LETTER 1596. second these came up the Earl and the Swiftsure; and these were all that did ought against six goodly gallions, two argosies, three frigots, seventeen galleys, and the Fort of Puntall, backed by the Admiral of Nueva Espana, and others; in all, fifty-five or fifty-seven. This being happily finished, we prepared to land the army, and to attempt the town; in which there were, of all sorts, some five thousand foot burgers, one hundred and fifty souldiers in pay, and some eight hundred horse of the gentry and cavalleros of Xerez, gathered together upon the discovery of our fleet two days before, while we were becalmed off Cape St. Mary. The horsemen sallied out to resist the landing; but were so well withstood that they most took their way toward the bridge which leadeth into the Main, called Puento Souse; the rest retired to the town, and so hardly followed, as they were driven to leave their horses at the port (which the inhabitants durst not open, to let them in), and so they leapt down an old wall into the suburbs; and being so closely followed by the vanguard of our footmen, as, when the General perceived an entrance there, he thought it was possible for ours to do the like; upon which occasion the town was carried with a sudden fury, and with little loss; only Sir JOHN WINGFEILD was slain; Sir EDWARD WINGFEILD, Captain BAGNOLL, and Captain MEDICK hurt; other men of quality, few or none. For the particular behaviours of any that entered, I cannot otherwise deliver than by report; for I received a grievous blow in my leg, interlaced and deformed with splinters, in the fight. Yet, being desirous to see every man's disposition, I was carried ashoar on men's shoulders; and as soon as my horse was recovered, my Lord Admiral sent one unto me, but I was not able to abide above an hour in the town, for the torment I suffered, and for the fear I had to be shouldred in the press, and among the tumultuous disordered soldiers, that, being then given to spoyl and rapine, had no respect. The same night I returned; chiefly for that there was no Admiral left to order the Fleet, and indeed few or no people in the Navy; all running headlong to the sack; and, secondly, because I was unfit for ought but ease at that time. At the break of day following, sent to the General to have order to follow the fleet of ships bound for the Indies; which were said to be worth twelve millions, and lay in Puerto Reall road, where they could not escape. But, the town new taken, and the confusion great, it was almost impossible for them to order many things at once; so as I could not receive any answer to my desire. The afternoon of the same day, those which were merchants of Cales and Sevil offered the Generals two millions to spare the fleet; whereupon there was nothing done for the present. But the morning following, being the twenty-third of June, the Duke of MEDINA caused all that fleet of merchants to be set on fire; because he was resolved that they must needs have fallen into our hands; so as now both gallions, frigots, argosies, and all other ships of war, together with the fleet of Nueva Espagna, were all committed into ashes; only the St. Matthew and the St. Andrew were in our possession. Much of the ordnance of the St. Philip hath been saved by the Flemmings, who have had great spoil. There is imbarked good store of ordnance out of the town; and the two Apostles aforesaid are well furnished, which (God willing) we purpose to bring into England. The town of Cales was very rich in merchandize, in plate, and money; many rich prisoners given to the land commanders; so as that sort are very rich. Some had LETTER LXIX. 1596. LETTER 1596. prisoners for sixteen thousand duccats; some for twenty thousand; some for ten thousand;1 and, besides, great houses of merchandize. What the Generals have gotten, I know least; they protest it is little. For my own part, I have gotten a lame leg, and a deformed. For the rest, either I spake too late, or it was otherwise resolved. I have not wanted good words, and exceeding kind and regardful usance. But I have possession of naught but poverty and pain. If God had spared me that blow, I had possesst myself of some House. 