Spanish officers had him hanged up at the yard-arm and cut down when he
was half-dead; that they slashed at his head with their cutlasses and
hacked his left ear nearly off; and that, to complete the measure of
their outrages, one of them actually tore off his bleeding ear, flung
it in his face, and bade him carry it home to his king and tell him
what had been done. To this savage order Jenkins reported that he was
ready with a reply: "I commend," he said, "my soul to God, and my cause
to my country"--a very eloquent and telling little sentence, which
gives good reason to think of what Jenkins could have done after
preparation in the House of Commons if he could throw off such rhetoric
unprepared, and in spite of the disturbing effect of having just been
half-hanged and much mutilated. Jenkins showed, indeed, remarkable
presence of mind in every way. He prudently brought home the severed
ear with him, and invited all patriotic Englishmen to look at it.
Scepticism itself could not, for a while at all events, refuse to
believe that the Spaniards had cut off Jenkins's ear, when, behold!
there was the ear itself to tell the story. Later on, indeed,
Scepticism did begin to assert herself. Were there not other ways, it
was asked, by which Englishmen might have lost an ear as well as by the
fury of the hateful Spaniards? {159} Were there not British pillories?
Whether Jenkins sacrificed his ear to the cause of his country abroad
or to the criminal laws of his country at home, it seems to be quite
settled now that his story was a monstrous exaggeration, if not a pure
invention. Burke has distinctly stigmatized it as "the fable of
Jenkins's ear." The fable, however, did its work for that time. It
was eagerly caught up and believed in; people wanted to believe in it,
and the ear was splendid evidence. The mutilation of Jenkins played
much the same part in England that the fabulous insult of the King of
Prussia to the French envoy played in the France of 1870. The
eloquence of Pulteney, the earnestness of Wyndham, the intriguing
genius of Bolingbroke, seemed only to have been agencies to prepare the
way for the triumph of Jenkins and his severed ear. The outcry all
over the country began to make Walpole feel at last that something
would have to be done. His own constitutional policy came against him
in this difficulty. He had broken the power of the House of Lords and
had strengthened that of the House of Commons. T