prison, martyred as he had been for so many years, and reduced to
such a miserable condition, is justified by all law--natural,
divine and human--and by the laws of Spain in particular. Saul,
pursuing David, respected Michal, though she was his daughter, and
had even saved her husband from the effects of his wrath.
Law--common, civil, and canonical--absolves woman from whatever she
does to defend her husband. The special law of Count Fernan
Gonzales leaves her free; the voice and the unanimous decree of all
nations exalt and glorify her. If, when her children are in her
house, in their chamber, or their cradle, it be proved that they
are strangers to every thing, by that alone, and by their age,
which excludes them from such confidences, how much more must that
child be a stranger to all, which the mother bore in her bosom, and
which they thus made a prisoner before its birth? Even before it
could be guilty, it was already punished; and its life and soul
were endangered, like one of its brothers who lost both when they
seized his mother a second time, near the port of Lisbon.' He
finishes with these noble and avenging threats:--'But let them not
be deceived; wherever they put them, such captives have, on their
side, the two most powerful advocates in the whole world--their
innocence and their misfortune. No Cicero, no Demosthenes can so
charm the ear, or so powerfully rouse the mind, as these two
defenders; because, among other privileges, God has given them that
of being always present, to cry out for justice, to serve both as
witnesses and advocates, and to terminate one of those processes
which God alone judges in this world: this is what will happen in
the present case, if the justice of men be too long in default. And
let not the debtors of God be too confident about the delay of His
judgment; though the fatal term be apparently postponed, it is
gradually approaching; and the debt to be paid is augmented by the
interest which is added to it down to the last day of Heaven's
great reckoning."'
It was not till eight years later, in 1599, when Philip III. sat on the
throne of Spain, that the wife and children of Perez regained their
liberty, and not till nearly twenty-five later, in 1615, that his
children, who had passed their youth in prison, and been legally
attainted with their father's degradation without having participated in
his offences, were restored to their rank and rights as Spanish nobles.
Baffled in his pursuit of vengeance by the sturdy independence of the
civil courts of Aragon, Philip turned his eyes for assistance to a
tribunal, of which the jurisdiction had apparently no boundary except
its exorbitant pretensions. At the king's bidding, the Inquisition
endeavoured to seize Perez within its inexorable grasp. It seized, but
could not hold him. The free and jealous Aragonese, shouting "Liberty
for ever!" flew to arms, and emancipated from the mysterious oppression
of the Holy Office the man already absolved of crime by the regular
decrees of justice.
The Inquisition having renewed its attempt, the people, headed and
supported by leaders of the highest lineage, condition, and authority in
Aragon, increased in the fervour and boldness of their resistance. Their
zealous championship of Perez--a most unworthy object of so much
generous and brave solicitude--drove them into open insurrection against
Philip. The biographer narrates, that when the storm raised by him, and
on his account, drew near, Perez escaped across the Pyrenees into
France; and the historian records, that when the sun of peace again
re-emerged from the tempest, Philip had overthrown the ancient
constitution of Aragon, crushed its nobility, destroyed its
independence, and incorporated its territory with the Spanish monarchy.
Perez, although compelled to fly, bade farewell for ever to his native
land with reluctance. There is something touching in the familiar image
which he uses to describe his own condition: "He was like a dog of a
faithful nature, who, though beaten and ill-treated by his master and
household, is loth to quit the walls of his dwelling." He found at
Bearn, in the court of the sister of Henry IV. of France, a
resting-place from hardship, but not a safe asylum from persecution.
During his brief residence there, three separate attempts to assassinate
him were detected or defeated; nor were these the only plots directed
against his person. M. Mignet quotes a pleasant variety of the species
from the lively pen of Perez himself.
"'When Perez was at Pau, they went so far as to try to make use of
a lady of that country, who lacked neither beauty, gallantry, nor
distinction; a notable woman, an Amazon, and a huntress; riding, as
they say, up hill and down dale. One would have thought they wanted
to put to death some new Samson. In short, they offered her ten
thousand crowns and six Spanish horses to come to Pau, and form an
intimacy with Perez; and, after having charmed him by her beauty,
to invite and entice him to her house, in order, some fine evening,
to deliver him up, or allow him to be carried off in a hunting
party. The lady, either being importuned, or desirous, from a
curiosity natural to her sex, to know a man whom authority and his
persecutors considered of so much consequence, or, lastly, for the
purpose of warning the victim herself, feigned, as the sequel makes
us believe, to accept the commission. She travelled to Pau, and
made acquaintance with Perez. She visited him at his house.
