Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846

The impunity of tyranny was over-strained. The tide of sympathy fluctuated, and ebbed with murmuring agitation from the channel in which it had flowed so long with a steady current. Jesters and preachers uttered homely truths – the nobles trembled – and the people shuddered. With a few intelligible exceptions, there was a burst of general satisfaction when, on the 20th April 1591, two months after his torture, Perez, by the aid of his intrepid and devoted wife – (and shall we be too credulous in adding, with the connivance of his guards?) – broke his bonds, fled from Castile, and set his foot on the soil of independent Aragon.

Let us now, for a moment, reconsider the motives which solve, as they guided, at once the indefensible guilt of Perez, and the malignant perfidy of Philip. The King of Spain unquestionably ordered the murder of Escovedo, and confided its perpetration to the docile secretary. But the death-warrant slumbered for a while in the keeping of the executioner. It was not until Escovedo acquired his perilous knowledge of the debaucheries of Perez and the Princess of Eboli, and had avowed his still more perilous resolution of publishing their frailty in a quarter where detection was ruin, that Perez plied with inflexible diligence artifice and violence, poison and dagger – to satisfy, coincidently, himself and his sovereign. By a similar infusion of emotions, roused by later occurrences, the feelings of Philip towards Perez underwent, after the murder, a radical change. He at first unhesitatingly joined, as we have seen, in rewarding the actual murderers. The tale of the preference lavished by beauty on his minion had not seared his heart-strings. With that revelation came the mood of inexpiable hate. A word from him, uttered with unequivocal emphasis, would have cleared and rescued Perez. Such words, indeed, he pronounced more than once; but never as he would have done, if their effect had been to screen merely the faithful minister of state. The object in their occasional recurrence was one of profound dissimulation. Philip's design was to lull the alarm of Perez, and to recover out of his hands every scrap of written evidence which existed, implicating himself in the death of Escovedo. And it was under an erroneous impression of his efforts having been at length completely triumphant, that he sent Perez to the torture, with a foregone determination of killing him with the sword of justice, as a slanderous traitor, who could not adduce a tittle of proof to support his falsehood.

But the wit of Perez was as penetrating as Philip's, and had avoided the snare. Retaining adroitly, in authentic documents, ample materials for his own defence, and the inculpation of the king, Perez fought undauntedly and successfully his battle, on the charge of Escovedo's murder, before the tribunals of Aragon, which were either ignorant of, or indifferent to, the scandals and personal criminalities inseparably mixed up with the case at Madrid. The retributive justice which had overwhelmed Perez in his person and circumstances in Castile, now descended on the reputation of Philip in Aragon, who was likewise not only obliged to hear of the acquittal of his detested foe by the supreme court there, but necessitated, by the tremendous statements promulgated by Perez as his justification, founded on unimpeachable writings in his possession, to drop and relinquish all legal proceedings.

The bitterness of the cup of woe, however, it had still been in the power of the fierce despot otherwise to deepen. Infuriated by the flight of Perez, the king caused the wife, then pregnant, and the children of the fugitive, to be arrested and cast into the public prison, dragging them "on the day when it is usual to pardon the very worst of criminals, at the very hour of the procession of the penitents on Holy Thursday, with a reckless disregard of custom and decency, among the crosses and all the cortèges of this solemnity, in order that there might be no lack of witnesses for this glorious action." These words we have cited from a famous narrative subsequently published by Perez in England, from which we are also tempted to extract, in relation to the same occurrence, the following passage, full of that energetic eloquence which contributed, among other causes, to win over general commiseration to the writer: —

