Westward Ho! Or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the County of Devon, in the Reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty Queen Elizabeth, - [e books for reading .TXT] 📗

sitting idle at home. For his whole soul was filling fast with sullen malice against Don Guzman. He was losing the “single eye,” and his whole body was no longer full of light. He had entered into the darkness in which every man walks who hates his brother; and it lay upon him like a black shadow day and night. No company, too, could be more fit to darken that shadow than Salvation Yeo's. The old man grew more stern in his fanaticism day by day, and found a too willing listener in his master; and Mrs. Leigh was (perhaps for the first and last time in her life) seriously angry, when she heard the two coolly debating whether they had not committed a grievous sin in not killing the Spanish prisoners on board the galleon.

It must be said, however (as the plain facts set down in this book testify), that if such was the temper of Englishmen at that day, the Spaniards had done a good deal to provoke it; and were just then attempting to do still more.

For now we are approaching the year 1588, “which an astronomer of Konigsberg, above a hundred years before, foretold would be an admirable year, and the German chronologers presaged would be the climacterical year of the world.”

The prophecies may stand for what they are worth; but they were at least fulfilled. That year was, indeed, the climacterical year of the world; and decided once and for all the fortunes of the European nations, and of the whole continent of America.

No wonder, then, if (as has happened in each great crisis of the human race) some awful instinct that The Day of the Lord was at hand, some dim feeling that there was war in heaven, and that the fiends of darkness and the angels of light were arrayed against each other in some mighty struggle for the possession of the souls of men, should have tried to express itself in astrologic dreams, and, as was the fashion then, attributed to the “rulers of the planetary houses” some sympathy with the coming world-tragedy.

But, for the wise, there needed no conjunction of planets to tell them that the day was near at hand, when the long desultory duel between Spain and England would end, once and for all, in some great death-grapple. The war, as yet, had been confined to the Netherlands, to the West Indies, and the coasts and isles of Africa; to the quarters, in fact, where Spain was held either to have no rights, or to have forfeited them by tyranny. But Spain itself had been respected by England, as England had by Spain; and trade to Spanish ports went on as usual, till, in the year 1585, the Spaniard, without warning, laid an embargo on all English ships coming to his European shores. They were to be seized, it seemed, to form part of an enormous armament, which was to attack and crush, once and for all—whom? The rebellious Netherlanders, said the Spaniards: but the queen, the ministry, and, when it was just not too late, the people of England, thought otherwise. England was the destined victim; so, instead of negotiating, in order to avoid fighting, they fought in order to produce negotiation. Drake, Frobisher, and Carlisle, as we have seen, swept the Spanish Main with fire and sword, stopping the Indian supplies; while Walsingham (craftiest, and yet most honest of mortals) prevented, by some mysterious financial operation, the Venetian merchants from repairing the Spaniards' loss by a loan; and no Armada came that year.

In the meanwhile, the Jesuits, here and abroad, made no secret, among their own dupes, of the real objects of the Spanish armament. The impious heretics,—the Drakes and Raleighs, Grenvilles and Cavendishes, Hawkinses and Frobishers, who had dared to violate that hidden sanctuary of just half the globe, which the pope had bestowed on the defender of the true faith,—a shameful ruin, a terrible death awaited them, when their sacrilegious barks should sink beneath the thunder of Spanish cannon, blessed by the pope, and sanctified with holy water and prayer to the service of “God and his Mother.” Yes, they would fall, and England with them. The proud islanders, who had dared to rebel against St. Peter, and to cast off the worship of “Mary,” should bow their necks once more under the yoke of the Gospel. Their so-called queen, illegitimate, excommunicate, contumacious, the abettor of free-trade, the defender of the Netherlands, the pillar of false doctrine throughout Europe, should be sent in chains across the Alps, to sue for her life at the feet of the injured and long-suffering father of mankind, while his nominee took her place upon the throne which she had long since forfeited by her heresy.

“What nobler work? How could the Church of God be more gloriously propagated? How could higher merit be obtained by faithful Catholics? It must succeed. Spain was invincible in valor, inexhaustible in wealth. Heaven itself offered them an opportunity. They had nothing now to fear from the Turk, for they had concluded a truce with him; nothing from the French, for they were embroiled in civil war. The heavens themselves had called upon Spain to fulfil her heavenly mission, and restore to the Church's crown this brightest and richest of her lost jewels. The heavens themselves called to a new crusade. The saints, whose altars the English had rifled and profaned, called them to a new crusade. The Virgin Queen of Heaven, whose boundless stores of grace the English spurned, called them to a new crusade. Justly incensed at her own wrongs and indignities, that 'ever-gracious Virgin, refuge of sinners, and mother of fair love, and holy hope,' adjured by their knightly honor all valiant cavaliers to do battle in her cause against the impious harlot who assumed her titles, received from her idolatrous flatterers the homage due to Mary alone, and even (for Father Parsons had asserted it, therefore it must be true) had caused her name to be substituted for that of Mary in the Litanies of the Church. Let all who wore within a manly heart, without a manly sword, look on the woes of 'Mary,'—her shame, her tears, her blushes, her heart pierced through with daily wounds, from heretic tongues, and choose between her and Elizabeth!”

So said Parsons, Allen, and dozens more; and said more than this, too, and much which one had rather not repeat; and were somewhat surprised and mortified to find that their hearers, though they granted the premises, were too dull or carnal to arrive at the same conclusion. The English lay Romanists, almost to a man, had hearts sounder than their heads, and, howsoever illogically, could not help holding to the strange superstition that, being Englishmen, they were bound to fight for England. So the hapless Jesuits, who had been boasting for years past that the persecuted faithful throughout the island would rise as one man to fight under the blessed banner of the pope and Spain, found that the faithful, like Demas of old, forsook them and “went after this present world;” having no objection, of course, to the restoration of Popery: but preferring some more comfortable method than an invasion which would inevitably rob them of their ancestral lands and would seat needy and greedy Castilians in their old country houses, to treat their tenants as they had treated the Indians of Hispaniola, and them as they had treated the caciques.

But though the hearts of men in that ungodly age were too hard to melt at the supposed woes of the Mary who reigned above, and too dull to turn rebels and traitors for the sake of those thrones and principalities in supra-lunar spheres which might be in her gift: yet there was a Mary who reigned (or ought to reign) below, whose woes (like her gifts) were somewhat more palpable to the carnal sense. A Mary who, having every comfort and luxury (including hounds and horses) found for her by the English Government, at an expense which would be now equal to some twenty