Messengers and love-letters flew about like hail. There were
several parties of pleasure; but, in the end, the good disposition
of the lady, and her attachment for Perez, gained the victory over
interest, that metal of base alloy, which defiles more than any act
of love; so that she herself came and revealed to him the
machinations from beginning to end, together with the offers made,
and all that had followed. She did much more. She offered him her
house and the revenue attached to it, with such a warmth of
affection, (if we may judge of love by its demonstrations,) that
any sound mathematician would say there was, between that lady and
Perez, an astrological sympathy.'"
His restless spirit of intrigue, and perhaps a nascent desire, provoked
by altered circumstances, of reciprocal vengeance against Philip,
hurried Perez from the tranquil seclusion of Bearn to the busy camp of
Henry IV. After a long conference, he was sent to England by that
monarch, who calculated on his services being usefully available with
Queen Elizabeth in the common enterprise against Spain. Then it was that
he formed his intimate acquaintance with the celebrated Francis Bacon,
in whose company we first introduced him to our readers, and with many
other individuals of eminence and note.
"It was during the leisure of this his first residence in London
that Perez published, in the summer of 1594, his _Relaciones_,
under the imaginary name of _Raphael Peregrino_; which, far from
concealing the real author, in reality designated him by the
allusion to his wandering life. This account of his adventures,
composed with infinite art, was calculated to render his ungrateful
and relentless persecutor still more odious, and to draw towards
himself more benevolence and compassion. He sent copies of it to
Burghley, to Lady Rich, sister of the Earl of Essex, to Lords
Southampton, Montjoy, and Harris, to Sir Robert Sidney, Sir Henry
Unton, and many other personages of the English court, accompanying
them with letters gracefully written and melancholy in spirit. The
one which he confided to the patronage of the Earl of Essex was at
once touching and flattering:--'Raphael Peregrino,' said he, 'the
author of this book, has charged me to present it to your
Excellency. Your Excellency is obliged to protect him, since he
recommends himself to you. He must know that he wants a godfather,
since he chooses such as you. Perhaps he trusted to his name,
knowing that your Excellency is the support of the pilgrims of
fortune.'"
The dagger of the assassin continued to track his wanderings. And it is,
probably, not commonly known, that upon one of the city gates of London,
near St Paul's, there might be seen, in 1594, the heads of two Irishmen,
executed as accomplices in a plot for the murder of Antonio Perez.
In England, where he was supported by the generosity of Essex, he did
not remain very long, having been recalled, in 1594, to France by Henry,
who had recently declared war against Philip. At Paris, Perez was
received with great distinction and the most flattering attentions,
being lodged in a spacious mansion, and provided with a military
body-guard. The precaution was not superfluous. Wearing seemingly a
charmed life, the dusky spectre of premature and unnatural death haunted
him wherever he went or sojourned. Baron Pinilla, a Spaniard, was
captured in Paris on the eve of his attempt to murder Perez, put to the
torture, and executed on the Place de Greve--thus adding another name to
the long catalogue of people, to whom any connexion with, or implication
in, the affairs of Perez, whether innocently or criminally, for good or
evil, attracted, it might be imagined as by Lady Bacon, from an angry
Heaven the flash of calamitous ruin.
His present prosperity came as a brilliant glimpse through hopeless
darkness, and so departed. Revisiting England in 1596, he found himself
denied access to Essex, shunned by the Bacons, and disregarded by every
body. The consequent mortification accelerated his return to France,
which he reached, as Henry was concluding peace with Philip, to
encounter cold distrust and speedy neglect from the French King. All
this was the result of his own incurable double-dealing. He had been
Henry's spy in the court of Elizabeth, and was, or fancied himself to be
Elizabeth's at Paris. But the omnipotent secretary of state and the
needy adventurer played the game of duplicity and perfidy with the odds
reversed. All parties, as their experience unmasked his hollow
insincerity, shrunk from reliance on, or intercourse with an
ambidextrous knave, to whom mischief and deceit were infinitely more
congenial than wisdom and honesty. "The truth is," wrote Villeroy, one
of the French ministers, to a correspondent in 1605, "that his
adversities have not made him much wiser or more discreet than he was in
his prosperity." We must confess ourselves unable to perceive any traces
of even the qualified improvement admitted by Villeroy.
The rest of the biography of this extraordinary man is a miserable diary
of indignant lamentations over his abject condition--of impudent
laudations of the blameless integrity of his career--of grovelling and
ineffectual efforts and supplications to appease and eradicate the
hatred of Philip--and of vociferous cries for relief from penury and
famine. "I am in extreme want, having exhausted the assistance of all my
friends, and no longer knowing where to find my daily bread," is the
terrible confession of the once favourite minister of the most powerful
monarch in Europe. He never touched the ground, or even gazed on the
distant hills of Spain again. In one of the obscure streets of Paris, in
solitude and poverty, he dragged the grief and infirmities of his old
age slowly towards the grave; and at length, in the seventy-second year
of his age, on a natural and quiet deathbed, closed the troubles of his
tempestuous existence.
