Evidence.
Lea remarks that “the matter-of-course way in which rules destructive of every principle of justice are laid down by men presumably correct in the ordinary affairs of life affords a wholesome lesson as to the power of fanaticism to warp the intellect of the most acute.â€�[25] Such rules as there were for the protection of accused persons were systematically set aside, and the lives of even devout Catholics hung on the merest trifles and technicalities. A new crime termed “suspicion of heresyâ€� was invented, and of this three degrees were formulated—light suspicion, vehement suspicion, and violent suspicion, all of which offered ample scope to inquisitorial ingenuity. A merchant found it a dangerous civility to bow to acquaintances who, unknown to him, were heretics. Two witnesses were required to prove heresy, but at a pinch one was made to suffice, and if the one witness revoked testimony in favour of the accused his revocation annulled the evidence, while if the original testimony was adverse to the defence it was the revocation that became void! The minimum age of witnesses was also liable to fluctuation. By the Italian civil law it was twenty years, but the Holy Office was not particular to a year or two, and a case is recorded in which the evidence of a boy of ten was accepted against his own family and sixty-six other people who had listened to a heretical sermon a year before. Wives, children, and servants could not testify in favour of an accused; against him their evidence was readily accepted. The only thing that disabled a witness was proof that he was actuated by mortal enmity against the accused; but, as the accused was kept in ignorance of the witness’s identity, proof of this sort was made practically impossible.
Witnesses seldom refused to testify. If they did, the torture chamber generally induced them to reconsider the matter; in fact, an unlucky witness ran as great a risk as the defendant of an acquaintance with the rack or the pulleys. Nor was the secrecy of the confessional of much avail, for all priests were instructed to use every means in their power to induce confessions of heresy, and the results were conveyed to the tribunals in a judiciously indirect manner.
All these precautions, thorough and effective as they were, were not thought sufficient, and were supplemented by instructions to the Inquisitors that less evidence was needed to prove heresy than to prove any other crime. The crowning infamy of keeping secret the names of witnesses was a peculiarity of the ecclesiastical procedure, of which its administrators were a little ashamed; but the feeble protests of one or two councils were ignored. As a slight concession to justice the accused was, though rarely, shown a list of names, but without being told which of them applied to his own case; and also a witness would sometimes be sworn in the presence of the accused, but examined apart. On occasion the whole of the evidence was withheld from the knowledge of the accused, and if a witness retracted his testimony the fact was not revealed to the interested party. In practice it was found best to leave all these details to the Inquisitors’ discretion.
The field which all this secrecy opened to malice, slander, and perjury may be faintly imagined. Serious abuses in connection with the handling of evidence were exposed in the fourteenth century by conscientious Inquisitors themselves, and the fact suggests that an appalling amount of injustice remained undiscovered. The extraordinary rule by which a perjured witness was to be punished, but his testimony was to hold good, was a development that might have been expected from an organization bent on the manufacture of criminals. And, because it was fairly safe, perjury by witnesses for the prosecution was by no means uncommon.