"'The crime committed by a wife who aids her husband to escape from prison, martyred as he had been for so many years, and reduced to such a miserable condition, is justified by all law – natural, divine and human – and by the laws of Spain in particular. Saul, pursuing David, respected Michal, though she was his daughter, and had even saved her husband from the effects of his wrath. Law – common, civil, and canonical – absolves woman from whatever she does to defend her husband. The special law of Count Fernan Gonzalès leaves her free; the voice and the unanimous decree of all nations exalt and glorify her. If, when her children are in her house, in their chamber, or their cradle, it be proved that they are strangers to every thing, by that alone, and by their age, which excludes them from such confidences, how much more must that child be a stranger to all, which the mother bore in her bosom, and which they thus made a prisoner before its birth? Even before it could be guilty, it was already punished; and its life and soul were endangered, like one of its brothers who lost both when they seized his mother a second time, near the port of Lisbon.' He finishes with these noble and avenging threats: – 'But let them not be deceived; wherever they put them, such captives have, on their side, the two most powerful advocates in the whole world – their innocence and their misfortune. No Cicero, no Demosthenes can so charm the ear, or so powerfully rouse the mind, as these two defenders; because, among other privileges, God has given them that of being always present, to cry out for justice, to serve both as witnesses and advocates, and to terminate one of those processes which God alone judges in this world: this is what will happen in the present case, if the justice of men be too long in default. And let not the debtors of God be too confident about the delay of His judgment; though the fatal term be apparently postponed, it is gradually approaching; and the debt to be paid is augmented by the interest which is added to it down to the last day of Heaven's great reckoning."'

It was not till eight years later, in 1599, when Philip III. sat on the throne of Spain, that the wife and children of Perez regained their liberty, and not till nearly twenty-five later, in 1615, that his children, who had passed their youth in prison, and been legally attainted with their father's degradation without having participated in his offences, were restored to their rank and rights as Spanish nobles.

Baffled in his pursuit of vengeance by the sturdy independence of the civil courts of Aragon, Philip turned his eyes for assistance to a tribunal, of which the jurisdiction had apparently no boundary except its exorbitant pretensions. At the king's bidding, the Inquisition endeavoured to seize Perez within its inexorable grasp. It seized, but could not hold him. The free and jealous Aragonese, shouting "Liberty for ever!" flew to arms, and emancipated from the mysterious oppression of the Holy Office the man already absolved of crime by the regular decrees of justice.

The Inquisition having renewed its attempt, the people, headed and supported by leaders of the highest lineage, condition, and authority in Aragon, increased in the fervour and boldness of their resistance. Their zealous championship of Perez – a most unworthy object of so much generous and brave solicitude – drove them into open insurrection against Philip. The biographer narrates, that when the storm raised by him, and on his account, drew near, Perez escaped across the Pyrenees into France; and the historian records, that when the sun of peace again re-emerged from the tempest, Philip had overthrown the ancient constitution of Aragon, crushed its nobility, destroyed its independence, and incorporated its territory with the Spanish monarchy.

Perez, although compelled to fly, bade farewell for ever to his native land with reluctance. There is something touching in the familiar image which he uses to describe his own condition: "He was like a dog of a faithful nature, who, though beaten and ill-treated by his master and household, is loth to quit the walls of his dwelling." He found at Béarn, in the court of the sister of Henry IV. of France, a resting-place from hardship, but not a safe asylum from persecution. During his brief residence there, three separate attempts to assassinate him were detected or defeated; nor were these the only plots directed against his person. M. Mignet quotes a pleasant variety of the species from the lively pen of Perez himself.

"'When Perez was at Pau, they went so far as to try to make use of a lady of that country, who lacked neither beauty, gallantry, nor distinction; a notable woman, an Amazon, and a huntress; riding, as they say, up hill and down dale. One would have thought they wanted to put to death some new Samson. In short, they offered her ten thousand crowns and six Spanish horses to come to Pau, and form an intimacy with Perez; and, after having charmed him by her beauty, to invite and entice him to her house, in order, some fine evening, to deliver him up, or allow him to be carried off in a hunting party. The lady, either being importuned, or desirous, from a curiosity natural to her sex, to know a man whom authority and his persecutors considered of so much consequence, or, lastly, for the purpose of warning the victim herself, feigned, as the sequel makes us believe, to accept the commission. She travelled to Pau, and made acquaintance with Perez. She visited him at his house. Messengers and love-letters flew about like hail. There were several parties of pleasure; but, in the end, the good disposition of the lady, and her attachment for Perez, gained the victory over interest, that metal of base alloy, which defiles more than any act of love; so that she herself came and revealed to him the machinations from beginning to end, together with the offers made, and all that had followed. She did much more. She offered him her house and the revenue attached to it, with such a warmth of affection, (if we may judge of love by its demonstrations,) that any sound mathematician would say there was, between that lady and Perez, an astrological sympathy.'"

