[[2]] He was with difficulty rescued from the direst vengeance of the Inquisition a few years afterwards in consequence of his too ready co-operation in the King's amorous tendencies. Don Geronimo was patron of the convent of San Placido, next door to his own house in the Calle de la Madera in Madrid, and had inflamed the King's mind with stories of a very beautiful nun who was an inmate of the convent. Philip and his favourite, the Count-Duke, insisted upon seeing this paragon of loveliness, and Don Geronimo, exerting his authority as patron, procured them entrance in disguise to the parlour, where, as was to be expected, his Catholic Majesty fell violently in love with the beautiful nun. The interviews in the parlour were constant but, with the grating between the King and his flame, unsatisfactory, and, by dint of bribes and threats, Don Geronimo managed to break a passage from the cellars of his own house into the vaults of the convent, by means of which, notwithstanding the prayers, the entreaties, and appeals of the abbess, the King was introduced into the cell of the unfortunate nun of whom he was enamoured. He found her laid out as if she were a corpse, surrounded with lighted tapers, with a great crucifix by her side, but not even this availed, and the sacrilegious amours continued so long that the news reached the ever-open ears of the Holy Office. The Grand Inquisitor, a Dominican friar called Antonio de Sotomayor, Archbishop of Damascus, privately took the King to task, and obtained a promise that the offence should cease. Don Geronimo was seized by the officers of the Inquisition (August 30, 1644), and taken to Toledo, where he was accused of sacrilege and other heinous crimes against the faith. The evidence was full and conclusive, and Don Geronimo's life was trembling in the balance, when the Count-Duke boldly went to the Grand Inquisitor one night with two signed royal decrees in his hands, one giving the Archbishop 12,000 ducats a year for life on condition of his resignation of the Grand Inquisitorship, and the other depriving him of all his temporalities, and banishing him for ever from all the dominions of his Catholic Majesty. The Grand Inquisitor naturally chose the former, and resigned next morning. Pressure was put on Pope Urban VIII. by the Spanish Ambassador, and very shortly an order arrived from Rome that the whole of the documents and evidence in the case were to be sealed up and sent in a box by a messenger of the Holy Office to his Holiness himself for decision. The messenger chosen was one of the Inquisition notaries called Alfonso Paredes. The Count-Duke, under various pretexts, delayed this man's departure for some weeks, and in the meanwhile had good portraits of him painted and sent by special messengers to all the ports in Italy where he was likely to land, and orders were sent to the Spanish agents to capture him at all risks. On the night of his arrival at Genoa, by the connivance of the authorities, he was seized, gagged, and carried off to Naples, where he was imprisoned for the rest of his life, condemned to perpetual silence on pain of instant death. The box of papers that he bore was sent privately to the King, who, with Olivares, burnt the contents without even opening the packet. The new Grand Inquisitor, who was a creature of the Queen, a Benedictine monk named Diego de Arce, was not to be entirely balked, and although no evidence now existed, he had the prothonotary Don Geronimo Villanueva brought from his prison in Toledo, where he had languished for two years, and placed before the tribunal of the Inquisition. He was stripped of his arms, accoutrements, insignia of rank and outer clothing, and sat upon a plain low wooden stool, and then, without any evidence being given or statement of specific offence, was condemned for irreligion, sacrilege, superstition, and other enormities, and, by the mercy of the Holy Office, was absolved from all this on condition that he fasted every Friday for a year, never again entered the convent, and gave 2,000 ducats to the poor through the monks of Atocha.
THE JOURNAL OF RICHARD BERE.
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THE JOURNAL OF RICHARD BERE.[[1]]
In the course of a recent search amongst the Sloane MSS. at the British Museum for a document of an entirely different character I chanced upon a manuscript which, so far as I have been able to discover, has never yet been described in print or received the attention it appears to deserve. It is a long, narrow book like an account book, in the Sloane binding, containing 244 pages of cramped and crowded little writing in faded ink on rough paper, recording the daily—almost hourly—movements of a man for eleven years, from the 1st of January, 1692-3, to the middle of April, 1704. It is written in Spanish—Englishman's Spanish, full of solecisms and English idioms, but fair and fluent Castilian for all that, and the diarist, thinking no doubt his secrets were safe in a language comparatively little known at the time, has set down for his own satisfaction alone, and often in words that no amount of editing would render fit for publication, the daily life of one of the dissolute men about town, who roistered and ruffled in the coffee-houses and taverns of London at the end of the seventeenth century. Few men could hope to possess the keen observation and diverting style of Samuel Pepys, or the sober judgment and foresight of stately John Evelyn, and this last contemporary diarist of theirs certainly cannot lay claim to any such qualities. He rarely records an impression or an opinion, and as a rule confines himself to a bald statement of his own movements and the people he meets day by day; but still, even such as it is, the diary is full of quaint and curious suggestions of the intimate life of a London widely different from ours. The familiar names of the streets, nay, the very signs of the taverns, are the same now as then, but in every line of the fading brown ink may be gathered hints of the vast chasm that separates the busy crowded life of to-day from the loitering deliberation with which these beaux in swords and high-piled periwigs sauntered through their tavern-haunting existence. It strikes the imagination, too, to think that the man who thus sets down so coarsely and frankly the acts of his life must have listened, with however little appreciation, to the luminous talk of wondrous John Dryden at Will's coffee-house, most certainly knew the rising Mr. Addison, and probably met Matthew Prior at his old home at the "Rummer" tavern, which the diarist frequented.