1 The President of the Contratacion,' or Chamber of Commerce, of Cadiz, gave what (to the reader) is a most amusing account of one part of the preliminary 'haggling of the market,' to these and the like bargains for ransom, in a letter to his fellow-officials of the Contratacion, dated 5th July (25th June, O.S.), which narrates his personal adventures when taken prisoner by the English. After much prefatory talk about his poverty, he made an offer, he says, of 300 ducats,--after he had been asked 20,000, a little while before. Of this offer, the Englishmen made great derision (han hecho muchar burla de mi). Presently, he offered 1,000 ducats, and there the matter rested for the night. In the morning, he thought it expedient to double the offer. But his captors replied that they would not be content with a real less than 10,000 ducats; knowing that the President was "the principal man in Andalusia, and had under his charge all the gold and silver that came from the Indies." When his letter was written, he was still in captivity. The news of the burning of the fleet had just then arrived.-Carta del Dr. Pedro Gutierrez Flores . . .. á los Oficiales de la Contratacion. De Cádiz en 5 de Julio, 1596. (Coleccion, &c. ut sup. vol. xxxvi. pp. 271-273.) PREFATORY NOTE TO LETTER LXX. - DEATH OF LADY CECIL-CECIL AND THE BROOKES. THE circumstance that the wife of Robert Cecil was the PREFA TORY LXX. 1596-1597. sister of two of the unhappy Conspirators of 1603 adds something to the interest of the letter at which we now arrive. LETTER That interest is great, intrinsically, for almost every line of the letter is characteristic. The writer, indeed, attained at length to a riper wisdom than that of which we have here the sententious and somewhat laboured expression. His mind grew, eventually, up to the knowledge that sorrows are capable of rendering "other service than to multiply harms;" and that they are not, always, "dangerous companions, converting bad into evil, and evil into worse." He learnt (in course of time) that grief may become, in a certain and pregnant sense, "the treasure" of quite other men than fools,-of men 'who going through the vale of misery use it for a well; and the pools are filled with water. But he attained to this knowledge only with extreme slowness,-at a late period of life, and after using desperate exertions in the hewing out of very leaky cisterns of comfort. Perhaps few men of like mental calibre have taken so long a time to learn the lessons of bereavement, or the uses of adversity. The task, however, was got by heart. at last. In the letter before us we have Ralegh's crude notions about the theme, before he had really learnt a line of it. This letter on Lady Cecil's death is also interesting as bearing strong through indirect testimony to the existence of some fine qualities in her husband. No one who knew Robert Cecil so intimately as Ralegh did, would have written thus, save under a conviction that the man to whom he was giving such consolation as he then had to give had loved truly and PREFA- NOTE TO LETTER 1596-1597. would grieve deeply. One feels in reading the letter that it is written to a real mourner and upon a real loss. Other friends and correspondents of Cecil, who had enjoyed like closeness of access, bear like evidence,—both to the worth of the dead and to the unselfishness of the grief. The Lord Admiral (Howard of Effingham) writes thus to Cecil on this occasion: "She was to vertuos and good to live in so wretched a world. And you that hath an extraordinary jugment, by his gevte that dowth all, much nede that wysdome. Seke now to master your good and kynd nature and to thynk that sorro, nor any thyng els, can now redeme it. And as she is now, most asured, hapyer than all we that live in this pudeled and trubled world, so dow I asure yow, as long as God shall spare me lyfe in it ther shall not any tred on the erthe that shal love you beter then my poure self." 1 We may take Lord Howard's testimony on the point in hand, without attaching overmuch meaning to his pious moralizings. For himself, and for his family, he was just as proud, as ambitious, and as covetous, as ever. His relish for the pomps and vanities of "this puddled and troubled world" was still as keen as it had always been. Some eight months earlier he had written to Sir Robert Cecil one of the most curiously impulsive, egotistical, and angry letters that even our Elizabethan repertories-much abounding in that sort of literature-can show. Under the excitement created by a passing royal rebuke, he made pretence to the Secretary that he was ready to pitch the High Admiralship of England to the feet of the first comer, merely because some official right "ever before enjoyed," as he said, "by admyralls of my name," had been infringed, or was thought to have been infringed, upon. His indignation at the straitening of his prerogatives rose so high as to make him utter the wish, "I had drowned by the way, before I aryved at this place."2 A 1 Lord Howard of Effingham to Sir R. Cecil, Jan. 1596-1597; Cecil Papers, vol. xxxviii. (Hatfield). 2 Ibid. vol. xl. § 6. |