The Year after the Armada, and Other Historical Studies

by Martin A. S. Hume

headpiece

JULIAN ROMERO—SWASHBUCKLER.

In a slumberous street in old Madrid, called anciently the Calle de Cantaranas, but now inappropriately named after Lope de Vega, there stands a venerable convent of barefooted Trinitarian nuns. The fortress-like red walls with the tiny grated windows looking upon the street, the quaint, sad tranquillity which hangs around the place, are only such as mark hundreds of other like retreats in Madrid and elsewhere; and yet to this particular convent many reverent steps are bent from all quarters of the earth, for here lie the bones of the "maimed one of Lepanto," the author of "Don Quixote." He died only a few yards away, in his house in the Calle de Leon, and was quietly laid to rest in the convent, where one of his own daughters was a nun. The very fact of his burial there was almost forgotten—was indeed for many years disputed, until proved beyond possibility of doubt not long since—and when the fury for destroying religious foundations seized the rulers of Madrid after the revolution of 1868, the convent was marked down for destruction like so many others of its kind. And destroyed it would have been but for the pious zeal of the good "setenton," Mesonero Romanos, most beloved of Madrid antiquarians, who woke up the Academy of History, and brought such pressure to bear upon the Government as to save the sepulchre of Cervantes from profanation for all future time, and thus enabled the great author, after he had lain in his grave for two and a half centuries, to repay his debt to the Trinitarian fathers who rescued him from his galling slavery in the hands of the infidel. A stone tablet is now fixed in the wall of the convent setting forth the fact of his sepulture there in 1616, and the foundation of the community a few years previously by Doña Juana Gaitan, daughter of General Julian Romero. The name of the latter awakens no responsive echoes in Spanish minds. I have before me, indeed, a recently published Spanish historical work which ascribes his very existence to a wrong period. With the exception of a few particulars of his later life given in a local history of Cuenca by Father Muñoz, no Spanish writer has ever been at the trouble of tracing what little may be known of his stirring career. And yet the man in his day was the very prototype of those indomitable adventurers, lusting for blood and gold, who, the sword in one hand and the cross in the other, hunted down to death the Indians of one hemisphere and the "heretics" of the other. Keen, cruel, Alba had no more ruthless instrument for his fell work than "Captain Julian," upon whom and Sancho de Avila the hatred of the persecuted Flemings was mainly concentrated. In the course of my somewhat out-of-the-track studies I have found the name of Julian Romero constantly cropping up, and so many personal traits of him have appeared, that by carefully piecing them together a more complete account may be formed of the life and character of this typical swashbuckler than of, perhaps, any of his fellows. His life, too, offers some interest to Englishmen, for he swaggered and ruffled in London many a time and oft, and was one of those Spanish mercenaries who, in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., fought so bravely against the French and Scots and quelled by their ferocity the risings of Kett in Norfolk and Arundell in the West Country. Practically nothing whatever was known of the lives—hardly indeed the existence—of the Spanish mercenaries in England until the recent publication of the anonymous "Spanish Chronicle of Henry VIII.,"[[1]] which I now attribute to Antonio de Guaras, a leading Spanish merchant in London, whom I know to have been on close terms of intimacy with the Spanish soldiers, and particularly with Julian Romero, whose early adventures in England are evidently related at first hand in the Chronicle.

Of all the turbulent soldiers of fortune who quarrelled, intrigued, and triumphed in England, and whose adventures are so minutely told in the Chronicle, only one was heard of in after life. The general, Sir Peter Gamboa, was murdered with Captain Sir Alonso de Villa Sirga in St. Sepulchre's churchyard, hard by Newgate, one wet winter's night in 1551, by Captain Guevara, who was incontinently hanged in Smithfield. Sir Pero Negro died of the sweating sickness in one of the crowded lanes of old London city. Juan de Haro was killed by the English for attempted desertion with his company to the French enemy before Boulogne; others fell in the Flemish wars, and only the rash and boastful "Captain Julian" lived to become Alba's trusted henchman, and to hand his name down to the execration of generations of Flemings as one of the prime movers of the "Spanish Fury" in Antwerp. So great was the fame of his ferocity that the panic mongers, who were for ever sending to Elizabeth and Cecil intelligence of the dreadful vengeance which was to fall upon England at the hands of King Philip, could invent nothing more terror-striking than their constantly repeated dread that Julian Romero was to swoop down upon the coast and serve English Protestants in the same way as he had treated those of the Netherlands. He had, indeed, as will be shown in his own words at various periods of his life—now for the first time brought together—all the vices and virtues of his class and time. Vain and boastful, bigoted and cruel, he was nevertheless true to his salt, faithful, brave, and steadfast; of that stern, self-sacrificing stuff by which alone empires may be won or despotism defended. He was born at Huelamo, in the province of Cuenca, of very humble folk, for even when he was in high command and on terms of close intimacy with nobles and ministers, he was never given the nobiliary address of Don, which was enjoyed by the most remote and out-at-elbows representative of the hidalgo class. He was not much of a scholar either, for his signature which exists at Simancas is the only part of his letters in his own hand, and is painfully traced in great bold straight lines, like a row of halberds.

