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      JULIAN ROMERO—SWASHBUCKLER.

JULIAN ROMERO—SWASHBUCKLER.

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      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 the earth, for here lie the bones of the "maimed one of Lepanto," the author of "Don Quixote." He died only a few yards away, in his house in the Calle de Leon, and was quietly laid to rest in the convent, where one of his own daughters was a nun. The very fact of his burial there was almost forgotten—was indeed for many years disputed, until proved beyond possibility of doubt not long since—and when the fury for destroying religious foundations seized the rulers of Madrid after the revolution of 1868, the convent was marked down for destruction like so many others of its kind. And destroyed it would have been but for the pious zeal of the good "setenton," Mesonero Romanos, most beloved of Madrid antiquarians, who woke up the Academy of History, and brought such pressure to bear upon the Government as to save the sepulchre of Cervantes from profanation for all future time, and thus enabled the great author, after he had lain in his grave for two and a half centuries, to repay his debt to the Trinitarian fathers who rescued him from his galling slavery in the hands of the infidel. A stone tablet is now fixed in the wall of the convent setting forth the fact of his sepulture there in 1616, and the foundation of the community a few years previously by Doña Juana Gaitan, daughter of General Julian Romero. The name of the latter awakens no responsive echoes in Spanish minds. I have before me, indeed, a recently published Spanish historical work which ascribes his very existence to a wrong period. With the exception of a few particulars of his later life given in a local history of Cuenca by Father Muñoz, no Spanish writer has ever been at the trouble of tracing what little may be known of his stirring career. And yet the man in his day was the very prototype of those indomitable adventurers, lusting for blood and gold, who, the sword in one hand and the cross in the other, hunted down to death the Indians of one hemisphere and the "heretics" of the other. Keen, cruel, Alba had no more ruthless instrument for his fell work than "Captain Julian," upon whom and Sancho de Avila the hatred of the persecuted Flemings was mainly concentrated. In the course of my somewhat out-of-the-track studies I have found the name of Julian Romero constantly cropping up, and so many personal traits of him have appeared, that by carefully piecing them together a more complete account may be formed of the life and character of this typical swashbuckler than of, perhaps, any of his fellows. His life, too, offers some interest to Englishmen, for he swaggered and ruffled in London many a time and oft, and was one of those Spanish mercenaries who, in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., fought so bravely against the French and Scots and quelled by their ferocity the risings of Kett in Norfolk and Arundell in the West Country. Practically nothing whatever was known of the lives—hardly indeed the existence—of the Spanish mercenaries in England until the recent publication of the anonymous "Spanish Chronicle of Henry VIII.,"[1] which I now attribute to Antonio de Guaras, a leading Spanish merchant in London, whom I know to have been on close terms of intimacy with the Spanish soldiers, and particularly with Julian Romero, whose early adventures in England are evidently related at first hand in the Chronicle.

      Of all the turbulent soldiers of fortune who quarrelled, intrigued, and triumphed in England, and whose adventures are so minutely told in the Chronicle, only one was heard of in after life. The general, Sir Peter Gamboa, was murdered with Captain Sir Alonso de Villa Sirga in St. Sepulchre's churchyard, hard by Newgate, one wet winter's night in 1551, by Captain Guevara, who was incontinently hanged in

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