he laid the whole matter before King Philip.
His Catholic Majesty was deeply perturbed. He at once dispatched Don
Juan de Llano, the Apostolic Commissary of the Holy Office to Madrigal
to sift the matter, and ordered that Anne should be solitarily confined
in her cell, and her nuns-in-waiting and servants placed under arrest.

Espinosa, for greater security, was sent from Valladolid to the prison
of Medina del Campo. He was taken thither in a coach with an escort of
arquebusiers.

"Why convey a poor pastry-cook with so much honour?" he asked his
guards, half-mockingly.

Within the coach he was accompanied by a soldier named Cervatos, a
travelled man, who fell into talk with him, and discovered that he spoke
both French and German fluently. But when Cervatos addressed him in
Portuguese the prisoner seemed confused, and replied that although he
had been in Portugal, he could not speak the language.

Thereafter, throughout that winter, examinations of the three chief
prisoners--Espinosa, Frey Miguel, and the Princess Anne--succeeded one
another with a wearisome monotony of results. The Apostolic Commissary
interrogated the princess and Frey Miguel; Don Rodrigo conducted the
examinations of Espinosa. But nothing was elicited that took the matter
forward or tended to dispel its mystery.

The princess replied with a candour that became more and more
tinged with indignation under the persistent and at times insulting
interrogatories. She insisted that the prisoner was Don Sebastian, and
wrote passionate letters to Espinosa, begging him for her honour's sake
to proclaim himself what he really was, declaring to him that the time
had come to cast off all disguise.

Yet the prisoner, unmoved by these appeals, persisted that he was
Gabriel de Espinosa, a pastry-cook. But the man's bearing, and the
air of mystery cloaking him, seemed in themselves to belie that
asseveration. That he could not be the Prior of Crato, Don Rodrigo
had now assured himself. He fenced skilfully under exurnination, ever
evading the magistrate's practiced point when it sought to pin him, and
he was no less careful to say nothing that should incriminate either of
the other two prisoners. He denied that he had ever given himself out to
be Don Sebastian, though he admitted that Frey Miguel and the princess
had persuaded themselves that he was that lost prince.

He pleaded ignorance when asked who were his parents, stating that he
had never known either