COUNT GONDOMAR.
(Vol. v., p. 489.)
Your correspondent W. Stanley Simmonds will find a lengthy account of this notable Spanish Don—Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Conde de Gondomar—in the Nobiliario genealogico de los Reyes y Titulos de España of Lopez de Haro, folio, Madrid, 1622, vol. i. pp. 236-238. In this notice he chiefly figures, strange to say, as a military character! At the ripe age of seventeen this "famous captain" is said to have chastised the insolence of that bold "English pirate, Francisco Draques," who in 1584 had had the temerity to land somewhere near Bayona, his sole object being of course plunder. Don Diego guarded well his territory of Tuy when the same formidable "dragon," in the year 1589, made his appearance before Coruña; and again in 1596, when the English Armada visited ill-fated Cadiz. Being a person of "great parts," the Count was despatched to England as ambassador in 1613, and during the five years that he resided in this country, "the king and his nobility showered upon him favours and honours innumerable." He once told James that the flour of England (meaning the gentry) was very fine, but the bran (meaning the common people) was very coarse; "La harina de Inglatierra es muy delgada y fina, pero el afrecho es muy grossero,"—for Gondomar, like the learned Isaac Casaubon, had been subject to the grossest insults from the London rabble. We next find ranked among his praiseworthy deeds the following atrocious one:
"Hizo cortar la cabeça al General Ingles Wbaltero Rale (Sir Walter Raleigh) por aver intentado descubrimiento en las Indias Occidentales de Castilla a su partida."
Another meritorious action is added:
"A su instancia perdonó la Magestad de aquel Rey (James I.) a sesenta sacerdotes que estavan presos condenados por causa de la religion, y a otros mucho Catolicos, passandolos todos consigo a Flandes."
The title of Count Gondomar was conferred upon him by Philip III. in 1617, but the date of his death is still a desideratum. Many anecdotes concerning him are to be seen scattered in Howel's Treatise of Ambassadors.
W. M. R. E.