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‘In matters of religion, don’t temporize,’ he ordered. ‘Punish with the utmost severity.’ In 1567, he dispatched his drear paladin Fernando de Toledo, duke of Alba, veteran of Tunis and Mühlberg, to crush the rebellion. When Philip used Margarita to lure rebel nobles and arrest them, she resigned and Alba (whom the Dutch called the Iron Duke, the Spanish the Great one) launched a conventional war and campaign of repression to defeat the rebels, beheading two noble leaders. He boasted that he went on to execute 18,600 people and killed many thousands when seizing Dutch towns. He summoned the provinces’ pre-eminent Protestant, William the Silent, prince of Orange, a protégé of Charles V, whom Philip had appointed as stadtholder (lieutenant) of Holland and Zeeland. Discreetly encouraged by Elizabeth of England and, via the Jewish duke Joseph Nasi, by Sultan Selim, William escaped to Germany, where he and his brothers assumed the Protestant leadership, appealing to the French Huguenots, signing letters of marque to Protestant privateers, the Watergeuzen (Sea Beggars), who soon defeated Spanish warships, and led an army into Holland.^* For the rest of Philip’s reign, the Seventeen Provinces, where he had to deploy as many as 80,000 troops, became a quagmire – out of which much of what we think of as the modern world would emerge.

His son, Don Carlos, made secret contact with the Dutch rebels and proposed to Don Juan, his trusted uncle of the same age, that he procure him a galley to escape, to seize power in the Netherlands. In return Carlos offered him the crown of Naples. Don Juan reported this treason to Philip. Worse was to come. When Carlos later received Don Juan, he tried to shoot him with his arquebus, but his servants had uncocked it. He drew a dagger and threw himself at his uncle, who disarmed him, tossed the diminutive, hunchbacked prince aside and drew a sword: ‘Don’t come one step closer, Your Highness!’ Carlos decided to kill his father.

At midnight one night in 1568, Philip donned helmet and breast-plate, gathered a posse, then led them through the corridors of the Madrid Alcázar and burst into the bedroom of Don Carlos, who awoke to find his bed surrounded by his father and several courtiers, swords drawn. ‘My aim,’ wrote Philip, ‘was to find a permanent remedy. Time is unlikely to find a cure.’

Carlos was imprisoned in the Alcázar, where he starved himself and tried to commit suicide by swallowing a diamond. He died six months later. That death was a relief for Philip. But in October 1568, his adored Isabel, aged twenty-three, died of infection after a miscarriage. Heartbroken, Philip did not want to remarry, but his niece Anna, twenty-one-year-old daughter of his cousin Emperor Maximilian II, betrothed to Carlos, was now available. Even the pope warned against inbreeding, but he needed a son more than ever.

To ensure that his Austrian cousins supported his anti-Protestant crusade, Philip invited their son, Rudolf, brother of his new wife and now his own heir apparent, to Spain. ‘May no one deter you from your faith,’ he told Rudolf, ‘which is the only true one!’ Rudolf was trained in Spanish ceremonial, ever after sporting its ‘Spaniolated’ ruff and black hose, but he was horrified by Philip’s dogmatism. It was the art of the Escorial – where Titian was painting The Last Supper – that impressed him. Rudolf the Mad would be the most unbuttoned and eccentric of all the Habsburgs.

As Philip settled into a happy fourth marriage, his half-brother Don Juan won glory.

In January 1567, Philip banned the faith, customs, language and costumes of the 400,000 Moriscos – Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism in 1501 – who, encouraged by Joseph Nasi from Constantinople, reacted by launching a rebellion in the mountainous Alpujarras under a mysterious leader, El Habaquí, boosted by jihadis from Africa and Ottoman Janissaries sent by Selim. Philip appointed Don Juan to crush the Muslims, the start of a dirty war in which Morisco villages were exterminated and Muslim rebels tortured Catholics. Don Juan was wounded in the fighting. ‘You must preserve yourself,’ Philip told his brother. ‘I must keep you for great things.’ Philip ordered mass deportations. ‘The saddest sight in the world,’ wrote Juan. ‘There was so much rain, wind and snow the poor people clung together lamenting. One cannot deny the spectacle of depopulation of a kingdom is most pitiful.’ Some 90,000 died; Philip planned to expel the remaining Moriscos – a tragic solution carried out by his son, Philip III.