claimed the succession, and taken possession of the throne of Portugal.
Portugal writhed under the oppressive heel of that foreign rule, and
Frey Miguel de Sousa himself, a deeply, passionately patriotic man, had
been foremost among those who had sought to liberate her. When Don
Antonio, the sometime Prior of Crato, Sebastian’s natural cousin, and a
bold, ambitious, enterprising man, had raised the standard of revolt,
the friar had been the most active of all his coadjutators. In those
days Frey Miguel, who was the Provincial of his order, a man widely
renowned for his learning and experience of affairs, who had been
preacher to Don Sebastian and confessor to Don Antonio, had wielded a
vast influence in Portugal. That influence he had unstintingly exerted
on behalf of the Pretender, to whom he was profoundly devoted. After
Don Antonio’s army had been defeated on land by the Duke of Alba, and
his fleet shattered in the Azores in 1582 by the Marquis of Santa Cruz,
Frey Miguel found himself deeply compromised by his active share in the
rebellion. He was arrested and suffered a long imprisonment in Spain.
In the end, because he expressed repentance, and because Philip II.,
aware of the man’s gifts and worth, desired to attach him to himself by
gratitude, he was enlarged, and appointed Vicar of Santa Maria la Real,
where he was now become confessor, counsellor and confidant of the
Princess Anne of Austria.
But his gratitude to King Philip was not of a kind to change his
nature, to extinguish his devotion to the Pretender, Don Antonio—who,
restlessly ambitious, continued ceaselessly to plot abroad—or yet to
abate the fervour of his patriotism. The dream of his life was ever the
independence of Portugal, with a native prince upon the throne. And
because of Anne’s fervent hope, a hope that grew almost daily into
conviction, that Sebastian had survived and would return one day to
claim his kingdom, those two at Madrigal, in that quiet eddy of the
great stream of life, were drawn more closely to each other.
But as the years passed, and Anne’s prayers remained unanswered and the
deliverer did not come, her hopes began to fade again. Gradually she
reverted to her earlier frame of mind in which all hopes were set upon
a reunion with the unknown beloved in the world to come.
One evening in the spring of 1594—four years after the name of
Sebastian had first passed between the priest and the princess—Frey
Miguel was walking down the main street of Madrigal, a village whose
every inhabitant was known to him, when he came suddenly face to face
with a stranger. A stranger would in any case have drawn his attention,
but there was about this man something familiar to the friar, something
that stirred in him vague memories of things long forgotten. His garb
of shabby black was that of a common townsman, but there was something
in his air and glance, his soldierly carriage, and the tilt of his
bearded chin, that belied his garb. He bore upon his person the stamp
of intrepidity and assurance.
Both halted, each staring at the other, a faint smile on the lips of
the stranger—who, in the fading light, might have been of any age from
thirty to fifty—a puzzled frown upon the brow of the friar. Then the
man swept off his broad-brimmed hat.
“God save your paternity,” was his greeting.
“God save you, my son,” replied Frey Miguel, still pondering him. “I
seem to know you. Do I?”
The stranger laughed. “Though all the world forget, your paternity
should remember me.”
And then Frey Miguel sucked in his breath sharply. “My God!” he cried,
and set a hand upon the fellow’s shoulder, looking deeply into those
bold, grey eyes. “What make you here?”
“I am a pastry-cook.”
“A pastry-cook? You?”
“One must live, and it is a more honest trade than most. I was in
Valladolid, when I heard that your paternity was the Vicar of the
Convent here, and so for the sake of old times—of happier times—I
bethought me that I might claim your paternity’s support.” He spoke
with a careless arrogance, half-tinged with mockery.
“Assuredly...” began the priest, and then he checked. “Where is your
shop?”
“Just down the street. Will your paternity honour me?”
Frey Miguel bowed, and together they departed.
For three days thereafter the convent saw the friar only in the
celebration of the Mass. But on the morning of the fourth, he went
straight from the sacristy to the parlour, and, despite the early hour,
desired to see her Excellency.
“Lady,” he told her, “I have great news; news that will rejoice your
heart.” She looked at him, and saw the feverish glitter in his sunken
eyes, the hectic flush on his prominent cheek-bones. “Don Sebastian
lives. I have seen him.”