In the winter of 1534 every village in Spain resounded with the drum-beat of the recruiters, who were seeking soldiers for the Emperor's great expedition against the Moors, which was to start from Barcelona in the spring. Spanish hearts were all aflame with wondrous stories of fortune and adventure. The excitement, the freedom, the idleness, and the possible gains of a soldier's life had seized upon the imagination of Spanish youth; and the turbulent spirit of war-like adventure in far countries was, for the next century at least, to be the dominant note of the national character. Julian must have been a mere boy, but he joined the standard, so he wrote forty years afterwards, at Christmas, 1534, as a foot-soldier, and, with a pike on his shoulder, started on his life of adventure. There was no one to record the doings and sufferings of the humble man-at-arms in those stirring days, and beyond the fact that he drifted from Spain to Tunis, from Tunis to Italy, and thence to Flanders and France, always in the midst of the fighting in the Emperor's wars, nothing is known for the next ten years of Julian Romero's service. In the beginning of 1544 Henry VIII. had arranged to enter into alliance with the Emperor to jointly attack the King of France, and the probability is that if they had together marched upon Paris promptly, they would have had France at their mercy. But other counsels prevailed, and, whilst Charles operated in Picardy and French Flanders, Henry sent the Duke of Norfolk and his brilliant son, Surrey, with an army of 15,000 men, to besiege Montreuil. The King's brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, at the same time with a large force "sat down before" Boulogne, and, on the 14th of July, great Harry himself landed at his good town of Calais to take the supreme command of his army before Boulogne. He was accompanied by a brilliant train of courtiers and soldiers, and took with him as his chief military adviser a great Spanish noble, Beltran de la Cueva, third Duke of Alburquerque, whose important share in the reduction of the town has been almost entirely ignored by English historians. Besides the 200 Spanish soldiers who followed the Duke, there were already three Spanish captains in Henry's service, each with a company of his countrymen, to the aggregate number of about 260 men, all of them seasoned veterans in the Continental wars; and these, together with the less experienced English levies, succeeded in capturing the town of Boulogne on the 15th of September. It appears that a breach had been made in the walls three weeks before, and the Spaniards begged Henry to let them take the place by assault. He told them that he would rather waste 10,000 pounds of powder than that a single one of his Spaniards should be sacrificed, "whereupon they blushed for mere shame." But as usual Henry had his own way, and the town surrendered; "the Frenchmen," says Wriothesley, "departing out of the towne with as much goodes as they might carye, both men and women, besyde that the waggons caryed; and the King his Majestie entered the said towne the 18th September with greate tryumphe, and the 20th day a solempne procession was kept with Te Deum songe for the Victory of the King his Majestie and many fyers made in the citye and in every part of the realme. The last day of September the King his Majestie landed at Dover at midnight." The reason for Henry's hurried return was his desire to retain all the credit for his victory without waiting for the probable reverse. Charles V. had come to terms with the French, and when he had sent word to his English ally that he was negotiating, Henry arrogantly said that the Emperor might make peace if he pleased, but he, Henry, would suit himself in the matter. But when he found the whole French army turned against him he hurriedly raised the siege of Montreuil, put all his forces into Boulogne under Lord Grey, and got back to England as fast as he could, whilst his laurels were yet green. All through the next year the French siege of Boulogne went on, the three companies of Spanish mercenaries, steady old soldiers as they were, being the mainstay of the defence. They complained bitterly of the raw Englishmen's habit of killing the prisoners instead of holding them to ransom, and on one occasion were near mutiny because their prisoners were murdered. "How now," said Captain Salablanca to Lord Grey, "do you think we are in the King's service for the wretched four ducats a month we earn? Not so my lord; we serve with the hope of taking prisoners and getting ransom. Your men have even now killed a gentleman of mine for whom I should have got at least five or six thousand crowns ransom." Whatever their object may have been in serving the schismatic king, Henry thought very highly of them, and when in the year 1545 he was about to send Warwick to attack the Scots, an opportunity occurred for him to engage some more, he gladly seized it. Charles V. had disbanded a large proportion of his army after the peace of Crespi was concluded, and had embarked them for Spain with orders that, under pain of death, they were to take service with no other sovereign. A ship with 800 or 1,000 of these disbanded soldiers on their way home anchored in the Downs, and the warriors being, we are told, "already tired of the sea," they sent an offer of their services to the King of England. The captain of the vessel, however, would not wait for the answer to reach them, but on his putting into Plymouth the whole of them landed and entered the English service. They were promptly sent off to Warwick's army in Scotland under an experienced old soldier of their number called Pedro Gamboa, who was made colonel, with power to create his own captains. Julian Romero landed with this force in some subordinate capacity, but on his arrival in Scotland received his first English commission as captain, from Gamboa. This was in the summer of 1545, and when the winter came the troops were put into quarters, whilst Gamboa and his newly fledged captains came to London to air their finery at Henry's Court. The King made much of them, and in the early spring of 1546, a temporary peace having been patched up with Scotland, ordered them to take their companies to the French coast between Calais and Boulogne, where the English were erecting a fort. Whilst Gamboa, Julian Romero, and the other new captains, had been ruffling at Court, receiving grants and attentions from the King, the three or four old Spanish commanders with their companies, who had been long in Henry's service, had been enduring hard fare and rough service, and obtaining but little loot at Boulogne; so that on the arrival in France of the new men, straight from Court favour, a very bitter feeling was shown towards them. One of the old captains, Cristobal Mora, deserted bodily with his men to the enemy, and another one, Juan de Haro, was killed in attempting to do so. It may therefore well be supposed that when peace was made in June, 1546, and the compatriots met again on neutral ground, there was a good deal of thumb-biting and recrimination. Mora was flouted in the streets by his fellow-countrymen for having disgraced the mercenary creed by deserting his paymaster before the enemy; whilst he retorted by accusing Gamboa and his friends of disobeying their natural sovereign the Emperor in taking service under an excommunicated heretic. Events came to a head at last by the deserting captain, Cristobal de Mora, sending a challenge from Montreuil to Colonel Gamboa in Calais in July. Either for some reason of disparity of age or rank between the two, or else out of mere hot-headed combativeness on the part of Julian Romero, the latter accepted the challenge for his chief, and has left upon record an extremely minute description of the fight. Sir Henry Knyvett went off to obtain the King of England's permission, which was gladly given, and "a thousand broad angels sent to Julian to put himself in order withal." The King of France ordered the erection of lists at Montreuil, where the wage of battle should be decided, and when all was ready Julian Romero, in the full pomp of war, started on his road from Calais to Montreuil, attended by a great company of English and Spanish gentlemen to see the fun. The following is the account given by Julian's friend.

