* That left just one of the Pizarro brothers, Hernando, ‘a tall coarse man’. When he had returned to Spain in 1539, Charles had him imprisoned for killing Almagro, though he lived in luxury, eating off gold plate, gambling with friends, even receiving visits from mistresses. When his niece, Francisca Inca Pizarro, seventeen and beautiful, arrived in Spain in 1550, Hernando, thirty-three years older, cultured, harsh and mean, married her. She moved into his prison, where she gave birth to five children. Finally released, Hernando and Francisca returned to Trujillo where they built the splendid Palace of Conquest which still stands, owned by the family who succeeded as marquesses of the Conquest. After Hernando’s death in 1575, Francisca married a younger man in 1581 and lived until 1598.
* After the conquest, Handsome John settled in Mexico City where he claimed to be the first to plant wheat in the Americas: ‘I, Juan Garrido, black in colour, resident of this city [Mexico],’ he wrote to Charles in 1538, ‘appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of providing evidence to the perpetuity of the king, a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marqués del Valle [Cortés] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications which were carried out, always with the said Marqués, all of which I did at my own expense without being given either salary or allotment of Indians or anything else … And also because I was the first to have the inspiration to sow wheat here in New Spain and to see if it took.’
* Slave traders gradually became known as
* It is unknown how many people lived in Mexico when Cortés arrived. It is often claimed there were thirty million people, but this is probably too high. They were certainly hit hard by European diseases. Western history writing often describes these epidemics as if they were episodes of deliberate European biological warfare. This was not the case. But the indigenous peoples were culled by different epidemics at different times, some of which killed over 25 per cent of the population. The smallpox epidemic of 1519–20 killed five to eight million people. But it was the later epidemics in 1545 and 1576 that were most catastrophic, killing around seventeen million people. New research using Spanish accounts of the symptoms suggests that these were cases not of smallpox but of haemorrhagic fever, more like ebola, with bleeding from ears, nose and bowel, spread by rats who flourished massively during wet years after droughts caused by climate change. If so, this may not have been brought by the Spanish; it may have been an indigenous disease.
* This was easier since the Protestant Thomas Cromwell was no longer on the scene. Cromwell was not the first self-made man to rise to power in England, but the Church was the traditional route – his patron Cardinal Wolsey was a butcher’s son from Ipswich. But Cromwell, who resembled an indefatigably efficient but implacable badger, was a new sort of minister. Son of a middle-class brewer, who as a youngster had fought for the French in Italy against the armies of Ferdinand of Spain, he looted the wealth of Catholic monasteries which Henry distributed to loyal courtiers, providing the fortunes of many aristocratic families. Amid the murderous paranoia of Henry’s court, the new queen Anne floundered after delivering a daughter – Elizabeth. As her sultriness turned to desperation, Henry fell out of love and into hate. Cromwell, playing on her mockery of Henry’s virility, framed her for treason and incest. Boleyn was beheaded and Henry married her demure lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour, while Cromwell, secretary, lord privy seal, vicegerent in spirituals and earl of Essex, married his own son to the new queen’s sister. Queen Jane delivered a son but died in childbirth. Cromwell’s arrangement of a fourth, Protestant marriage to a German princess led to Henry’s sexual humiliation and Cromwell’s own beheading. Henry afterwards regretted Cromwell’s killing. Even a further humiliation from his fifth marriage to a saucy, unfaithful teenager did not douse Henry’s uxoriousness: he married one more time. Henry was an inscrutable showman who consolidated his dynasty and eliminated any threats, but his reputation rests on the fact that his capricious break with Rome reflected a deeper English instinct for both political independence and religious reform. The Cromwell family would produce two rulers of England and almost became a royal dynasty of their own: Cromwell’s nephew Richard Williams-Cromwell was the great-grandfather of Oliver Cromwell.
