“In heaven, by God’s mercy, madam. It was the Tower gun.”
The Queen sank down moaning where she stood.
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?”