III.—In a Valladolid Dungeon.
The order of imprisonment was issued on the 26th of February, 1572. His goods were to be confiscated with the exception of a bed and forty ducats to provide for his food in prison. He was to be seized, wherever found, “in church, monastery, or other sacred place,” and he was to bring with him nothing but clothes and linen. A curious clause adds that “beasts of burden to carry him and his bed, etc., are to be provided at the customary price, and the price is not to be raised.” He was thus arrested and conducted to Valladolid. The following description of the prison is given in the trial of Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, who had been confined there some ten years before. “The prison consisted of two rooms, one for him and one for two servants. They were so remote that the Archbishop heard nothing of a fire which broke out on the 21st of September, 1561, and, lasting for a day and a half, consumed more than four hundred houses, some of them close to the secret prison. The stench was so intolerable that they were obliged at times to beg that the doors might be opened, or they would be suffocated. The infection of the place rendered both master and servants seriously ill, and the doctors of the Holy Office reported that it was indispensable to bathe the apartment in pure air morning and evening. In consequence the Inquisitors arranged that a grating should be made in the door, a device which the Archbishop scorned as adding insult to injury. The rooms were not swept ... the shutters of the windows were kept closed, and on some days the Archbishop had to light a candle at nine in the morning. The food was brought on broken plates; the sheets served as table-cloth....” In a letter written to Philip II., after two years of imprisonment, the Archbishop says, “I fear and expect death daily, and to this end my treatment seems to have been directed ever since I came here.” The loss of sun and light, and the actual dirtiness and horror of the place must have been utterly repulsive to a man of Luis de León’s temperament. In one of his writings, “La Perfecta Casada,” he says, “Is not cleanliness the fountain head of beauty—the first and greater part of it?” He loved the open air, and was wont to regret the loss of liberty which even his duties as professor at Salamanca entailed. But to the actual and severe hardships to be undergone there was added, for the devout Catholic, the more subtle and indefinite torture of the mind. For he could not be certain that by some involuntary sin he had not incurred degradation in this life, and punishment unceasing in the next, and in the loneliness and gloom of the prison these doubts would often recur. Luis de León acknowledged the full authority of the Inquisition, and his unqualified submission was not forced or hypocritical, but the fruit of a sincere conviction. The extreme clearness of his intellect was his safeguard, and, though he bowed himself in all things to the will of the Church, he was well assured of his own innocence. Shortly after his arrest he drew up a profession of faith, declaring that he lived and died “now and in the future in the faith and belief of the Holy Catholic Church, and confessing his sins con entrañable dolor.” His defence was conducted throughout in a masterly way. During these five years of suffering he showed a fine sincerity and a clearness of argument that remind one very strongly of Pascal. Never was his style more trenchant and lucid, his reasoning more subtle than in the numerous “Unpublished Documents” that have come down to us. On no occasion was the patience and humility of the man more clearly shown. It is a strange reflection that many of these documents, in accordance with the secrecy of the Inquisition’s proceedings, were kept hidden from Luis de León himself, and that he probably never knew, as we know, that he came within a little of being examined upon the rack. In spite of his ingenious and elaborate defence, Luis de León’s trial was a long one, and one must shudder to think of the sufferings and despair of men of weaker metal and less subtle intellect, such as his intimate friend Grajal, who died in prison. The Inquisition proceeded as usual in an extremely slow and thorough fashion. “Recato y secreto,” caution and secrecy, were indeed its watchwords. Witnesses concerning Luis de León’s case were examined in many parts of Spain, and even at Cuzco, in Peru. It were easy to declaim against the cruelty and tyranny of the Inquisition, but on closer view it would seem unjust to lay the blame entirely at its door. The times, as we have noted, called for the utmost vigilance on the part of the upholders of the true and Catholic faith. They might hold themselves bound to investigate with unwearied diligence the most trifling disputes concerning the doctrine of the Church. Already unorthodox books had been filtering into Spain. A translation of the Psalms had been received at Cadiz, and one man alone, a kind of sixteenth-century Borrow, had brought two bales of heretical books to Seville. The life of the bookseller was rendered anxious and difficult by such proceedings. In a letter to the Inquisitors of Valladolid we read: “The booksellers of this town (Salamanca) have received and continue daily to receive bales of books from France and other parts. These they dare not open for sale without permission.” The evil must be stopped before it spread contagion through the country. It may be argued plausibly that the firmness of the Inquisition saved Spain from the religious dissensions that raged so fiercely in France, Germany, and England, nor may it be forgotten that the centuries of the Inquisition’s most rigorous power were the centuries of Spain’s greatest literary glory.
