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Prisoners were therefore often captured by one side or the other, and the gibbets on the walls and in the camp were constantly occupied. Ned as a volunteer was not attached to any special body of troops, Ripperda telling him to act for himself and join in whatever was going on as he chose.
The other two were arrested on their return, and condemned, after an impartial trial, to death. For, while these emissaries of a cowardly magistracy were absent, the stout commandant of the little garrison, Ripperda, had assembled the citizens and soldiers in the market-place. He warned them of the absolute necessity to make a last effort for freedom.
Whereupon Elizabeth grew more and more termagant; listened to wild counsels; took up an Alberoni, a Ripperda, any wandering diplomatic bull-dog that offered; and let them loose upon the Kaiser and her other gainsayers. To the terror of mankind, lest universal war should supervene.
There was no composition possible, he urged, with foes who were as false as they were sanguinary, and whose foul passions were stimulated, not slaked, by the horrors with which they had already feasted themselves. Ripperda addressed men who could sympathize with his bold and lofty sentiments.
In the spring of 1727, War, as anticipated, breaks out; Spaniards actually begin battering at Gibraltar; Kaiser's Ambassador at London is angrily ordered to begone. Causes of war were many: 1. Duke de Ripperda tumbled out now, that illustrious diplomatic bulldog, at Madrid sought asylum in the English Ambassador's house; and no respect was had to such asylum: that is one cause.
Captain Ripperda, who had so heroically rebuked the craven conduct of the magistracy, whose eloquence had inflamed the soldiers and citizens to resistance, and whose skill and courage had sustained the siege so long, was among the first to suffer.
What embassyings, bargainings, bargain-breakings; what galloping of estafettes; acres of diplomatic paper, now fallen to the spiders, who always privately were the real owners! Not in the Treaty of Utrecht, not in the Congresses of Cambray, of Soissons, Convention of Pardo, by Ripperda, Horace Walpole, or the wagging of wigs, could this matter be settled at all.
There was no composition possible, he urged, with foes who were as false as they were sanguinary, and whose foul passions were stimulated, not slaked, by the horrors with which they had already feasted themselves. Ripperda addressed men who could sympathize with his bold and lofty sentiments.
But the Spanish queen had not given up her designs, and she found another instrument for carrying them out in Ripperda, a Groningen nobleman, who had originally gone to Spain as ambassador of the States. This able and scheming statesman persuaded Elizabeth that she might best attain her ends by an alliance with Austria, which was actually concluded at Vienna on April 1, 1725.
Not for himself, for after the first pang he would have whistled off his high hopes with the spirit of a Ripperda; not even for Cleveland, for at this moment, it must be confessed, his thoughts were not for his friend, did Vivian Grey's soul struggle as if it were about to leave its fleshy chamber.
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