AND OTHER HISTORICAL STUDIES BY MARTIN A. S. HUME, F.R.HIST.S. EDITOR OF THE CALENDAR OF SPANISH STATE PAPERS OF ELIZABETH (PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE) AUTHOR OF "THE COURTSHIPS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH," ETC. Dieu et mon droit Dieu et mon droit SECOND EDITION "'There is no book so bad,' said the bachelor, 'but that something good may be found in it.' 'There is no doubt of that,' replied Don Quixote."— Don Quixote , pt. ii. LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1896 All rights reserved. To MY MOTHER. H

Circumstances have led me to follow the course of modern history into somewhat unfrequented channels, and in the pursuit of my main object it is occasionally my good fortune to come across a piece of unused or unfamiliar contemporary information—some faded manuscript or forgotten newsletter—which seems to throw fresh light upon an important period or an interesting personality of the past. It is true that in some cases the matters recounted are not of any great historical significance, but even

THE COUNTER-ARMADA OF 1589 .[ 1 ] On the night of Sunday, the 28th of July, 1588, the great Armada was huddled, all demoralised and perplexed, in Calais roads. Only a week before the proudest fleet that ever rode the seas laughed in derision at the puny vessels that alone stood between it and victory over the heretic Queen and her pirate countrymen, who for years had plundered and insulted with impunity the most powerful sovereign in Europe. Gilded prows and fluttering pennons, great towering hu

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

It is somewhat curious that English historians, in describing an event fraught with such tremendous possibilities to Christianity as the coming of the Spanish prince to wed Mary of England, should have entirely overlooked a source of information which was more likely than any other to abound in interesting and trustworthy details of the voyage—I mean the contemporary narratives of Spaniards who accompanied Philip hither. So far as regards the splendid pageantry that marked the new consort's entr

Perhaps no character in history has been more misjudged and misrepresented than Philip II. For three centuries it has pleased English writers particularly, to portray him as a murderous ogre, grimly and silently plotting the enslavement of England for thirty years before the great catastrophe which reduced his vast empire to the rank of a harmless second-rate power. As a matter of fact he was a laborious, narrow-minded, morbidly conscientious man, patient, distrustful, and timid; a sincere lover

(A HISTORY OF THE SUMPTUARY LAWS IN SPAIN.) It is a curious reflection that whilst all the serious acts and surroundings of civilised life have been rendered amenable to the law, whilst the very instincts inherent in the nature of mankind have been dominated and regulated by authority, utter failure has attended the persistent efforts of rulers to cope with the trivial follies of fashion, or to limit the vanity and extravagance of personal adornment. For long ages men, and particularly women, ha

Probably not one person out of a thousand of those who hurry along the busiest part of the Strand notices even the existence of a closed iron gate by the side of a public-house opposite the Vaudeville Theatre. If you peer through the grating you will only see a dark, narrow court, now blocked up by the building operations connected with the Hotel Cecil, and you will have no difficulty in coming to the conclusion that this avenue, which has been gradually going down in the world for the last two

The pallid little milksop in black velvet, with his lank, tow-coloured hair and his great underhung chin, who will simper for ever on the canvas of Carreño, had grown to be a man—a poor feeble anæmic old man of thirty-seven,[ 2 ] the last of his race, to whom fastings and feastings, the ceremonies of the Church, and the nostrums of the empirics had been equally powerless in providing a successor for the crumbling empire of his fathers. The strong spirits upon whom he had leant in his youth and e

No dead and gone human visage looms so clearly through the mist of ages as that strange lymphatic face of Philip IV., which the genius of Velazquez delighted to portray from youth to age. The smooth-faced stripling in hunting dress, with his fair pink and white complexion, his lank yellow hair, and his great mumbling Austrian mouth, shows more plainly on canvas than he could have done whilst alive how weak of will and how potent of passion he was, how easily he would be led by the overbearing Co

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 m