A moment she stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she paled
until her face became as white as the nun’s coil upon her brow; her
breath came in a faint moan, she stiffened, and swayed upon her feet,
and caught at the back of a prie-dieu to steady and save herself from
falling. He saw that he had blundered by his abruptness, that he had
failed to gauge the full depth of her feelings for the Hidden Prince,
and for a moment feared that she would swoon under the shock of the
news he had so recklessly delivered.
“What do you say? Oh, what do you say?” she moaned, her eyes
half-closed.
He repeated the news in more measured, careful terms, exerting all the
magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses. Gradually she
quelled the storm of her emotions.
“And you say that you have seen him? Oh!” Once more the colour suffused
her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became radiant. “Where
is he?”
“Here. Here in Madrigal.”
“In Madrigal?” She was all amazement. “But why in Madrigal?”
“He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I—his sometime preacher and
counsellor—was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real. He came to seek me.
He comes disguised, under the false name of Gabriel de Espinosa, and
setting up as a pastry-cook until his term of penance shall be
completed, and he shall be free to disclose himself once more to his
impatiently awaiting people.”
It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in
turmoil, made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and dreadful
fear. This dream-prince, who for four years had been the constant
companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent, imaginative,
starved Soul had come to love with a consuming passion, was a living
reality near at hand, to be seen in the flesh by the eyes of her body.
It was a thought that set her in an ecstasy of terror, so that she
dared not ask Frey Miguel to bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied
him with questions, and so elicited from him a very circumstantial
story.
Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the Holy
Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed that he had
proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the pride that had
brought him down, by roaming the world in humble guise, earning his
bread by the labour of his hands and the sweat of his brow like any
common hind, until he should have purged his offense and rendered
himself worthy once more to resume the estate to which he had been
born.
It was a tale that moved her pity to the point of tears. It exalted her
hero even beyond the eminence he had already held in her fond dreams,
particularly when to that general outline were added in the days that
followed details of the wanderings and sufferings of the Hidden Prince.
At last, some few weeks after that first startling announcement of his
presence, in the early days of August of that year 1594, Frey Miguel
proposed to her the thing she most desired, yet dared not beg.
“I have told His Majesty of your attachment to his memory in all these
years in which we thought him dead, and he is deeply touched. He
desires your leave to come and prostrate himself at your feet.”
She crimsoned from brow to chin, then paled again; her bosom heaved in
tumult. Between dread and yearning she spoke a faint consent.
Next day he came, brought by Frey Miguel to the convent parlour, where
her Excellency waited, her two attendant nuns discreetly in the
background. Her eager, frightened eyes beheld a man of middle height,
dignified of mien and carriage, dressed with extreme simplicity, yet
without the shabbiness in which Frey Miguel had first discovered him.
His hair was of a light brown—the colour to which the golden locks of
the boy who had sailed for Africa some fifteen years ago might well
have faded—his beard of an auburn tint, and his eyes were grey. His
face was handsome, and save for the colour of his eyes and the high
arch of his nose presented none of the distinguishing and marring
features peculiar to the House of Austria, from which Don Sebastian
derived through his mother.
Hat in hand, he came forward, and went down on one knee before her.
“I am here to receive your Excellency’s commands,” he said.
She steadied her shuddering knees and trembling lips.
“Are you Gabriel de Espinosa, who has come to Madrigal to set up as a
pastry-cook?” she asked him.
“To serve your Excellency.”
“Then be welcome, though I am sure that the trade you least understand
is that of a pastry-cook.”
The kneeling man bowed his handsome head, and fetched a deep sigh.
“If in the past I had better understood another trade, I should not now
be reduced to following this one.”
She urged him now to rise, hereafter the entertainment between them was
very brief on that first occasion. He departed upon a promise to come
soon again, and the undertaking on her side to procure for his shop the
patronage of the convent.
Thereafter it became his custom to attend the morning Mass celebrated
by Frey Miguel in the convent chapel—which was open to the public—and
afterwards to seek the friar in the sacristy and accompany him thence
to the convent parlour, where the Princess waited, usually with one or
another of her attendant nuns. These daily interviews were brief at
first, but gradually they lengthened until they came to consume the
hours to dinner-time, and presently even that did not suffice, and
Sebastian must come again later in the day.
And as the interviews increased and lengthened, so they grew also in
intimacy between the royal pair, and plans for Sebastian’s future came
to be discussed. She urged him to proclaim himself. His penance had
been overlong already for what was really no fault at all, since it is
the heart rather than the deed that Heaven judges, and his heart had
been pure, his intention in making war upon the Infidel loftily pious.
