Note 857 — Chapter XXIX

There is a book on this subject which should not be entirely overlooked in a history of Spanish literature. It is an account of a pastry-cook of Madrigal, who, seventeen years after the rout in Africa, passed himself off in Spain as Don Sebastian, and induced Anna of Austria, a cousin of that monarch and a nun, to give him rich jewels, which led to the detection of the fraud. The story is interesting and well told, and was first printed in 1595, at Cadiz, under the title of “A History of Gabriel de Espinosa, the Pastry-cook of Madrigal, who pretended to be King Don Sebastian of Portugal.” Of course, Philip II. did not deal gently with one who made such pretensions to the crown he himself had clutched, or with any of his abettors. The pastry-cook and a monk on whom he had imposed his fictions were both hanged, after undergoing the usual appliances of racks and tortures; and the poor princess was degraded from her rank, and shut up in a conventual cell for life. There is an anonymous play of small merit, which seems to have been written in the time of Philip IV., and is entitled “El Pastelero de Madrigal.”