His restless spirit of intrigue, and perhaps a nascent desire, provoked by altered circumstances, of reciprocal vengeance against Philip, hurried Perez from the tranquil seclusion of Béarn to the busy camp of Henry IV. After a long conference, he was sent to England by that monarch, who calculated on his services being usefully available with Queen Elizabeth in the common enterprise against Spain. Then it was that he formed his intimate acquaintance with the celebrated Francis Bacon, in whose company we first introduced him to our readers, and with many other individuals of eminence and note.

"It was during the leisure of this his first residence in London that Perez published, in the summer of 1594, his Relaciones, under the imaginary name of Raphael Peregrino; which, far from concealing the real author, in reality designated him by the allusion to his wandering life. This account of his adventures, composed with infinite art, was calculated to render his ungrateful and relentless persecutor still more odious, and to draw towards himself more benevolence and compassion. He sent copies of it to Burghley, to Lady Rich, sister of the Earl of Essex, to Lords Southampton, Montjoy, and Harris, to Sir Robert Sidney, Sir Henry Unton, and many other personages of the English court, accompanying them with letters gracefully written and melancholy in spirit. The one which he confided to the patronage of the Earl of Essex was at once touching and flattering: – 'Raphael Peregrino,' said he, 'the author of this book, has charged me to present it to your Excellency. Your Excellency is obliged to protect him, since he recommends himself to you. He must know that he wants a godfather, since he chooses such as you. Perhaps he trusted to his name, knowing that your Excellency is the support of the pilgrims of fortune.'"

The dagger of the assassin continued to track his wanderings. And it is, probably, not commonly known, that upon one of the city gates of London, near St Paul's, there might be seen, in 1594, the heads of two Irishmen, executed as accomplices in a plot for the murder of Antonio Perez.

In England, where he was supported by the generosity of Essex, he did not remain very long, having been recalled, in 1594, to France by Henry, who had recently declared war against Philip. At Paris, Perez was received with great distinction and the most flattering attentions, being lodged in a spacious mansion, and provided with a military body-guard. The precaution was not superfluous. Wearing seemingly a charmed life, the dusky spectre of premature and unnatural death haunted him wherever he went or sojourned. Baron Pinilla, a Spaniard, was captured in Paris on the eve of his attempt to murder Perez, put to the torture, and executed on the Place de Grève – thus adding another name to the long catalogue of people, to whom any connexion with, or implication in, the affairs of Perez, whether innocently or criminally, for good or evil, attracted, it might be imagined as by Lady Bacon, from an angry Heaven the flash of calamitous ruin.

His present prosperity came as a brilliant glimpse through hopeless darkness, and so departed. Revisiting England in 1596, he found himself denied access to Essex, shunned by the Bacons, and disregarded by every body. The consequent mortification accelerated his return to France, which he reached, as Henry was concluding peace with Philip, to encounter cold distrust and speedy neglect from the French King. All this was the result of his own incurable double-dealing. He had been Henry's spy in the court of Elizabeth, and was, or fancied himself to be Elizabeth's at Paris. But the omnipotent secretary of state and the needy adventurer played the game of duplicity and perfidy with the odds reversed. All parties, as their experience unmasked his hollow insincerity, shrunk from reliance on, or intercourse with an ambidextrous knave, to whom mischief and deceit were infinitely more congenial than wisdom and honesty. "The truth is," wrote Villeroy, one of the French ministers, to a correspondent in 1605, "that his adversities have not made him much wiser or more discreet than he was in his prosperity." We must confess ourselves unable to perceive any traces of even the qualified improvement admitted by Villeroy.

