Looking like a man who had fallen from a roof, a pulp of red and
grey, with joints heaved out of all relation to anatomy, the prisoner
of the Inquisition was haled before his most Catholic Majesty, who sat
in a closet of the Escurial eating rich pastry from a salver, and
licking his fingers between. A swarthy guard on either side held up
the poor wretch, else he would have weltered to the stones, for he had
no limbs capable of supporting him. Yet he swaggered in grotesque
suggestion, and gave a twisted parody of a laugh. The pitiful, it
seemed, where such existed, could endure the sight of his mutilation
less than he himself the fact. He was one of those endowed with a
constitutional insensibility to pain. That such human anomalies occur,
witness the contemporary examples of Gérard, who murdered William the
Silent, and Ravaillac, who stabbed Henry of Navarre. Each endured,
jesting and unflinching, the most exquisite tortures, the least of
which, one cannot but think, would have killed any man of normal
nerves.
Like Gérard, like Ravaillac, was William Donne--Drake’s Chaplain, as
he was called, being trebly damned in the title. He had been captured
in that final descent of his master on Cadiz, and had thereafter, of
course, nothing but the worst to expect. Not short shrift, but
particular torments was the ruling for the “sea-dogs,” whom Philip had
especial cause to hate. The appeal of their odd buccaneering divinity
was largely to humour, of which he was utterly devoid. He had been
offended by nothing so much as Drake’s boast of singeing his Spanish
Majesty’s beard, and he retorted, wherever he got the chance, with
flame and molten lead.
But now he was, for him, in a rare good temper--which might continue
until the pastry, to which he was gluttonously addicted, began to
assert its effects on an enfeebled digestion. Gleeful in the
triumphant maturation of his long-elaborated schemes, he played in
fancy at baiting and pricking the English bull, to which he was about
to deliver the Spanish quietus, and William Donne offered himself as
well as any to symbolise the fated victim.
It was the 1st of August, 1588; the invincible Armada, after a mishap
or two, had sailed for Flanders, where the Prince of Parma awaited it
with a force of seventeen thousand veterans and a fleet of
flat-bottomed transports; Portugal was annexed, William of Orange
dead, and, to crown all, the Leaguers, under Henry of Guise, held
France and Paris. The Catholic nobility in England only awaited,
according to the King’s Jesuit advisers, the landing of the Spanish
troops to join forces with the invaders; there was nothing to fear at
last and everything to gain. No wonder his Majesty, for ever cold,
calculating, patient, had relaxed a little in the near prospect of
this unprecedented harvest of his sowing.
He swallowed a last scrap of pastry, and dusted his fingers
delicately. An emaciated little man of sixty, with over-blown
forehead, small-pupilled ice-blue eyes, and pinched aquiline nose, not
all his power nor all his dominions could redeem him from the charge
of personal insignificance. His mouth was repulsively wide; his lower
jaw, from which bristled a point of grizzled beard, once dusty yellow,
was so protruded as to thrust into prominence a disorder of broken
teeth like an old bulldog’s. He was dressed unostentatiously in velvet
doublet, trunk-hose and curt-manteau, all black, and the collar of the
Golden Fleece hung round his neck under a small ruff. Such was Philip,
as he sat regarding, without one spasm of emotion, the human wreck
before him. Illiterate, infinitesimal-minded, pusillanimous, a
disgusting debauchee, he had no one virtue in all the world but
sincerity, and with that he endowed a thousand crimes. The monstrous
idolatry, through him, of the hereditary principle he embodied, had
long supplied its own moral in the torture and immolation of countless
hosts of guiltless, happy human beings, in scores of midnight
assassinations, in the poisoning of the very springs of nature. Let it
be said of him that the murder of his own son was his greatest act of
grace, and there is the man summarised.
An English Jesuit, Father Allen, the King’s principal authority for
the statement about the Catholic nobility, hung confidentially over
his Majesty’s chair, his chill grey eyes scanning the figure of that
mutilated fellow-countryman. A second, a Spaniard, but of the like
black cloth and inhuman aspect, stood motionless near the prisoner.
The King, having cleansed his fingers, glanced up covertly (to the day
of his own agonised death he could never look any man, not even the
meanest, in the face) and spoke suddenly, in the rapid voice that
always seemed to grudge its own utterance:
“The gnat will kill the King! Were those the man’s words?”
Allen looked towards his colleague, who answered in a passionless
voice:
“Those and little else--the constant burden of his blasphemy. On the
pulley, on the rack, wrenched in the ‘Escalero,’ or with the greased
soles of his feet frying at the brazier, always that cry or song. He
utters it as it were a charm against pain, jubilant, triumphant.”
His Majesty’s eyes frowned.
“Methinks the Holy Office lacks a counter-charm. Has it no hooks to
root up speech, no blistering gags to choke it? Bid him construe his
words, or suffer worse.”
“It seems that feeling is dead in him,” said the Father adviser,
“killed like a bird in the hand. He is own brother to Balthazar
Gérard, who, after all, was a martyr. But it is just a trick of the
spirit, detaching itself from the matter it makes sensitive. Shall I
question the man?”
