Dom Antonio still put a brave face on the matter, but his heart was sinking. For the first two days he had lodged in the rear of the English camp, outside Santa Catalina, but on the third, says my Portuguese diarist, he began to fear for his safety, and, wearied of low fare and the sound of musketry, sought refuge in the house of a Portuguese gentleman on the road to Cascaes. But he was repulsed and barely escaped capture, and thereafter could but cling desperately to the English force. In vain he {62} looked now for the general rising in his favour, for the promised nobles who never came, and hour by hour the prospect darkened. The Earl of Essex, young, inexperienced, hot-headed, was for assaulting all sorts of impossible places with pike and musket, but Norris knew better, and sadly acknowledged to himself that the expedition had failed. Drake, with the fleet, had in the meanwhile reached Cascaes with everything he could lay hands on in the form of prizes. He had cast anchor on the very day twelvemonth that the great Armada had first sailed out of Lisbon, and the townspeople of the capital were full of portents which they saw in this coincidence. Every one in Lisbon by this time feared that he would sail up the river and enter the harbour; and such was the dread of his name that if he had done so he might have turned the tide of victory. But his advice had been rejected, and he would not venture under the guns of the forts with an under-manned fleet and no soldiers. So he remained at Cascaes and left Norris to get out of the hobble as best he could. When he arrived he found the town almost abandoned, for the citizens had fled in terror at his very name. My Portuguese says that Cardenas, the commander of the fortress, "a great gentleman," was deceived by a monk (or, as he says, the devil in disguise of one) into the belief that Lisbon had fallen, and he accordingly gave up the fortress, and himself took to flight. The Castilian and the Englishman tell the story somewhat differently, and say that Cardenas was an adherent of Dom Antonio, and stipulated that a show of compulsion should be used before he surrendered the fortress. The {63} result in any case was the same to him, for the "great gentleman's" head soon afterwards adorned one of the Archduke's poles on the quay at Lisbon. Drake had therefore established himself without difficulty at Cascaes, and patiently awaited the result of the land attack on Lisbon.