"Well when they arrived in France and the day being come the seconds and umpires saw that each one had equal arms. They were to fight on horseback and each one had a sword, and both rapiers and daggers, and their corselets were open at the back with great holes big enough for two fists to go in on both pieces. This scheme was invented by the French because Mora had one of the best and quickest horses in France, and as they were not to fight with the lance, Mora thought, with the fleetness of his horse, he would be able to wound Julian in the back with his rapier, and so vanquish him.

"When the umpires had seen the arms were equal they gave the signal for the trumpets to sound, and the opponents at once closed with one another, and, at the first blows with the swords, Julian's sword fell from his hands and he seized his rapier. Mora was not backward and threw away his sword for his rapier; and, as he had such an active horse, he went circling round Julian so as to wound him in the back. But Julian was no sluggard, and when Mora saw he could not do this, he decided to kill Julian's horse, which he did with a thrust in the chest; and a few moments afterwards it fell to the ground. At that moment Julian, thinking to do the same for Mora, attacked him with that object; but Mora was too quick with his horse for Julian to wound it, and the rapier fell from Julian's hand, almost at the moment that his horse dropped under him; and as he felt his horse was going to fall he leapt quickly off his back and Mora had not time to ride him down, thanks to the horse which was on the ground. Julian to escape being ridden down, and finding himself armed only with his dagger, was forced to shield himself behind his fallen horse, whilst Mora went round and round and Julian dodged behind the horse. This went on for more than three hours, and at last Mora cried out, 'Surrender, Julian! I do not want to kill thee!' but Julian did not answer a word. There was hardly an hour of daylight left, and Julian would be vanquished at sunset. And, as he saw that Mora was strutting about waiting for the sun to go down, Julian kept wide awake and, watching his opportunity, dropped on one knee behind his prostrate horse and with his dagger cut the straps of his spurs, which he threw away. Seeing his rapier not far from him he made a dash to regain it, and succeeded before Mora could ride him down.

"The gentleman who was acting as Julian's second, seeing how things were going, was very downcast and wished he never had come and said to the Spanish captains: 'Gentlemen, our man is losing.' Then said Captain Cristobal Diaz, 'What, sir! the day is not yet done and I still hope to God that Julian will come off the victor.' 'Do you not see, sir,' said the other, 'that Mora is only flourishing about waiting for sundown?' As they were chatting thus, they saw how Julian had snatched up his rapier again, and how Mora was attacking him. Julian had just time to deal a thrust at Mora's horse, which, feeling itself wounded began to prance, and its rider, fearing that it would fall with him underneath it, determined to get a short distance away and dismount. Julian, however, being on foot and light, without his spurs, went running after him, and when he was trying to dismount, embraced him in such a manner as to bring him to the ground, and with his dagger cut the ties of his helmet. Mora then surrendered at once, and Julian took his arm, and with the sword of his enemy in his hand, led him three times round the field that all might see how he had surrendered."