[10] I do not mention in this list Archbishop Cranmer and his fellow prelates, Latimer and Ridley, since having been persecutors themselves they may be said to have reaped under Mary Tudor what they had sowed under Edward VI. They were condemned and executed by the laws which they had made and put in force against Unitarians and Anabaptists.
[11] H. C. Lea, whose ill-digested mass of facts torn from their proper context are as representative of Spain as the accounts of a foreigner who had studied only the police reports of America, would be of us.
[12] "L'Inquisition fût, d'abord, plus politique que religieuse, et destinée à maintenir l'Ordre plutôt qu'à défendre la foi," says the Protestant historian Guizot (Hist. Mod. Lect. II).
[13] Every Spanish child knows the story of Guzmán el bueno at Tarifa. The rebel infante threatened to kill Guzmán's son, were the city not surrendered, whereupon the hero flung his own knife down from the walls; rather the death of him he loved best than disloyalty to his trust and king. The boy was killed under his father's eyes.
When the tomb of this national hero was opened in 1570, the skeleton discovered was nine feet long, just as Jaime I el Conquistador, a contemporary of Guzmán, was found to be of gigantic proportions when the pantheon of the Aragonese kings in Poblet was sacked in 1835.
[14] "León Cathedral is indeed in almost every respect worthy to be ranked among the noblest churches in Europe. Its detail is rich and beautiful throughout, the plan very excellent, the sculptures with which it is adorned quite equal in quality and character to that of any church of the age, and the stained glass with which its windows are filled some of the best in Europe."
G. E. STREET: "Gothic Architecture in Spain."
[15] "Libro del Paso Honroso" written by an eye witness, Pero Rodríguez de Lena. Prescott says that no country has been more fruitful in the field of historical composition than Spain. The chronicles date from the twelfth century, every great family, every town and every city had its chronicler. Compare the minute details we have of Cortés in Mexico about 1517, with the meager accounts we find of the North American settlers some generations later.
[16] It is amusing to find Napier, whose "History of the Peninsula War" is one of the most one-sided of chronicles, laying down the law in this fashion: "The English are a people very subject to receive and to cherish false impressions, proud of their credulity, as if it were a virtue, the majority will adopt any fallacy, and cling to it with a tenacity proportioned to its grossness."
[17] Frequently in Spain one comes on Irish names among the leading families. The O'Donnells, Dukes of Tetuán, have had several generations of distinguished men. In the 18th century Count Alexander O'Reilly led the Spanish armies in the New World and the Old, and when Governor of Andalusia, he so reformed economic conditions in Cadiz that a beggar was unknown on the streets. He too was followed by an able son. Reading Spanish books the traces of Irish exiles are many: thus a Doña Lucía Fitzgerald organized and drilled a woman's regiment during the siege of Gerona in 1808; and the beautiful wife of the poet Campoamor was a Doña Guillermina O'Gorman.