At last there came a day when I heard the gaolers clanking down the passages, the creak of doors being opened and the steps of my comrades as they shuffled and limped over the stones. When the door of my own cell was opened and the gaoler pushed me out into the light, I was in great fear for I believed the hangman had made ready.
We were summoned to the inner courtyard of the prison. There we were told that the very next morning an Auto da Fe, as they call it, would be held in the great square of Mexico, at which we were to declare our penitence and receive our sentences. We were sixty-eight English prisoners and nearly as many Spaniards, whose offence was to leave a wife in Spain and marry another in the Indies. They were sure that mercy would be shown to them, as indeed it was – although it seems to me that to leave a poor woman in Spain, neither married nor unmarried, is a worse crime than to obey Her Majesty in matters of church worship.
Then into the courtyard came the Familiars of the Holy Office with grave faces and dressed all in black. They set down a pile of pieces of yellow cloth, and made every man take one and put it on. They call these San Benitos. The cloth has a hole in the middle for the head, and the two flaps hang down over the breast and back, each having a St Andrew’s Cross of red cloth sewed on to it. In spite of our troubles we could not help grinning at each other, for we looked like the fools in a company of village players.
When we were dressed in our fool’s coats, a secretary read our confessions over to us and warned us that we must not deny them. We were taught how to answer the Inquisitors, in what order we should walk to the place of judgment, when to stand and when to kneel. And they were so busy with all this playacting that none of us got any sleep. I could not but remember Mr Hawkins, and how, when he wished to receive or say farewell to some Spanish governor, he would marshal his gentlemen and soldiers the day before the ceremony so that they should be perfect in their salutes and the handling of their weapons.
In the morning, which was February the Twenty-eighth of 1574, each of us was given for breakfast a cup of wine and a slice of bread fried in honey. Then we slowly marched in procession to the great square outside the cathedral with a rolling of drums and a solemn blowing of trumpets and flutes, all so out of tune with each other that I thought it pity they should burn poor William Lowe instead of making him their bandmaster.
Each man, holding a long, green candle in his hand and wearing his San Benito, was accompanied by two pious Spaniards. This they performed as a religious duty and also out of friendship. The two who walked on either side of me were the old soldier who had taught me to ride and the husband of Doña Elvira’s maid.
Don Gil himself was too great a man to appear by my side, but had sent me a message which the old soldier whispered with his eyes on the ground and his lips moving as if in prayer: that he was powerless to interfere with the sentence pronounced on myself and William Lowe, whatever it might be, but that when the Church had absolved us of our sins and handed us over to the justices for punishment, he would bribe the officers to make it easy for us.
There was such a mass of people in the streets that the servants of the Holy Office had to ride their horses into the crowd to make way for us. This was the first Auto da Fe which had ever been held in New Spain, and so grand a festival that two weeks before they had sent drummers round the city to declare it a public holiday. The Indians had never been so contented, I think, since their priests used to drag prisoners to that same square and up the steps of the temple to have their hearts cut out.
We, too, went up steps, and were placed on benches on a big wooden stage. Doctor Moya de Contreras and the other Inquisitors mounted their own stairway and sat down opposite to us, dressed in their black and white robes like four proud magpies. After them came the Viceroy and his Officers of State, and took their places under a rich canopy to shade them from the sun.
A train of priests and friars flowed up as well, so many that I feared the stage would break under their weight. Then sheriffs of the Holy Office commanded silence.
First the Inquisitors called upon Roger, Chief Armourer of the Jesus of Lubeck. He was by birth a Dutchman, with a surname so hard that I have forgotten it. He lived and slept in his forge and seldom mixed with the ship’s company.
His confession was read out, by which he freely admitted that he had been a Protestant. Doctor Moya de Contreras asked him, ‘Do you repent or will you continue in heresy and lose both body and soul?’
To which Roger replied that he repented and begged to be forgiven.
It seemed as if that were all, for the Chief Inquisitor smiled on him, gave him absolution and promised mercy. But what he thought merciful was a sentence of two hundred lashes and six years of rowing in King Philip’s galleys.
So it went on. William Collins got ten years in the galleys; Morgan Tillert two hundred lashes and eight years; and the rest two or three hundred lashes and from five to ten years. George Rively was sentenced to be burnt at the stake, and I choked with sorrow – for they should not see a tear on me – when I remembered how he held me above his head, saying that he would rather be drowned than burned.
Then Doctor Bonilla called out in the silence:
‘Stand up, Miles Philips!’
I stood up, holding myself decently though I was trembling all over, and was asked if I repented of my heresies; to which I replied, as who would not, that I repented very heartily.
When I had been absolved and received into the Catholic Church, I waited to hear how many strokes I should receive, telling myself that now I was a grown man I must endure pain as bravely as my comrades. But my sentence was only to serve five years in a monastery and to wear my fool’s coat all that time.
That was the judgment on all who had been so young when our fleet left Plymouth that they could never have learned the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Therefore they treated us as they would Indians or pagans, and not as men who had once been Catholics and now were Protestants, which the Inquisitors considered the worst crime imaginable.