The rest of the biography of this extraordinary man is a miserable diary of indignant lamentations over his abject condition – of impudent laudations of the blameless integrity of his career – of grovelling and ineffectual efforts and supplications to appease and eradicate the hatred of Philip – and of vociferous cries for relief from penury and famine. "I am in extreme want, having exhausted the assistance of all my friends, and no longer knowing where to find my daily bread," is the terrible confession of the once favourite minister of the most powerful monarch in Europe. He never touched the ground, or even gazed on the distant hills of Spain again. In one of the obscure streets of Paris, in solitude and poverty, he dragged the grief and infirmities of his old age slowly towards the grave; and at length, in the seventy-second year of his age, on a natural and quiet deathbed, closed the troubles of his tempestuous existence.

Such is "this strange eventful history." Such was the incalculable progeny of misery, disgrace, disaster, and ruin, involving himself, his family, countless individuals, and an entire nation, which issued from the guilty love of Perez and the Princess of Eboli.

Antonio Perez and Philip II. By M. Mignet. Translated by C. Cocks, B.L. London: 1846.

RECOLLECTIONS OF A LOVER OF SOCIETY

No. II1802

All the great people of London, and most of the little, have been kept in a fever of agitation during the last fortnight, by the preparatives for the grand club ball in honour of the peace. Texier had the direction of the fête, and he exhibited his taste to the astonishment of les sauvages Britanniques. Never were seen such decorations, such chaplets, such chandeliers, such bowers of roses. In short, the whole was a Bond Street Arcadia. All the world of the West End were there; the number could not have been less than a thousand – all in fancy dresses and looking remarkably brilliant. The Prince of Wales, the most showy of men every where, wore a Highland dress, such, however, as no Highlander ever wore since Deucalion's flood, unless Donald was master of diamonds enough to purchase a principality. The Prince, of course, had a separate room for his own supper party, and the genius of M. Texier had contrived a little entertainment for the royal party, by building an adjoining apartment in the style of a cavern, after the Gil Blas fashion, in which a party of banditti were to carry on their carousal. The banditti were, of course, amateurs – the Cravens, Tom Sheridan, and others of that set – who sang, danced, gambled, and did all sorts of strange things. The Prince was delighted; but even princes cannot have all pleasures to themselves. Some of the crowd by degrees squeezed or coaxed their way into the cavern, others followed, the pressure became irresistible; until at last the banditti, contrary to all the laws of melodrame, were expelled from their own cavern, and the invaders sat down to their supper. Lords Besborough, Ossulston, and Bedford were the directors of the night; and the foreign ministers declared that nothing in Europe, within their experience, equalled this Bond Street affair. Whether the directors had the horses taken from their carriages, and were carried home in an ovation, I cannot tell; but Texier, not at all disposed to think lightly of himself at any time, talks of the night with tears in his eyes, and declares it the triumph of his existence.

George Rose has had a narrow escape of being drowned. All the wits, of course, appeal to the proverb, and deny the possibility of his concluding his career by water. Still, his escape was extraordinary. He had taken a boat at Palace Yard to cross to Lambeth. As he was standing up in the boat, immediately on his getting in, the waterman awkwardly and hastily shoved off, and George, accustomed as he was to take care of himself, lost his balance, and plumped head foremost into the water. The tide was running strong, and between the weight of his clothes, and the suddenness of the shock, he was utterly helpless. The parliamentary laughers say, that the true wonder of the case is, that he has been ever able to keep his head above water for the last dozen years; others, that it has been so long his practice to swim with the stream, that no one can be surprised at his slipping eagerly along. The fact, however, is, that a few minutes more must have sent him to the bottom. Luckily a bargeman made a grasp at him as he was going down, and held him till he could be lifted into his boat. He was carried to the landing-place in a state of great exhaustion. George has been, of course, obnoxious to the Opposition from his services, and from his real activity and intelligence in office. He is good-natured, however, and has made no enemies. Sheridan and the rest, when they have nothing else to do in the House, fire their shots at him to keep their hands in practice, but none of them have been able to bring him down.

