Drake’s Chaplain
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.”