Indeed Doctor Bonilla gave it as his opinion that we lads had not the intelligence to understand the meaning of a trial by the Holy Office. In that he was right, for to this day I see little purpose in trying a man for what he thinks rather than what he does. But I had enough intelligence to know what my questioners were at, and to put the blame on Her Majesty who was safely out of their reach in London, and please God may ever be so!
To my great joy they gave the same sentence to William Lowe who was not so young as the rest of us. He had pleaded that he had never had any Christian instruction, whether Catholic, Protestant or what you will. It may be that he belonged to the Older Religion and had learned his music from the devil. In the eyes of the Holy Office that was not such a sin as to be a heretic.
When the Inquisitors had sentenced us, we were taken back to our prison. On the way we saw the Familiars of the Holy Office piling up stakes and faggots to burn the body of poor George Rively. I say his body, because they had enough human kindness left in them to strangle him first.
After we were all back in the courtyard, the seamen who had been condemned to the galleys shed tears and cried out against their fate, for they feared they would never see England again nor their wives and children. As for the lashes, they comforted each other, swearing that it was nothing for men such as they who had learned to bear pain and hardship. Those who had received lashes on shipboard – which was common under Master Hampton of the Minion, but seldom inflicted by Master Barrett – bared their backs to show their weals and scars, and said that they had forgotten the punishment a week after it had been suffered. That was not true, but men in great terror will maintain such things.
In the morning a troop of horses was led into the courtyard. My comrades, naked to the waist, were mounted on them with their legs tied underneath. The Inquisitors had sentenced them to be beaten on horseback so that the whole city should see their punishment, which could only be by raising their poor backs above the heads of the crowd. So they rode
out of the prison, one after another in a line, each man followed by his executioner with a long whip. In front rode two criers calling out to the people to come and see how the enemies of God, the English dogs, were beaten.
As soon as they were outside the gaol, we could hear the roar of the crowd shouting to the executioners to lay on hard and draw blood, which I thought very strange in so kindly a people as those of New Spain. In England when man or woman is beaten through the streets or hanged and quartered the spectators do not yell for blood but laugh and crack jests. Choose which you will. All I know is that a crowd is a cruel thing, without pity.
They were carried back to the prison in the afternoon, where surgeons attended to their wounds. Since they had been condemned to serve in the galleys, they could not be allowed to die and cheat King Philip. We did for them what we could, sitting by our friends and begging wine and fruit for them from our former gaolers, which they readily gave. Their backs were so raw that one could see the bone. Yet Morgan Tillert told me, when he could speak, that it was no worse than being lashed at the cart’s tail in London, and that his executioner soon wearied of swinging a whip in noonday heat.
The next day those of us who had been condemned to serve in monasteries were taken away by the friars, and we never saw our comrades again. When the yearly fleet sailed from San Juan de Ulua, they were shipped to Spain to serve in the galleys. And there they must have died on the rowers’ benches, for only one was ever heard of again.
CHAPTER FIVE
William Lowe and I were sent to the monastery of the Jesuits, where we had to work without pay and wear our San Benitos continually. But since we were no longer enemies and heretics they treated us very kindly. I was well fed and had a neat, whitewashed room of my own and clean bedding, both of which were luxury to me after the filth and darkness of the prison.
These Jesuits, like all the friars I met in New Spain, were brave, Christian men. Their first duty was to care for and protect the Indians, bringing them gradually to the love of Our Saviour and desiring that religion should not be dismal for them but gay with dances and processions. Some of the friars were mestizos, sons of Spanish fathers and Indian mothers, and not only preached in Nahuatl but wrote books and plays. They also preserved what they could of the strange writing of the Indians and of their pictures and records.
At first both William Lowe and I were set to work in the kitchen, and no place could have been more welcome to us, as the good friars knew. When I had been there some months and recovered my strength, the Prior, Don Cayetano, sent for me to his room.
‘What would you like to do, Miguel?’ he asked.
They all called me Miguel – which is Michael in Spanish – since Miles was too hard for them.
‘Anything which pleases you, father,’ I answered, ‘for I am glad to serve you and only wish to show my gratitude.’
‘You are a strange lad,’ he said, smiling. ‘I think we shall make a good Catholic of you yet, for there is no hatred in you.’
To that I made no reply, for my heart was burning with hatred of the Holy Office and all its works.
‘What is done, is done,’ he said, knowing well why I was silent. ‘It is the future we must think of, Miguel. Now, I have heard you try to speak to the gardener in Nahuatl.’
I answered, kneeling before him, that I hoped it was no sin and that I still remembered the little I had learned before I was arrested.
‘No sin at all,’ he said, raising me up gently and blessing me. ‘The more languages a man can speak, the more he may do the will of God. Would you work for us with the Indians? I hear that in former days they liked you.’
I said that I doubted if I was proficient enough in the faith to be a missionary.
‘A fine missionary you would make!’ he laughed. ‘No, what I have in mind for you is to take charge of the workmen who are building our new church.’
