the other, hunted down to death the Indians of one hemisphere and the "heretics" of the other. Keen, cruel, Alba had no more ruthless instrument for his fell work than "Captain Julian," upon whom and Sancho de Avila the hatred of the persecuted Flemings was mainly concentrated. In the course of my somewhat out-of-the-track studies I have found the {77} name of Julian Romero constantly cropping up, and so many personal traits of him have appeared, that by carefully piecing them together a more complete account may be formed of the life and character of this typical swashbuckler than of, perhaps, any of his fellows. His life, too, offers some interest to Englishmen, for he swaggered and ruffled in London many a time and oft, and was one of those Spanish mercenaries who, in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., fought so bravely against the French and Scots and quelled by their ferocity the risings of Kett in Norfolk and Arundell in the West Country. Practically nothing whatever was known of the lives--hardly indeed the existence--of the Spanish mercenaries in England until the recent publication of the anonymous "Spanish Chronicle of Henry VIII.,"[1] which I now attribute to Antonio de Guaras, a leading Spanish merchant in London, whom I know to have been on close terms of intimacy with the Spanish soldiers, and particularly with Julian Romero, whose early adventures in England are evidently related at first hand in the Chronicle. Of all the turbulent soldiers of fortune who quarrelled, intrigued, and triumphed in England, and whose adventures are so minutely told in the Chronicle, only one was heard of in after life. The general, Sir Peter Gamboa, was murdered with Captain Sir Alonso de Villa Sirga in St. Sepulchre's churchyard, hard by Newgate, one wet winter's night in 1551, by Captain Guevara, who was incontinently hanged in Smithfield. Sir {78} Pero Negro died of the sweating sickness in one of the crowded lanes of old London city. Juan de Haro was killed by the English for attempted desertion with his company to the French enemy before Boulogne; others fell in the Flemish wars, and only the rash and boastful "Captain Julian" lived to become Alba's trusted henchman, and to hand his name down to the execration of generations of Flemings as one of the prime movers of the "Spanish Fury" in Antwerp. So great was the fame of his ferocity that the panic mongers, who were for ever sending to Elizabeth and Cecil intelligence of the dreadful vengeance which was to fall upon England at the hands of King Philip, could invent nothing more terror-striking than their constantly repeated dread that Julian Romero was to swoop down upon the coast and serve English Protestants in the same way as he had treated those of the Netherlands. He had, indeed, as will be shown in his own words at various periods of his life--now for the first time brought together--all the vices and virtues of his class and time. Vain and