After lying twelve days in the road, the ship weighed anchor, and in about two months arrived safe at Deptford. The next morning, Mr. Lithgow was carried on a feather bed to Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, where at that time was the king and royal family. His majesty happened to be that day engaged in hunting, but on his return in the evening, Mr. Lithgow was presented to him, and related the particulars of his sufferings, and his happy delivery. The king was so affected at the narrative, that he expressed the deepest concern, and gave orders that he should be sent to Bath, and his wants properly supplied from his royal munificence. By these means, under God, after some time, Mr. Lithgow was restored, from the most wretched spectacle, to a great share of health and strength; but he lost the use of his left arm, and several of the smaller bones were so crushed and broken, as to be ever after rendered useless.
Notwithstanding every effort was used, Mr. Lithgow could never obtain any part of his money or effects, though his majesty and the ministers of state, interested themselves in his behalf. Gondamore, the Spanish ambassador, indeed, promised that all his effects should be restored, with the addition of L1000 English money, as some atonement for the tortures he had undergone, which last was to be paid him by the governor of Malaga. These engagements, however, were but mere promises; and though the king was a kind of guarantee for the well performance of them, the cunning Spaniard found means to elude the same. He had, indeed, too great a share of influence in the English council during the time of that pacific reign, when England suffered herself to be bullied into slavish compliance by most of the states and kings in Europe.
_Croly on the Inquisition._
We shall conclude this chapter with the subjoined extract from the New Interpretation of the Apocalypse by the Rev. George Croly.
In our fortunate country, the power of the Romish church has so long perished, that we find some difficulty in conceiving the nature, and still more in believing the tyranny of its dominion. The influence of the monks and the murders of the inquisition have passed into a nursery tale; and we turn with a generous, yet rash and most unjustifiable scepticism from the history of Romish authority.
Through almost the entire of Italy, through the Flemish dominions of Germany, through a large portion of France, and through the entire of Spain, a great monastic body was established, which, professing a secondary and trivial obedience to the sovereign, gave its first and real obedience to the pope. The name of spiritual homage cloaked the high treason of an oath of allegiance to a foreign monarch; and whoever might be king of France, or Spain, the pope was king of the Dominicans. All the other monastic orders were so many papal outposts. But the great Dominican order, immensely opulent in its pretended poverty; formidably powerful in its hypocritical disdain of earthly influence; and remorselessly ambitious, turbulent, and cruel in its primitive zeal; was an actual lodgment and province of the papacy, an inferior Rome, in the chief European kingdoms.
In the closest imitation of Rome, this spiritual power had fiercely assumed the temporal sword; the inquisition was army, revenues, and throne in one. With the racks and fires of a tribunal worthy of the gulf of darkness and guilt from which it rose, the Dominicans bore popery in triumph through christendom, crushing every vestige of religion under the wheels of its colossal idol. The subjugation of the Albigenses in 1229 had scattered the church; the shock of the great military masses was past; a subtler and more active force was required to destroy the wandering people of God; and the inquisition multiplied itself for the work of death. This terrible tribunal set every principle, and even every form of justice at defiance. Secrecy, that confounds innocence with guilt, was the spirit of its whole proceeding. All its steps were in darkness. The suspected revolter from popery was seized in secret, tried in secret, never suffered to see the face of accuser, witness, advocate, or friend, was kept unacquainted with the charge, was urged to criminate himself; if tardy, was compelled to this self-murder by the rack; if terrified, was only the more speedily murdered for the sport of the multitude. From the hour of his seizure he never saw the face of day, until he was brought out as a public show, a loyal and festal sacrifice, to do honor to the entrance of some travelling viceroy, some new married princess, or, on more fortunate occasions, to the presence of the sovereign. The dungeons were then drained, the human wreck of the torture and scourge were gathered out of darkness, groups of misery and exhaustion with wasted forms and broken limbs, and countenances subdued by pain and famine into idiotism, and despair, and madness; to feed the fires round which the Dominicans were chanting the glories of popery, and exulting in the destruction of the body for the good of the soul!