Philip waved his hand, and Allen crossed the closet and stood before
William Donne, an ingratiatory smile on his lips.
“Good seaman,” he said, “what is this same regicidal gnat you chaunt
of?”
The prisoner jerked up his battered face, hearing a question in his
own tongue.
“The gnat,” he said in a thick voice, faintly rollicking, “that killed
the King.”
“Why and how did he kill him?”
An expression of slyness evolved itself from the wrecked features. A
parable was quite in keeping with the regenerate privateering of the
time.
“The King,” said William Donne, “had conquered all the blessed world,
from the Orcades to Cape Horn, and then, being puffed-up like, he
thought he’d sail for the land of God and conquer that. So he fitted
up a fleet of winged carracks and steered for heaven. But was the
Almighty disturbed to see the countless host approaching? Not He. He
just sent out a single gnat, that flew and crept into the King’s ear
and stung his brain, burning it to madness, so that there was an end
of the expedition; and the fleet went about, crashing together in its
confusion, and returned, what was left of it, to the Spanish Main.”
A short pause succeeded, and then Allen smiled and nodded.
“To the Spanish Main,” he said, “exactly. And the land of God, my
friend?”
“What but little England,” cried William Donne, “and Drake the jolly
gnat?”
The Jesuit turned and interpreted to the King, who, for all his
world-dominion, spoke no tongue but his own. His Majesty, caressing
his thin beard, answered without emotion: “Well, he hath betrayed his
charm. Let the Holy Office get at him at last.”
He dismissed the man and the subject with a gesture, and, rising, put
a hand upon the priest’s shoulder. His eyes glistened with a cold,
remote look, as if their pupils contracted to a distant vision.
“It comes, Allen,” he said, “it comes--the fruition of our long
desire. These news--how spiteful Fate delays them; and yet it can be
but a day or so. To grasp that little stronghold of heresy in our hand
at last, and dust the tares into the fire. Woe on them that have
baulked us in the hour of their triumph! They shall burn, Allen, they
shall burn. We will sweep the land with flame, that the after-crop may
be rich and virgin. The world surrenders piecemeal to our Christ, the
Prince of love and justice. A land of God we’ll make it----”
He paused abruptly on the word, and stood staring, his jaw loose. Then
rallied, and, breathing out a deep sigh, whispered: “That dog! A
blasphemous appropriation! We’ll show his God of gnats the warrant of
the Cross; we’ll dispute his claim, I think. His God!--a Jezebel, a
false idol, who sends her ships to poison my new world--mine, decreed
of Rome! A curse upon the gnat!”
He appeared of a sudden strangely moved. The gnat’s particular humour,
indeed, was the sting he most abhorred; the virus of its memory for
ever rankled in his veins. Not eight years was it since this gnat,
this Drake, this bold heretic fanatic, had, daring his edict, swept
the Spanish Indies and plundered a Spanish galleon of their treasures,
loaded with which he had returned to England, to be applauded and
knighted by its Queen. Not one year was it since, descending upon
Cadiz and the ports of the Faro, this same freebooter had inflicted an
almost irreparable blow upon the preparations ripening for the great
attack.
The land of God! The land of the foul fiend rather. But it was all
decided at last; the hour of reckoning was come, and he, Philip, only
awaited the news confirmatory to exact his bitter toll for every
abuse, for every humiliation, for every insult so long heaped upon
him.
Standing there, he recalled a certain letter, in which this Jezebel,
this Queen of heretics, had finally, soon after her accession,
rejected the offer of his hand. That had been thirty years ago, but
the memory remained, an open wound. She was to answer for it in her
“land of God.” And Drake! With the venom of a mean nature he lusted to
wreak the first of his triumphant hate on the body of the “sea-dog’s”
chaplain. The wretch’s nerves of feeling must be got at somehow; he,
Philip, must think of some harrowing method; and in the meantime it
would be richly gratifying to disinter that old letter of rejection,
and gloat over the reprisals to be exacted for it.
His face transfigured, he released his hold of the priest, and was on
the point of moving from the room, when a sudden soft hubbub arising
outside arrested him. Always fearful of violence, he hesitated an
instant, then, in a spasm of panic, tore aside the hangings. A throng
of ashy faces greeted him. Instinctively he read the truth.
“My fleet!” he gasped.
A cowering courtier fell upon his knees before him.
“Destroyed, dispersed, great lord.”
“By what--by whom?”
“By shot, by fire, by tempest. The English captains in their
privateers swarmed like gnats about the rolling hulks.”
“Like gnats? Was Drake among them?”
“The first and worst.”
The King staggered, recovered himself, stiffened, and turned towards
his oratory.
“No more,” he said. “I take it kneeling.”
He moved away stupidly, stopped, turned again, and addressed himself,
as if groping, towards the Jesuit:
“I take it kneeling, I say. The land of God--England--can it be--and
I----?”
Some insect droned in the dead silence; the King was seen to start, to
stoop, to block his ears with his hands.
“Tell them,” he said thickly, “to let the seaman go, in God’s name and
the King’s. It is our will.”