A remarkable man died in June, the well-known Colonel Barré. He began political life about the commencement of the American war, and distinguished himself by taking an active part in the discussion of every public measure of the time. Barré's soldiership impressed its character on his parliamentary conduct. He was prompt, bold, and enterprising, and always obtained the attention of the House. Though without pretensions to eloquence, he was always a ready speaker; and from the rapidity with which he mastered details, and from the boldness with which he expressed his opinions, he always produced a powerful effect on the House. Though contemporary with Burke, and the countryman of that illustrious orator, he exhibited no tendency to either the elevation or the ornament of that distinguished senator; yet his speeches were vigorous, and his diligence gave them additional effect. No man was more dreaded by the minister; and the treasury bench often trembled under the force and directness of his assaults. At length, however, he gave way to years, and retired from public life. His party handsomely acknowledged his services by a retiring pension, which Mr Pitt, when minister, exchanged for the clerkship of the pells, thus disburdening the nation by substituting a sinecure. For many years before his death, Barré was unfortunately deprived of sight; but, under that heaviest of all afflictions, he retained his practical philosophy, enjoyed the society of his friends, and was cheerful to the last. He was at length seized with paralysis, and died.

The crimes of the French population are generally of a melodramatic order. The temperament of the nation is eminently theatrical; and the multitude of minor theatres scattered through France, naturally sustain this original tendency. A villain in the south of France, lately constructed a sort of machinery for murder, which was evidently on the plan of the trap-doors and banditti displays of the Porte St Martin. Hiring an empty stable, he dug a pit in it of considerable depth. The pit was covered with a framework of wood, forming a floor, which, on the pulling of a string, gave way, and plunged the victim into a depth of twenty feet. But the contriver was not satisfied with his attempt to break the bones of the unfortunate person whom he thus entrapped. He managed to have a small chamber filled with some combustible in the side of the pit, which was to be set on fire, and, on the return of the platform to its place, suffocate his detenu with smoke. Whether he had performed any previous atrocities in this way, or whether the present instance was the commencement of his profession of homicide, is not told. By some means or other, having inveigled a stout countrywoman, coming with her eggs and apples to market, into his den, she no sooner trod upon the frame, than the string was pulled, it turned, and we may conceive with what astonishment and terror she must have felt herself plunged into a grave with the light of day shut out above. Fortunately for her, the match which was to light the combustibles failed, and she thus escaped suffocation. Her cries, however, were so loud, that they attracted some of the passers-by, and the villain attempted to take to flight. He was, however, seized, and given into the hands of justice.

An action was lately brought by an old lady against a dealer in curiosities, for cheating her in the matter of antiques. Her taste was not limited to the oddities of the present day, and, in the dealer, she found a person perfectly inclined to gratify her with wonders. He had sold her a model of the Alexandrian library, a specimen of the original type invented by Memnon the Egyptian, and a manuscript of the first play acted by Thespis. These had not exhausted the stock of the dealer: he possessed the skin of a giraffe killed in the Roman amphitheatre; the head of King Arthur's spear; and the breech of the first cannon fired at the siege of Constantinople. The jury, however, thought that the virtuoso having ordered those curiosities, ought to pay for them, and brought in a verdict for the dealer.

The French consul has been no sooner installed, than he has begun to give the world provocatives to war. His legion of honour is a military noblesse, expressly intended to make all public distinction originate in the army; for the few men of science decorated with its star are not to be compared with the list of soldiers, and even they are chiefly connected with the department of war as medical men, practical chemists, or engineers.

His next act was to fix the military establishment of France at 360,000 men; his third act, in violation of his own treaties, and of all the feelings of Europe, was to make a rapid invasion of Switzerland, thus breaking down the independence of the country, and seizing, in fact, the central fortress of the Continent. His fourth act has been the seizure of Piedmont, and its absolute annexation to France. By a decree of the Republic, Piedmont is divided into six departments, which are to send seventeen deputies to the French legislature. Turin is declared to be a provincial city of the Republican territory; and thus the French armies will have a perpetual camp in a country which lays Italy open to the invader, and will have gained a territory nearly as large as Scotland, but fertile, populous, and in one of the finest climates of the south. Those events have excited the strongest indignation throughout Europe. We have already discovered that the peace was but a truce; that the cessation of hostilities was but a breathing-time to the enemy; that the reduction of our armies was precipitate and premature; and that, unless the fears of the French government shall render it accessible to a sense of justice, the question must finally come to the sword.