Diffidently he admitted that it might be so, but both he and Frey
Miguel were of opinion that it would be wiser now to await the death of
Philip II., which, considering his years and infirmities, could not be
long delayed. Out of jealousy for his possessions, King Philip might
oppose Sebastian’s claims.
Meanwhile these daily visits of Espinosa’s, and the long hours he spent
in Anne’s company gave, as was inevitable, rise to scandal, within and
without the convent. She was a nun professed, interdicted from seeing
any man but her confessor other than through the parlour grating, and
even then not at such length or with such constancy as this. The
intimacy between them—fostered and furthered by Frey Miguel—had so
ripened in a few weeks that Anne was justified in looking upon him as
her saviour from the living tomb to which she had been condemned, in
hoping that he would restore her to the life and liberty for which she
had ever yearned by taking her to Queen when his time came to claim his
own. What if she was a nun professed? Her profession had been against
her will, preceded by only one year of novitiate, and she was still
within the five probationary years prescribed. Therefore, in her view,
her vows were revocable.
But this was a matter beyond the general consideration or knowledge,
and so the scandal grew. Within the convent there was none bold enough,
considering Anne’s royal rank, to offer remonstrance or advice,
particularly too, considering that her behaviour had the sanction of
Frey Miguel, the convent’s spiritual adviser. But from without, from
the Provincial of the Order of St. Augustine, came at last a letter to
Anne, respectfully stern in tone, to inform her that the numerous
visits she received from a pastry-cook were giving rise to talk, for
which it would be wise to cease to give occasion. That recommendation
scorched her proud, sensitive soul with shame. She sent her servant
Roderos at once to fetch Frey Miguel, and placed the letter in his
hands.
The friar’s dark eyes scanned it and grew troubled.
“It was to have been feared,” he said, and sighed.
“There is but one remedy, lest worse follow and all be ruined. Don
Sebastian must go.”
“Go?” Fear robbed her of breath. “Go where?”
“Away from Madrigal—anywhere—and at once; tomorrow at latest.” And
then, seeing the look of horror in her face, “What else, what else?” he
added, impatiently. “This meddlesome provincial may be stirring up
trouble already.”
She fought down her emotion. “I... I shall see him before he goes?” she
begged.
“I don’t know. It may not be wise. I must consider.” He flung away in
deepest perturbation, leaving her with a sense that life was slipping
from her.
That late September evening, as she sat stricken in her room, hoping
against hope for at least another glimpse of him, Dona Maria de Grado
brought word that Espinosa was even then in the convent in Frey
Miguel’s cell. Fearful lest he should be smuggled thence without her
seeing him, And careless of the impropriety of the hour—it was already
eight o’clock and dusk was falling—she at once dispatched Roderos to
the friar, bidding him bring Espinosa to her in the parlour.
The friar obeyed, and the lovers—they were no less by now—came face to
face in anguish.
“My lord, my lord,” she cried, casting all prudence to the winds, “what
is decided?”
“That I leave in the morning,” he answered.
“To go where?” She was distraught.
“Where?” He shrugged. “To Valladolid at first, and then... where God
pleases.”
“And when shall I see you again?”
“When... when God pleases.”
“Oh, I am terrified... if I should lose you... if I should never see
you more!” She was panting, distraught.
“Nay, lady, nay,” he answered. “I shall come for you when the time is
ripe. I shall return by All Saints, or by Christmas at the latest, and
I shall bring with me one who will avouch me.”
“What need any to avouch you to me?” she protested, on a note of
fierceness. “We belong to each other, you and I. But you are free to
roam the world, and I am caged here and helpless...”
“Ah, but I shall free you soon, and we’ll go hence together. See.” He
stepped to the table. There was an ink-horn, a box of pounce, some
quills, and a sheaf of paper there. He took up a quill, and wrote with
labour, for princes are notoriously poor scholars:
“I, Don Sebastian, by the Grace of God King of Portugal, take to wife
the most serene Dona ulna of Austria, daughter of the most serene
Prince, Don John of Austria, by virtue of the dispensation which I hold
from two pontiffs.”
And he signed it—after the manner of the Kings of Portugal in all
ages—“El Rey”—the King.
“Will that content you, lady?” he pleaded, handing it to her.
“How shall this scrawl content me?”
“It is a bond I shall redeem as soon as Heaven will permit.”