Such is "this strange eventful history." Such was the incalculable
progeny of misery, disgrace, disaster, and ruin, involving himself, his
family, countless individuals, and an entire nation, which issued from
the guilty love of Perez and the Princess of Eboli.
_Antonio Perez and Philip II._ By M. MIGNET. Translated by C.
COCKS, B.L. London: 1846.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: "Dona Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda," observes the historian
of the house of Silva, "the only daughter of Don Diego de Mendoza and
the Lady Catalina de Silva, was, from the blood which ran in her veins,
from her beauty, and her noble inheritance, one of the most desirable
matches (_apeticidos casamientos_) of the day!"]
RECOLLECTIONS OF A LOVER OF SOCIETY.
No. II.
1802.
All the great people of London, and most of the little, have been kept
in a fever of agitation during the last fortnight, by the preparatives
for the grand club ball in honour of the peace. Texier had the direction
of the fete, and he exhibited his taste to the astonishment of _les
sauvages Britanniques_. Never were seen such decorations, such chaplets,
such chandeliers, such bowers of roses. In short, the whole was a Bond
Street Arcadia. All the world of the West End were there; the number
could not have been less than a thousand--all in fancy dresses and
looking remarkably brilliant. The Prince of Wales, the most showy of men
every where, wore a Highland dress, such, however, as no Highlander ever
wore since Deucalion's flood, unless Donald was master of diamonds
enough to purchase a principality. The Prince, of course, had a separate
room for his own supper party, and the genius of M. Texier had contrived
a little entertainment for the royal party, by building an adjoining
apartment in the style of a cavern, after the Gil Blas fashion, in which
a party of banditti were to carry on their carousal. The banditti were,
of course, amateurs--the Cravens, Tom Sheridan, and others of that
set--who sang, danced, gambled, and did all sorts of strange things. The
Prince was delighted; but even princes cannot have all pleasures to
themselves. Some of the crowd by degrees squeezed or coaxed their way
into the cavern, others followed, the pressure became irresistible;
until at last the banditti, contrary to all the laws of melodrame, were
expelled from their own cavern, and the invaders sat down to their
supper. Lords Besborough, Ossulston, and Bedford were the directors of
the night; and the foreign ministers declared that nothing in Europe,
within their experience, equalled this Bond Street affair. Whether the
directors had the horses taken from their carriages, and were carried
home in an ovation, I cannot tell; but Texier, not at all disposed to
think lightly of himself at any time, talks of the night with tears in
his eyes, and declares it the triumph of his existence.
* * * * *
George Rose has had a narrow escape of being drowned. All the wits, of
course, appeal to the proverb, and deny the possibility of his
concluding his career by water. Still, his escape was extraordinary. He
had taken a boat at Palace Yard to cross to Lambeth. As he was standing
up in the boat, immediately on his getting in, the waterman awkwardly
and hastily shoved off, and George, accustomed as he was to take care of
himself, lost his balance, and plumped head foremost into the water. The
tide was running strong, and between the weight of his clothes, and the
suddenness of the shock, he was utterly helpless. The parliamentary
laughers say, that the true wonder of the case is, that he has been ever
able to keep his head above water for the last dozen years; others, that
it has been so long his practice to swim with the stream, that no one
can be surprised at his slipping eagerly along. The fact, however, is,
that a few minutes more must have sent him to the bottom. Luckily a
bargeman made a grasp at him as he was going down, and held him till he
could be lifted into his boat. He was carried to the landing-place in a
state of great exhaustion. George has been, of course, obnoxious to the
Opposition from his services, and from his real activity and
intelligence in office. He is good-natured, however, and has made no
enemies. Sheridan and the rest, when they have nothing else to do in the
House, fire their shots at him to keep their hands in practice, but none
of them have been able to bring him down.
* * * * *
A remarkable man died in June, the well-known Colonel Barre. He began
political life about the commencement of the American war, and
distinguished himself by taking an active part in the discussion of
every public measure of the time. Barre's soldiership impressed its
character on his parliamentary conduct. He was prompt, bold, and
enterprising, and always obtained the attention of the House. Though
without pretensions to eloquence, he was always a ready speaker; and
from the rapidity with which he mastered details, and from the boldness
with which he expressed his opinions, he always produced a powerful
effect on the House. Though contemporary with Burke, and the countryman
of that illustrious orator, he exhibited no tendency to either the
elevation or the ornament of that distinguished senator; yet his
speeches were vigorous, and his diligence gave them additional effect.
