But it was not to be, and the forgotten babe of the sovereign house was put with so many other princely corpses in that horrible "rotting place of princes," off the black marble stair of the regal pantheon of the Escurial, where, not so very many years ago, I saw a ghastly heap of princely and semi-princely skulls and leg-bones gathered up as they had fallen from the rotting coffins to the floor. There, all undistinguished from the others, probably enough rests still, his very name never published, and his short existence hardly known till now, Don Francis Ferdinand of Austria, one of the last male members of the Spanish branch of the sovereign house, which in four generations descended from the highest pinnacle of human greatness to contempt, disgrace, decrepitude and decay. [1] _The Gentleman's Magazine_, September, 1892. [2] He was with difficulty rescued from the direst vengeance of the Inquisition a few years afterwards in consequence of his too ready co-operation in the King's amorous tendencies. Don Geronimo was patron of the convent of San Placido, next door to his own house in the Calle de la Madera in Madrid, and had inflamed the King's mind with stories of a very beautiful nun who was an inmate of the convent. Philip and his favourite, the Count-Duke, insisted upon seeing this paragon of loveliness, and Don Geronimo, exerting his authority as patron, procured them entrance in disguise to the parlour, where, as was to be expected, his Catholic Majesty fell violently in love with the beautiful nun. The interviews in the parlour were constant but, with the grating between the King and his flame, unsatisfactory, and, by dint of bribes and threats, Don Geronimo managed to break a passage from the cellars of his own house into the vaults of the convent, by means of which, notwithstanding the prayers, the entreaties, and appeals of the abbess, the King was introduced into the cell of the unfortunate nun of whom he was enamoured. He found her laid out as if she were a corpse, surrounded with lighted tapers, with a great crucifix by her side, but not even this availed, and the sacrilegious amours continued so long that the news reached the ever-open ears of the Holy Office. The Grand Inquisitor, a Dominican friar called Antonio de Sotomayor, Archbishop of Damascus, privately took the King to task, and obtained a promise that the offence should cease. Don Geronimo was seized by the officers of the Inquisition (August 30, 1644), and taken to Toledo, where he was accused of sacrilege and other heinous crimes against the faith. The evidence was full and conclusive, and Don Geronimo's life was trembling in the balance, when the Count-Duke boldly went to the Grand Inquisitor one night with two signed royal decrees in his hands, one giving the Archbishop 12,000 ducats a year for life on condition of his resignation of the Grand Inquisitorship, and the other depriving him of all his temporalities,