Thereafter she fell to weeping, and he to protesting, until Frey Miguel
urged him to depart, as it grew late. And then she forgot her own
grief, and became all solicitude for him, until naught would content
her but she must empty into his hands her little store of treasure—a
hundred ducats and such jewels as she possessed, including a gold watch
set with diamonds and a ring bearing a cameo portrait of King Philip,
and last of all a portrait of herself, of the size of a playing-card.
At last, as ten was striking, he was hurried away. Frey Miguel had gone
on his knees to him, and kissed his hand, what time he had passionately
urged him not to linger; and then Sebastian had done the same by the
Princess both weeping now. At last he was gone, and on the arm of Dona
Maria de Grado the forlorn Anne staggered back to her cell to weep and
pray.
In the days that followed she moved, pale and listless, oppressed by
her sense of loss and desolation, a desolation which at last she sought
to mitigate by writing to him to Valladolid, whither he had repaired.
Of all those letters only two survive.
“My king and lord,” she wrote in one of these, “alas! How we suffer by
absence! I am so filled with the pain of it that if I did not seek the
relief of writing to your Majesty and thus spend some moments in
communion with you, there would be an end to me. What I feel to-day is
what I feel every day when I recall the happy moments so deliciously
spent, which are no more. This privation is for me so severe a
punishment of heaven that I should call it unjust, for without cause I
find myself deprived of the happiness missed by me for so many years
and purchased at the price of suffering and tears. Ah, my lord, how
willingly, nevertheless, would I not suffer all over again the
misfortunes that have crushed me if thus I might spare your Majesty the
least of them. May He who rules the world grant my prayers and set a
term to so great an unhappiness, and to the intolerable torment I
suffer through being deprived of the presence of your Majesty. It were
impossible for long to suffer so much pain and live.
“I belong to you, my lord; you know it already. The troth I plighted to
you I shall keep in life and in death, for death itself could not tear
it from my soul, and this immortal soul will harbour it through
eternity...”
Thus and much more in the same manner wrote the niece of King Philip of
Spain to Gabriel Espinosa, the pastry-cook, in his Valladolid retreat.
How he filled his days we do not know, beyond the fact that he moved
freely abroad. For it was in the streets of that town that meddlesome
Fate brought him face to face one day with Gregorio Gonzales, under
whom Espinosa had been a scullion once in the service of the Count of
Nyeba.
Gregorio hailed him, staring round-eyed; for although Espinosa’s
garments were not in their first freshness they were far from being
those of a plebeian.
“In whose service may you be now?” quoth the intrigued Gregorio, so
soon as greetings had passed between them.
Espinosa shook off his momentary embarrassment, and took the hand of
his sometime comrade. “Times are changed, friend Gregorio. I am not in
anybody’s service, rather do I require servants myself.”
“Why, what is your present situation?”
Loftily Espinosa put him off. “No matter for that,” he answered, with a
dignity that forbade further questions. He gathered his cloak about him
to proceed upon his way. “If there is anything you wish for I shall be
happy, for old times’ sake, to oblige you.”
But Gregorio was by no means disposed to part from him. We do not
readily part from an old friend whom we rediscover in an unsuspected
state of affluence. Espinosa must home with Gregorio. Gregorio’s wife
would be charmed to renew his acquaintance, and to hear from his own
lips of his improved and prosperous state. Gregorio would take no
refusal, and in the end Espinosa, yielding to his insistence, went with
him to the sordid quarter where Gregorio had his dwelling.
About an unclean table of pine, in a squalid room, sat the
three—Espinosa, Gregorio, and Gregorio’s wife; but the latter displayed
none of the signs of satisfaction at Espinosa’s prosperity which
Gregorio had promised. Perhaps Espinosa observed her evil envy, and it
may have been to nourish it—which is the surest way to punish envy—that
he made Gregorio a magnificent offer of employment.
“Enter my service,” said he, “and I will pay you fifty ducats down and
four ducats a month.”
Obviously they were incredulous of his affluence. To convince them he
displayed a gold watch—most rare possession—set with diamonds, a ring
of price, and other costly jewels. The couple stared now with dazzled
eyes.
“But didn’t you tell me when we were in Madrid together that you had
been a pastry-cook at Ocana?” burst from Gregorio.
Espinosa smiled. “How many kings and princes have been compelled to
conceal themselves under disguises?” he asked oracularly. And seeing
them stricken, he must play upon them further. Nothing, it seems, was
sacred to him—not even the portrait of that lovely, desolate royal lady
in her convent at Madrigal. Forth he plucked it, and thrust it to them
across the stains of wine and oil that befouled their table.