Perhaps the harm of the Inquisition was, rather, not that it affected original thought and research, but that it created in everyday life an intolerable spirit of suspicion and distrust. It was to the animosity of their private enemies that the imprisonment of both Archbishop Carranza and Luis de León was due, and it is difficult to believe in the sincerity of the witnesses who, “without being cited” and “for the discharge of their conscience,” laid their accusations before the Inquisition. In the University of Salamanca there was much prying and spying, fostered by the rivalries and enmity of the professors. The professors were elected by the votes of the students after a public discussion between the candidates on a given theme, and this system naturally led to considerable ill-feeling and many abuses. During discussions in the University there would be always some one on the watch for any specious subject of accusation. Thus, when Luis de León maintained that “marriage was not in itself an evil but only a less blessed state than celibacy,” León de Castro had written it down in order to denounce it to the Inquisition, and in the same way another professor had gone hastily out during a discussion in order to fetch pen and ink. On one occasion, when Zuñiga was in Luis de León’s cell at Salamanca, the latter mentioned a book which his friend, the celebrated Arias Montano, had sent him. Zuñiga thereupon displayed suspicions of Montano which Luis de León resented. A few days afterwards, to quote Luis de León’s own words, “he seemed to me to be still suspicious and, knowing that he was of a morose spirit and ever inclined to see things in their worst light, I said to him laughingly: ‘You are indeed a pessimist; it seems you still think ill of Montano.’ He said, ‘No; of the man I do not think ill, but I am not certain that it is not my duty to denounce the book.’” Luis de León goes on to say that more than two years afterwards he also “had a fit of pessimism, and, considering the number of heretics who had been discovered and were being discovered daily in Spain,” determined himself to lay the matter before the Inquisition—a common way of forestalling an accusation. Again, Medina examined with most holy zeal (con santísimo celo) Luis de León’s lectures and other papers. The result would be all the more fruitful in that he would not omit the notes taken by students at the lectures, and, as Luis de León was well aware, “ignorant students often put a quite wrong interpretation on what the lecturer said.” Medina did, in fact, call a meeting of students in his cell and inquired of them if they had heard or knew of any suspicious or perverted doctrines of Luis de León. Such methods must multiply means of attack and further spin out a trial. Of one witness Luis de León, in his defence, said, “This witness is the Bachelor of Arts Rodríguez, nicknamed ‘Doctor Subtle’ in the University. I think it is he because he says I left him without an answer, and he was the only person of that University with whom this happened. For as he was a man of unsound judgment and sometimes asked impertinent questions and from what he heard and did not understand collected nonsensical answers, I grew angry and called him a fool. And at other times, in order not to become angry and out of humour on his account, I would give him no answer but flee from him. And he is so witless and importunate that I remember trying to escape him both indoors and in the Schools and in the streets, he following and asking absurd questions, I hurrying on without answering, until at last some of my companions or other students would push him aside and hold him back by force.” A little picture of academic life which for vividness it would be hard to surpass. Luis de León, indeed, was not sparing in his criticism of his various accusers. Their names, in accordance with the custom of the Inquisition, were kept from him, but on reading the anonymous accusations, he referred each one to its true author with unfailing judgment and was thus enabled to refute them with a sure hand. Of one of the witnesses who belonged to his own order he said: “He is known among us as a man who never speaks the truth except by accident.” Of another he speaks satirically as “most spiritual,” espiritualísimo, and says that the words “kisses,” “embraces,” “bright eyes,” and other words in the Spanish rendering of the Song of Songs scandalized him; words, that is, which had not struck him when he read them in Latin, shocked him now that they were written in the romance. Luis de León was not unaware that the worst interpretation would be put on his sayings, or reported sayings, and he was led by this fear himself to lay many trivial details before the Inquisition. Thus he confessed that at a lecture “the students furthest from me bade me speak louder, for I was hoarse