boastful, bigoted and cruel, he was nevertheless true to his salt, faithful, brave, and steadfast; of that stern, self-sacrificing stuff by which alone empires may be won or despotism defended. He was born at Huelamo, in the province of Cuenca, of very humble folk, for even when he was in high command and on terms of close intimacy with nobles and ministers, he was never given the nobiliary address of Don, which was enjoyed by the most remote and out-at-elbows representative of the hidalgo class. He was not much of a scholar either, for his signature which exists at Simancas is the only part of his letters in {79} his own hand, and is painfully traced in great bold straight lines, like a row of halberds. In the winter of 1534 every village in Spain resounded with the drum-beat of the recruiters, who were seeking soldiers for the Emperor's great expedition against the Moors, which was to start from Barcelona in the spring. Spanish hearts were all aflame with wondrous stories of fortune and adventure. The excitement, the freedom, the idleness, and the possible gains of a soldier's life had seized upon the imagination of Spanish youth; and the turbulent spirit of war-like adventure in far countries was, for the next century at least, to be the dominant note of the national character. Julian must have been a mere boy, but he joined the standard, so he wrote forty years afterwards, at Christmas, 1534, as a foot-soldier, and, with a pike on his shoulder, started on his life of adventure. There was no one to record the doings and sufferings of the humble man-at-arms in those stirring days, and beyond the fact that he drifted from Spain to Tunis, from Tunis to Italy, and thence to Flanders and France, always in the midst of the fighting in the Emperor's wars, nothing is known for the next ten years of Julian Romero's service. In the beginning of 1544 Henry VIII. had arranged to enter into alliance with the Emperor to jointly attack the King of France, and the probability is that if they had together marched upon Paris promptly, they would have had France at their mercy. But other counsels prevailed, and, whilst Charles operated in Picardy and French Flanders, Henry sent the Duke of Norfolk and his brilliant son, Surrey, with an army of 15,000 men, {80} to besiege Montreuil. The King's brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, at the same time with a large force "sat down before" Boulogne, and, on the 14th of July, great Harry himself landed at his good town of Calais to take the supreme command of his army before Boulogne. He was accompanied by a brilliant train of courtiers and soldiers, and took with him as his chief military adviser a great Spanish noble, Beltran de la Cueva, third Duke of Alburquerque, whose important share in the reduction of the town has been almost entirely ignored by English historians. Besides the 200 Spanish soldiers who followed the Duke, there were already three Spanish captains in Henry's