“Look at this beautiful lady, the most beautiful in Spain,” he bade
them. “A prince could not have a lovelier bride.”
“But she is dressed as a nun,” the woman protested. “How, then, can she
marry?”
“For kings there are no laws,” he told her with finality.
At last he departed, but bidding Gregorio to think of the offer he had
made him. He would come again for the cook’s reply, leaving word
meanwhile of where he was lodged.
They deemed him mad, and were disposed to be derisive. Yet the woman’s
disbelief was quickened into malevolence by the jealous fear that what
he had told them of himself might, after all, be true. Upon that
malevolence she acted forthwith, lodging an information with Don
Rodrigo de Santillan, the Alcalde of Valladolid.
Very late that night Espinosa was roused from his sleep to find his
room invaded by alguaziles—the police of the Alcalde. He was arrested
and dragged before Don Rodrigo to give an account of himself and of
certain objects of value found in his possession—more particularly of a
ring, on the cameo of which was carved a portrait of King Philip.
“I am Gabriel de Espinosa,” he answered firmly, “a pastry-cook of
Madrigal.”
“Then how come you by these jewels?”
“They were given me by Dona Ana of Austria to sell for her account.
That is the business that has brought me to Valladolid.”
“Is this Dona Ana’s portrait?”
“It is.”
“And this lock of hair? Is that also Dona Ana’s? And do you, then,
pretend that these were also given you to sell?”
“Why else should they be given me?”
Don Rodrigo wondered. They were useless things to steal, and as for the
lock of hair, where should the fellow find a buyer for that? The
Alcalde conned his man more closely, and noted that dignity of bearing,
that calm assurance which usually is founded upon birth and worth. He
sent him to wait in prison, what time he went to ransack the fellow’s
house in Madrigal.
Don Rodrigo was prompt in acting; yet even so his prisoner mysteriously
found means to send a warning that enabled Frey Miguel to forestall the
Alcalde. Before Don Rodrigo’s arrival, the friar had abstracted from
Espinosa’s house a box of papers which he reduced to ashes.
Unfortunately Espinosa had been careless. Four letters not confided to
the box were discovered by the alguaziles. Two of them were from
Anne—one of which supplies the extract I have given; the other two from
Frey Miguel himself.
Those letters startled Don Rodrigo de Santillan. He was a shrewd
reasoner and well-informed. He knew how the justice of Castile was kept
on the alert by the persistent plottings of the Portuguese Pretender,
Don Antonio, sometime Prior of Crato. He was intimate with the past
life of Frey Miguel, knew his self-sacrificing patriotism and
passionate devotion to the cause of Don Antonio, remembered the firm
dignity of his prisoner, and leapt at a justifiable conclusion. The man
in his hands—the man whom the Princess Anne addressed in such
passionate terms by the title of Majesty—was the Prior of Crato. He
conceived that he had stumbled here upon something grave and dangerous.
He ordered the arrest of Frey Miguel, and then proceeded to visit Dona
Ana at the convent. His methods were crafty, and depended upon the
effect of surprise. He opened the interview by holding up before her
one of the letters he had found, asking her if she acknowledged it for
her own.
She stared a moment panic-stricken; then snatched it from his hands,
tore it across, and would have torn again, but that he caught her
wrists in a grip of iron to prevent her, with little regard in that
moment for the blood royal in her veins. King Philip was a stern
master, pitiless to blunderers, and Don Rodrigo knew he never would be
forgiven did he suffer that precious letter to be destroyed.
Overpowered in body and in spirit, she surrendered the fragments and
confessed the letter her own.
“What is the real name of this man, who calls himself a pastry-cook,
and to whom you write in such terms as these?” quoth the magistrate.
“He is Don Sebastian, King of Portugal.” And to that declaration she
added briefly the story of his escape from Alcacer-el-Kebir and
subsequent penitential wanderings.
Don Rodrigo departed, not knowing what to think or believe, but
convinced that it was time he laid the whole matter before King Philip.
His Catholic Majesty was deeply perturbed. He at once dispatched Don
Juan de Llano, the Apostolic Commissary of the Holy Office to Madrigal
to sift the matter, and ordered that Anne should be solitarily confined
in her cell, and her nuns-in-waiting and servants placed under arrest.