The royal confessor assured Perez that he would
be safe if he told the whole truth and declared openly that he had
acted by the royal orders! Perez refused, Philip commanded again (Jan.
4, 1590). Perez must now reveal the King's motive for decreeing the
murder. If Philip was setting a trap for Perez that trap only caught
him if he could not produce the King's compromising letters, which, in
fact, he still possessed. Mr. Froude asserts that Philip had heard
from his confessor, and _he_ from the wife of Perez, that the letters
were still secreted and could be produced. If so, Perez would be safe,
and the King's character would be lost. What was Philip's aim and
motive? Would he declare the letters to be forgeries? No other mortal
(of that day) wrote such an unmistakable hand as his, it was the worst
in the world. He must have had some loophole, or he would never have
pressed Perez to bear witness to his own crime. A loophole he had, and
Perez knew it, for otherwise he would have obeyed orders, told the
whole story, and been set free. He did not. Mr. Froude supposes that
he did not think the royal authority would satisfy the judges. But
they could not condemn Perez, a mere accessory to Philip, without
condemning the King, and how could the judges do that? Perez, I think,
would have taken his chance of the judges' severity, as against their
King, rather than disobey the King's command to confess all, and so
have to face torture. He did face the torture, which proves, perhaps,
that he knew Philip could, somehow, escape from the damning evidence
of his own letters. Philip's loophole, Major Martin Hume thinks, was
this: if Perez revealed the King's reasons for ordering the murder,
they would appear as obsolete, at the date of the deed. Pedro alone
would be culpable. In any case he faced torture.

Like most people in his circumstances, he miscalculated his own power
of bearing agony. He had not the endurance of the younger Auchendrane
murderer: of Mitchell, the choice Covenanting assassin: of the gallant
Jacobite Nevile Payne, tortured nearly to death by the minions of the
Dutch usurper, William of Orange. All of these bore the torment and
kept their secrets. But 'eight turns of the rope' opened the mouth of
Perez, whose obstinacy had merely put him to great inconvenience. Yet
he did not produce Philip's letters in corroboration; he said that
they had been taken from him. However, next day, Diego Martinez, who
had hitherto deni