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We all know Felipe II of Spain, Portugal, and a whole lot of other places, had miserable luck when it came to surviving kids. He married four times, but only had two kids that survived him - Isabel Clara Eugenia and Felipe III.

His only child from his first wife, D. Carlos, fared well (if one can use that term), but died before his father, and left no issue.

Since Mary I's pregnancies are said to be hysterical pregnancies/cancer/dropsy/insert reason here (and I personally don't like a Habsburg England), we'll scratch her two from the list.

That leaves Élisabeth de Valois who's miscarriage/stillbirth of their only son nearly cost her her life (1560/1562), and who seems to have only produced her three daughters - the aforementioned Isabel, the Duchess of Savoy, and a stillborn daughter, before dying (appropriately enough) in childbirth, with what some sources call a son and others call a child listed as 'Juana'.

Finally, the wife who did the best was Felipe's last (who just happened to be his niece, too. Yeah, Habsburgs, the modern Ptolemies, gotta love it). She had four sons, Fernando (1571-1578, who died of typhoid), Carlos Lorenzo (1573-1575; whose death caused her to go into premature labor with her third son), Diego (1575-1582) and finally Felipe III (b. 1578).

And Felipe's life was such a slender reed that I've seen it stated that this was (at least partly) the reason for Isabel's late marriage, in case she needed to become queen of Spain.

Now the question is, what if Felipe had more surviving sons? Say Carlos, perhaps one of Élisabeth's. And if Felipe still decides to marry Anna, take your pick of which one besides the youngest could survive (they mostly seem to have died from relatively easily butterfliable illnesses).

How might this affect Felipe's government? His foreign policy (obviously if events in France still transpire as OTL, he might push for Élisabeth's son to be king of that country) especially. How might it influence his relations with his Austrian relatives? Etc etc.
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