The police surrounded the house where Brancetor was to be found. It was night. The English minister entered, and found his man writing at a table. “I told him,” Wyatt reported in his account of the story, “that, since he would not come to visit me, I was come to seek him. His colour changed as soon as he heard my voice; and with that came in the provost, and set hand on him. I reached to the letters that he was writing, but he caught them afore me, and flung them backwards into the fire. I overthrew him, and cracked them out; but the provost got them.” Brancetor upon this declared himself the Emperor’s servant. He made no attempt to escape, but charged the officer, “that his writings and himself should be delivered into the Emperor’s hands.” He took a number of papers from his pocket, which he placed in the provost’s charge; and the latter not daring to act further in such a matter without further instructions, left a guard in the room with Wyatt and the prisoner, and went to make a report to the chancellor. “In the mean time,” says Wyatt, “I used all the soberness I could with Brancetor, advising him to submit himself to your Majesty; but he made the Emperor his master, and seemed to regard nothing else. Once he told me he had heard me oft times say that kings have long hands; but God, quoth he, hath longer. I asked him what length he thought that would make when God’s and kings’ hands were joined together; but he assured himself of the Emperor.” Presently the provost returned, and said that Brancetor was to remain in his charge till the morning, when Wyatt would hear further. Nothing more could be done with the provost; and after breakfast Wyatt had an interview with Cardinal Granvelle and the chancellor. The treaties were plain; a clause stated in the clearest language that neither France, nor Spain, nor England should give shelter to each other’s traitors; but such a case as Brancetor’s had as clearly not been anticipated when they were drawn; and the matter was referred to the Emperor.
Charles grants an audience to Wyatt.
He will defend his followers, English or Spanish, treaty or no treaty.
Charles made no difficulty in granting an audience, which he seemed rather to court. He was extremely angry. The man had been in his service, he said, for years; and it was ill done to arrest a member of his household without paying him even the courtesy of a first application on the subject. The English government could scarcely be serious in expecting that he would sacrifice an old attendant in any such manner. Wyatt answered sturdily that Brancetor was his master’s subject. There was clear proof, he could vouch for it on his own knowledge, that the man committed treason in Spain; and he again insisted on the treaties. The Emperor cared nothing for treaties. Treaty or no treaty, a servant of his own should pass free; “and if he was in the Tower of London,” he said, “he would never consent so to charge his honour and conscience.” Brancetor had come to Paris under his protection; and the French government would never do him the dishonour of permitting the seizure of one of his personal train.
Wyatt complains of the treatment of English subjects by the Inquisition.
He was so displeased, and there was so much truth in what he said, that Wyatt durst not press him further; but opened ground again with a complaint which he had been instructed also to make, of the ill usage of Englishmen in Spain by the Inquisition. Charles again flashed up with imperious vehemence. “In a loud voice,” he replied, “that the authority of the Inquisition depended not upon him. It had been established in his realm and countries for good consideration, and such as he would not break—no, not for his grandame.”
It was unreasonable, Wyatt replied, to punish men merely for their want of allegiance to Rome. They were no heretics, sacramentaries, Anabaptists. They held the Catholic faith as truly as any man.
Charles refuses t o interfere.
“The king is of one opinion,” Charles replied, “and I am of another. If your merchants come with novelties, I can not let the Inquisition. This is a thing that toucheth our faith.”
“What,” Wyatt said, “the primacy of the Bishop of Rome!”