During the last few, days of his illness, he was delirious.

Tossing upon his uneasy couch, he again arranged in imagination, the combinations of great battles, again shouted his orders to rushing squadrons, and listened with brightening eye to the trumpet of victory.

Reason returned, however, before the hour of death, and permitted him, the opportunity to make the dispositions rendered necessary by his condition.

He appointed his nephew, Alexander of Parma, who had been watching assiduously over his deathbed, to succeed him, provisionally, in the command of the army and in his other dignities, received the last sacraments with composure, and tranquilly breathed his last upon the first day of October, the month which, since the battle of Lepanto, he had always considered a festive and a fortunate one.
It was inevitable that suspicion of poison should be at once excited by his decease.

Those suspicions have been never set at rest, and never proved.