Now, it may seem absurd that I who had no knowledge of masonry and could not even mix mortar should be put in charge of Indian builders, but Father Cayetano explained to me, just as Don Gil had, that they knew what was wanted and could work from a plan with very little help.
Then he led me to the window of his room, from which could be seen a part of the great square of Mexico.
‘There stood a high hill of stone,’ he said, ‘and on top of it the temple of the War God and all round it courtyards and palaces. Four years after Cortés took the city, all was level with the ground, and the Cathedral and the Viceroy’s Palace were nearly finished. This whole vast work was done willingly by the Indians, thousands upon thousands of them, building for us Spaniards as they were accustomed to build for their kings.’
‘So all I have to do is to see that wood and lime and stone are there when needed?’ I asked.
‘More than that, Miguel. I should prefer that the overseer be one of us, but as soon as a brother can speak Nahuatl he is sent out alone to preach the gospel. So I choose you. And if you wish to please me, be as gentle with your men as one of us would be.’
He reminded me of the laws. The Indians are not allowed to drink wine or pulque, for they are very fond of it and much given to beastliness when they have too much; it is a strong beer made from the juice of the maguey plant. They may not ride horses or mules, nor have arms on their persons or in their houses, not even a knife with a point. All these laws and many others I was to see that they obeyed, he said, not as a spy upon them but as a father takes care that his children do not run into trouble.
‘May I have William Lowe with me?’ I asked.
‘No, Miguel. You can make your way in life. He, being afflicted, cannot. So we shall keep him in the kitchen and train him in the fine art of cooking. Then he will have an honest craft and be sure of a living, for though we greatly honour musicians in New Spain, we do not much care if they starve.’
He took me down to a little square alongside the great canal, where the Jesuits were building their new church. It had been the site of a temple of the Fire God, Huehueteotl, where the Indians used to burn their captives alive after throwing a powder in their faces to dull the pain. The Holy Office was somewhat more merciful in first strangling them.
When we arrived, the workmen all knelt before Don Cayetano, who made a gesture with his hands that they were to rise at once. The Indians do not make proper distinction between saints and priests, like Thomas Hull. They were dressed in their graceful mantles, some of which are handsomely dyed or embroidered along the edges, and in cotton trousers, for the friars will not permit them to wear the maxtli or loin-cloth. They came from Tlatelolco in the north of the city, where their grandfathers had fought to the last against the Conquerors.
The Prior told them that I was to be their overseer and that they should come to me with their needs and troubles. I could read nothing in their faces and I thought at first that they much disliked to be commanded by a man in a fool’s coat.
The foundations of the church were laid out straight and true. The Indians were starting to raise the walls with fine blocks of stone. When the Prior had left us, I walked round the work, talking to the masons and the stone carvers, and found that all obeyed a chief named Jose. His mantle was caught up over the left shoulder, and the band of figures in blue and red was broader than that of the rest.
One of the men, who had recently come from Texcoco on the other side of the lake, asked Jose in Nahuatl why I wore a yellow cape.
‘So that they may see him from far off,’ Jose answered. ‘He is an enemy of the Spaniards as we are.’
I had no wish to be known as an enemy of Spaniards and ordered back to prison by the Holy Office. The only chance I had of ever returning home was to wait until common folk ceased to remember that I was an Englishman. So I said to the chief in my stuttering Nahuatl, ‘I am the friend of all who are friends with me. Let neither of us ever say that the other is an enemy of the Spaniards.’
He understood me, but only answered that if I wished to learn his language he would teach me himself and soon hav
e me speaking it as well as I did Spanish. And as he promised, so he performed.
My first and second years passed as pleasantly as could be, considering that I was not a free man. I was permitted to go out of the monastery at certain hours, and Don Cayetano sometimes gave me leave to see my comrades. Richard Williams was serving his sentence with the Grey Friars, and Thomas Hull with a College of Priests, where he died of his former hardships. As for poor Paul Horsewell, his spirit was broken. There had been some argument amongst the lawyers over his sentence so he had not been released from prison with the rest of us. When some Spanish criminals dug their way through the wall with nothing but an old horseshoe, he escaped with them. For that he was punished with a hundred lashes, the Holy Office not caring whether he was the nephew of Haquines or the devil. Another of us, John Perrin, was as rude and ungovernable in his monastery as if he had been in a den of Gravesend thieves. The Inquisitors tried him all over again and sentenced him to four years in the galleys.
Besides these, whom I saw seldom, I had good friends among the Spaniards and mestizos of the city. They laughed at my fool’s coat (when there were no spies or Familiars near) and would say most courteously that it became me. To make jest of my disgrace, they once put a spear in my hand and a helmet on my head, and swore that I looked like a knight errant from the story books with my device of St Andrew’s Cross fore and aft.
The friars, too, had some liking for me, and I for them. They did not hide from me what they thought of the coming of the Holy Office into New Spain and of their needless cruelty, though piously swearing their obedience to the Pope who must know best. They would have me always remember that the Inquisitors were merciful to Spaniards who were suspected of being Jews or heretics, and with the Indians most patient, considering them children who should be brought to the knowledge of God by kindness.
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