t, and
for some time continued in a state of pitiable agitation. Yet one might
have thought that the warnings he had already received were such as
might have prepared his mind in some degree for the blow. For he seems
to have been in the condition of the tenant of one of those
inquisitorial cells in Venice, the walls of which, we are told, were so
constructed as to approach each other gradually every day, until the
wretched inmate was crushed between them. After Montigny had
sufficiently recovered from his agitation to give heed to it, the
sentence was read to him by the notary. He was still to be allowed a
day before the execution, in order to gain time, as Philip had said, to
settle his affairs with Heaven. And although, as the alcalde added, the
sentence passed on him was held by the king as a just sentence, yet, in
consideration of his quality, his majesty, purely out of his benignity
and clemency, was willing so far to mitigate it, in regard to the form,
as to allow him to be executed, not in public, but in secret, thus
saving his honor, and suggesting the idea of his having come to his end
by a natural death.[1253] For this act of grace Montigny seems to have
been duly grateful. How true were the motives assigned for it, the
reader can determine.

Having thus discharged their painful office, Arellano and the governor
withdrew, and, summoning the friar, left the prisoner to the spiritual
consolations he so much needed. What followed, we have from Castillo
himself. As Montigny's agitation subsided, he listened patiently to the
exhortations of the good father; and when at length restored to
something like his natural composure, he joined with him earnestly in
prayer. He then confessed and received the sacrament, seeming desirous
of employing the brief space that yet remained to him in preparation for
the solemn change. At intervals, when not actually occupied with his
devotions, he read the compositions of Father Luis de Granada, whose
spiritualized conceptions had often solaced the hours of his captivity.

Montigny was greatly disturbed by the rumor of his having been shaken in
his religious principles, and having embraced the errors of the
Reformers. To correct this impression, he briefly drew up, with his own
hand, a confession of faith, in which he avows as implicit a belief in
all the articles sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church, and its head,
the Vicar of Christ, as Pius the Fifth himself could have desire