No man was more dreaded by the minister; and the treasury bench often
trembled under the force and directness of his assaults. At length,
however, he gave way to years, and retired from public life. His party
handsomely acknowledged his services by a retiring pension, which Mr
Pitt, when minister, exchanged for the clerkship of the pells, thus
disburdening the nation by substituting a sinecure. For many years
before his death, Barre was unfortunately deprived of sight; but, under
that heaviest of all afflictions, he retained his practical philosophy,
enjoyed the society of his friends, and was cheerful to the last. He was
at length seized with paralysis, and died.
* * * * *
The crimes of the French population are generally of a melodramatic
order. The temperament of the nation is eminently theatrical; and the
multitude of minor theatres scattered through France, naturally sustain
this original tendency. A villain in the south of France, lately
constructed a sort of machinery for murder, which was evidently on the
plan of the trap-doors and banditti displays of the Porte St Martin.
Hiring an empty stable, he dug a pit in it of considerable depth. The
pit was covered with a framework of wood, forming a floor, which, on the
pulling of a string, gave way, and plunged the victim into a depth of
twenty feet. But the contriver was not satisfied with his attempt to
break the bones of the unfortunate person whom he thus entrapped. He
managed to have a small chamber filled with some combustible in the side
of the pit, which was to be set on fire, and, on the return of the
platform to its place, suffocate his _detenu_ with smoke. Whether he had
performed any previous atrocities in this way, or whether the present
instance was the commencement of his profession of homicide, is not
told. By some means or other, having inveigled a stout countrywoman,
coming with her eggs and apples to market, into his den, she no sooner
trod upon the frame, than the string was pulled, it turned, and we may
conceive with what astonishment and terror she must have felt herself
plunged into a grave with the light of day shut out above. Fortunately
for her, the match which was to light the combustibles failed, and she
thus escaped suffocation. Her cries, however, were so loud, that they
attracted some of the passers-by, and the villain attempted to take to
flight. He was, however, seized, and given into the hands of justice.
* * * * *
An action was lately brought by an old lady against a dealer in
curiosities, for cheating her in the matter of antiques. Her taste was
not limited to the oddities of the present day, and, in the dealer, she
found a person perfectly inclined to gratify her with wonders. He had
sold her a model of the Alexandrian library, a specimen of the original
type invented by Memnon the Egyptian, and a manuscript of the first play
acted by Thespis. These had not exhausted the stock of the dealer: he
possessed the skin of a giraffe killed in the Roman amphitheatre; the
head of King Arthur's spear; and the breech of the first cannon fired at
the siege of Constantinople. The jury, however, thought that the
virtuoso having ordered those curiosities, ought to pay for them, and
brought in a verdict for the dealer.
* * * * *
The French consul has been no sooner installed, than he has begun to
give the world provocatives to war. His legion of honour is a military
noblesse, expressly intended to make all public distinction originate in
the army; for the few men of science decorated with its star are not to
be compared with the list of soldiers, and even they are chiefly
connected with the department of war as medical men, practical chemists,
or engineers.
His next act was to fix the military establishment of France at 360,000
men; his third act, in violation of his own treaties, and of all the
feelings of Europe, was to make a rapid invasion of Switzerland, thus
breaking down the independence of the country, and seizing, in fact, the
central fortress of the Continent. His fourth act has been the seizure
of Piedmont, and its absolute annexation to France. By a decree of the
Republic, Piedmont is divided into six departments, which are to send
seventeen deputies to the French legislature. Turin is declared to be a
provincial city of the Republican territory; and thus the French armies
will have a perpetual camp in a country which lays Italy open to the
invader, and will have gained a territory nearly as large as Scotland,
but fertile, populous, and in one of the finest climates of the south.
Those events have excited the strongest indignation throughout Europe.
We have already discovered that the peace was but a truce; that the
cessation of hostilities was but a breathing-time to the enemy; that the
reduction of our armies was precipitate and premature; and that, unless
the fears of the French government shall render it accessible to a sense
of justice, the question must finally come to the sword.
* * * * *
Schiller's play of the "Robbers" is said to have propagated the breed of
highwaymen in Germany. To ramble through the country, stop travellers on
the highway, make huts in the forest, sing Bedlamite songs, and rail at
priests and kings, was the fashion in Germany during the reign of that
popular play. It was said, a banditti of students from one of the
colleges had actually taken the road, and made Carl Moor their model.
All this did very well in summer, but the winter probably cooled their
enthusiasm; for a German forest, with its snow half a dozen feet deep,
and the probability of famine, would be a formidable trial to the most
glowing mysticism.