and they could not hear me well, and I said: ‘I am hoarse and, you know, it is better to speak low that the gentlemen of the Inquisition may not hear.’” He was full of life and humour, and many a chance word spoken in jest might be twisted by the malicious to an uncatholic implication. He felt in prison that he was fighting blindfold against many enemies and asked more than once to be brought face to face with his accusers. “And thus,” he says, “they speak from afar as men in safety and free, while I, blind and in prison, cannot see who is attacking me.” Many absurd charges were brought against him. According to one witness he “always said low mass, even on a feast day, and no one could hear what he said as he mumbled ‘tu, tu, tu,’ and made an end very speedily.” Another accusation seems to have been based on a mere quibble between the words vino, “wine,” and vinó, “came.” For at a dinner some one seems to have asked for wine and Fray Luis to have said that it was doubtful if it had come; but, according to the witness, all understood his answer to refer to the coming of Christ! Another witness said that he was “a very clever theologian, but somewhat bold in his lectures”—a charge less petty than the preceding, but from its vagueness scarcely less ridiculous. In the same spirit Castro “had heard say,” “thought that he had heard”; Medina “thought that he saw in Fray Luis an inclination to new things.” Such charges coming from enemies made his innocence, as he said, “clearer than the light of noon.” Minute points were elaborately dealt with. For instance, the sale of Castro’s book on Isaiah had been spoilt, he said, by the Jews (Luis de León and his friends); according to Luis de León, the real reason of its failure was its size and costliness. As to the accusation of being, in fact, by descent a Jew, it would appear that Fray Luis’ great-grandmother, or rather the second wife of his great-grandfather, was of Jewish origin.
The one serious charge was, indeed, that he did not give due authority to the Vulgate. It is probable that his attitude had been inopportune at a time when the Vulgate was being attacked on all sides by the heretics, and that the numerous students who attended his lectures were apt to exaggerate his doctrine.
And so the trial dragged on. Luis de León began to lose patience. “If only,” he exclaims, “the sun were divided fairly between me and my accusers”—a metaphor borrowed from duelling. He complains frequently of unnecessary delay. He writes to the Inquisitors, “You are delaying the conclusion of my trial without just cause,” “without cause and to the one end of lengthening out my imprisonment, and with the wish to put a term to my life, since you find me without fault.” He begs that there be no more delay “considering the length of time I have been here, and the small cause there was for bringing me here, and the enmity and notorious calumnies that began and occasioned this scandal.” His imprisonment, he says, is “a long, harsh and cruel torment.” Partly constant communications between Valladolid and Madrid caused delay. Thus a request of Fray Luis, made on the 20th of August, did not receive an answer from the Supreme Tribunal at Madrid till the 20th of September. Partly, too, it must be admitted that after the scandal and excitement caused by his imprisonment at Salamanca, where he had a host of friends and followers, it would seem almost as if the Inquisitors were unwilling to release him with the confession that the whole matter had been smoke without a fire; and the longer the trial continued the greater, naturally, would become their embarrassment.
He was allowed some books and a few other articles. Thus he asks for a crucifix, a brass candlestick, a knife, “to cut what I eat,” the works of St. Leon, a Hebrew Bible, a Sophocles in Greek, a Pindar in Greek and Latin, etc. He complains that he is not properly attended, and “it has happened that I have fainted with hunger from having no one to give me food, and I beg that I may be given a monk of my order to serve me if you do not wish to allow me to die alone between four walls.” He was not allowed the use of the Sacraments, and in his frequent illness this was a constant torture. “You persist,” he says, “in keeping me in prison as if I were a heretic, deprived of the use of the Sacraments, with manifest danger to my life and to my soul, though you bring no fresh charge against me.” He therefore begs them, pending the sentence, to “allow me at least a free death among my monks.” Seeing that the conclusion of his case was delayed from day to day he implores, in another petition, to be transported to some monastery in Valladolid that he may die there as a Christian. “This is the only thing that I solicit or desire, since the passion of my enemies and my own sins have taken from me all that one desires in life.”