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Updated: June 29, 2025
Certainly if a monarch intended to conquer such countries as France, England, and Holland, without stirring from his easy chair in the Escorial, it would have been at least as well so Alexander thought to invest a little more capital in the speculation.
Yet there was no arrangement whatever to enable him to come forth not the slightest provision to effect that junction. It would almost seem that the letter-writer of the Escorial had been quite ignorant of the existence of the Dutch fleets off Dunkerk, Newport, and Flushing, although he had certainly received information enough of this formidable obstacle to his plan.
In the calm cabinet of the Escorial, Philip and his comendador mayor are laying their heads together, preparing the invasion of England; making arrangements for King Alexander's coronation in that island, and like sensible, farsighted persons as they are even settling the succession to the throne after Alexander's death, instead of carelessly leaving such distant details to chance, or subsequent consideration.
A courier, despatched post haste to Spain, bore the glorious news, together with the sacred, standard of the Prophet, the holy of holies, inscribed with the name of Allah twenty-eight thousand nine hundred times, always kept in Mecca during peace, and never since the conquest of Constantinople lost in battle before. The King was at vespers in the Escorial.
Envoy Edmonds was now equally and completely in the dark as to the mission of Varenne, and informed his Government that the only result of it was that the secret agent to Spain was favoured, through the kindness of Mendoza, with a distant view of Philip II. with his son and daughter at their devotions in the chapel of the Escorial.
England was to be conquered in order that the rebellious Netherlands might be reduced; and 'Mucio' was to be let slip upon the unhappy Henry III. so soon as it was thought probable that the Bearnese and the Valois had sufficiently exhausted each other. Philip was to reign in Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Edinburgh, without stirring from the Escorial.
Catching sight of Manuel and the other two, the fellow of the three cards approached and said: "Shall we have some wine?" "Sure." They entered one of the taverns of the Ronda. Pastiri was alone that day, as his companion had gone off to the Escorial; since he had no one to act as his confederate in the game he hadn't made a centimo.
Very noiselessly had the patient manager who sat in the Escorial been making preparations for that European tragedy in which most of the actors had such fatal parts assigned them, and of which few of the spectators of its opening scenes were doomed to witness the conclusion.
Did not the penniless adventurer, whose keen eyesight and wise recklessness were passing for hallucination and foolhardiness in the eyes of his contemporaries, understand the game he was playing better than did that profound thinker, that mysterious but infallible politician, who sat in the Escorial and made the world tremble at every hint of his lips, every stroke of his pen?
Mary of Austria, the widow of King Louis, presented two of the Corvinian books to the Librairie de Bourgogne at Brussels; one was the Missal, full of Attavante's work, on which the Sovereigns of Brabant were sworn; the other was the 'Golden Gospels, long the pride of the Escorial, but now restored to Belgium.
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