Ancient Spanish ballads - 1856 Author:John Gibson Lockhart Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ESCAPE OF COUNT FERNAN GONZALEZ. [THE story of Fernan Gonzalez is detailed in the Coronica Antigua de Espaila with so many romantic circumstances, that ce... more »rtain modern critics have been inclined to consider it as entirely fabulous. Of the main facts recorded, there seems, however, to be no good reason to doubt; and it is quite certain that, from the earliest times, the name of Fernan Gonzalez has been held in the highest honor by the Spaniards themselves of every degree. He lived at the beginning of the tenth century. It was under his rule, according to the chronicles, that Castile first became an independent Christian state, and it was by his exertions that the first foundations were laid of that system of warfare by which the Moorish power ia Spain was at last overthrown. He was so fortunate as to have a wife as heroic as himself, and both in the chronicles and in the ballads abundant justice is done to her merits. She twice rescued Fernan Gonzalez from confinement, at the risk of her own life. He had asked, or designed to ask, her hand in marriage of her father, Gar- cias, King of Navarre, and was on his way to that prince's court, when he was seized and cast into a dungeon, in consequence of the machinations of his enemy, the Queen of Leon, sister to the King of Navarre. Sancha, the young princess, to whose alliance he had aspired, being informed of the cause of his journey, and of the sufferings to which it had exposed him, determined, at all hazards, to effect his liberation; and having done so, by bribing his jailer, she accompanied his flight to Castile. Many years after, he fell into an ambush prepared for him by the same implacable enemy, and was again a fast prisoner in Leon. His Countess, feigning a pilgrimage to Compostella, obtained leave, in the first pl...« less