"'The crime committed by a wife who aids her husband to escape from prison, martyred as he had been for so many years, and reduced to such a miserable condition, is justified by all law--natural, divine and human--and by the laws of Spain in particular. Saul, pursuing David, respected Michal, though she was his daughter, and had even saved her husband from the effects of his wrath. Law--common, civil, and canonical--absolves woman from whatever she does to defend her husband. The special law of Count Fernan Gonzales leaves her free; the voice and the unanimous decree of all nations exalt and glorify her. If, when her children are in her house, in their chamber, or their cradle, it be proved that they are strangers to every thing, by that alone, and by their age, which excludes them from such confidences, how much more must that child be a stranger to all, which the mother bore in her bosom, and which they thus made a prisoner before its birth? Even before it could be guilty, it was already punished; and its life and soul were endangered, like one of its brothers who lost both when they seized his mother a second time, near the port of Lisbon.' He finishes with these noble and avenging threats:--'But let them not be deceived; wherever they put them, such captives have, on their side, the two most powerful advocates in the whole world--their innocence and their misfortune. No Cicero, no Demosthenes can so charm the ear, or so powerfully rouse the mind, as these two defenders; because, among other privileges, God has given them that of being always present, to cry out for justice, to serve both as witnesses and advocates, and to terminate one of those processes which God alone judges in this world: this is what will happen in the present case, if the justice of men be too long in default. And let not the debtors of God be too confident about the delay of His judgment; though the fatal term be apparently postponed, it is gradually approaching; and the debt to be paid is augmented by the interest which is added to it down to the last day of Heaven's great reckoning."' It was not till eight years later, in 1599, when Philip III. sat on the throne of Spain, that the wife and children of Perez regained their liberty, and not till nearly twenty-five later, in 1615, that his children, who had passed their youth in prison, and been legally attainted with their father's degradation without having participated in his offences, were restored to their rank and rights as Spanish nobles.