The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 10

by Unknown

CHAPTER V. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

[1822-1900 A.D.]

Immediately after the proclamation of the Constitution of 1822, the Austrian and Russian ambassadors had taken their departure and now that intervention in Spain had been definitely determined on by the Congress of Verona, one of the queen’s adherents, the count of Amarante, raised the standard of revolt at Villa Real, on the northern bank of the Douro in the province of Tras-os-Montes, where the family of Silveira, to which he belonged, possessed estates. The rebellion was made in the name of absolutism or, as the phrase went, in the name of regeneration. The enterprise did not succeed, and the insurrectionists were driven across the Spanish border, though still hoping for the support of the French who had now arrived on the scene. This hope was delusive, for the duke of Angoulême and his government had to consider the susceptibilities of England. That power, already provoked by the treatment of Spanish concerns at the Congress of Verona, looked distrustfully at the development of events in the peninsula, and took a special interest in Portuguese matters; only the regency at Madrid gave them as much assistance as possible.

[1823-1826 A.D.]

But there was no need for direct interference. The new Portuguese constitution had not effected what it had promised; long before this the fickle humour of this passionate, ignorant, and idle people had veered round. In particular the party opposed to the constitution had successfully worked upon the troops and the liberal cause had no one, no regular party, and only a few individual men in whom reliance could be placed. Thus in May, 1823, Dom Miguel was able openly to declare against the constitution. He withdrew from the capital, collected troops, and soon that same Sepulveda who had been one of the principal instigators of the revolution of 1820 marched to the prince’s headquarters at Villafranca at the head of several thousands.

Thither on the 30th of May the king himself was conducted by mutinous troops, and from thence on the 3rd of June issued a proclamation in which he declared the “infamous cortes” dissolved and the “pure monarchy” established. Two days later he returned, an absolute monarch, to the capital he had left as a constitutional ruler. Of the members of the dismissed cortes a number had escaped to England, though the king himself nourished no thoughts of vengeance. The adherents and promoters of the counter-revolution were rewarded: Count Amarante, for instance, was made marquis of Chaves; the cloisters were restored and their property was given back, a new ministry was formed under Count Palmella and a junta appointed to indicate those dispositions of the cortes which were incompatible with the monarchical principle. For a time Dom Miguel, who had been appointed commander-in-chief of the army, was praised throughout Europe as the hero of the reaction.

On the 18th of June Queen Carlota also returned to Lisbon. This infamous woman detested her husband, who on his part had good reason to dread her fury which stopped at nothing. She was now bent on raising to his place her son Miguel who promised to be a prince after her own heart. A system of monarchical terrorism according to the ideas of this worthy pair was impossible so long as the mild Dom João was reigning; the utmost that could be managed was a wretched assassination, like that of which the king’s moderate counsellor, the marquis of Loulé, was the victim; the reins had therefore to be snatched from him by a coup d’état.

On the 30th of April, 1824, Dom Miguel caused the leaders of the moderate party to be arrested. The king’s minister, at whom the blow was really aimed, found time to escape on an English man-of-war which lay at anchor in the Tagus. Thither on the 9th of May the king, who had little confidence in his unnatural son, also fled, being assisted by the English and French ambassadors. But this time the overstrained bow broke in the hands of the absolutist party. They had forgotten to reckon with one factor on which they were accustomed to count too securely. The common people of the capital regarded their sovereign with something like idolatry; and when, from his place of refuge, the king disclosed the criminal designs of those who should have stood closest to him, Miguel found himself suddenly forsaken by all and threatened by many, so that nothing was left him but to go himself to his father and implore his pardon. He was now for a time held in custody on the English vessel.

His “inexperienced youth” might be made a pretext for securing his pardon, for he was indeed, although a practised sinner, only twenty-two years old; but it was thought expedient to send him to travel abroad. He betook himself through France to Vienna, to prepare himself, under Metternich’s eye, for a subsequent continuation of his rôle. His mother was banished to a cloister which suited her but ill; she resisted, under the pretence of illness, and is said to have even taken the last sacraments to prove her sickness. The question of the form of government was then so far settled that on the 4th of June, 1824, the king, acting on English advice, granted a constitution by which the cortes were re-established in their ancient form and division into three estates, the cortes of Lamego, as they were called from their place of assembly. The country now remained undisturbed till the king’s death, which took place on the 10th of May, 1826, and placed the two thrones of Portugal and Brazil to a certain extent at the disposal of his eldest son Dom Pedro, who was conducting the government in Rio de Janeiro.

PORTUGAL RECEIVES A NEW RULER AND A NEW CONSTITUTION

[1826 A.D.]

But to hold them both had become an impossibility since the events of 1820, and a treaty effected through English mediation in 1825 had expressly provided that the two crowns should never again be united on one head, thus confirming the work of the Brazilian cortes of 1822 which declared the country’s independence of Portugal. On the 23rd of April, 1826, the new ruler granted the Portuguese an extremely liberal constitution, the Charta de ley and renounced his European throne in favour of his daughter Maria da Gloria. He endeavoured to counteract the danger to which her claims might be exposed from his younger brother, Dom Miguel, by assigning the child, then only seven years old, as wife to the uncle who was seventeen years her senior and by making the validity of his own resignation depend on the condition that Miguel should swear to the Charta and accept the marriage; until this should be completed Pedro’s own rights were reserved, and since owing to the difference of age between the couple the marriage could not take place for some time, he intrusted the government to his sister Isabella Maria as regent.

She proclaimed the new constitution, which was sufficiently liberal; in it the king retained only a certain power of intervention and arbitration, with no immediate influence on legislation; but liberality in the constitution was a very doubtful advantage in a country which was still so unripe for freedom, and an article which guaranteed freedom of religious worship roused the spiritual caste, who had no difficulty in representing to the ignorant country people and the numerous class of petty rural nobility whose interests were compromised by the new Charta that the new constitution was a work of the devil. However, a first attempt at a rising by the marquis of Chaves was suppressed, and in 1826 the regent was able to open the chambers.

But, supported by the apostolic party in Spain, Chaves returned. A formidable rebellion arose simultaneously in the north and south and gained such alarming proportions that the regent felt herself compelled to call in the aid of England. And this time not in vain. On Friday evening, December the 8th, 1826, the English government received the despatch. George Canning, the guiding spirit of that government, had long since declared that he would suffer no Spanish intervention of any sort in the country so long allied to England; on the 11th the regiments under General Clinton were on the march to their places of embarkation, and on the 12th the great minister made that great speech in the lower house which echoed throughout the world and lent to events in that remote corner of the continent, in themselves of little significance to the destinies of Europe, a far-reaching importance much above their immediate value.

Canning made use of the occasion to justify his whole policy—a peace policy, but one which must yield to treaty obligations entered into towards a country long allied with England; the contingency provided for by the treaty had now arisen and it would be a pitiful quibble to say that this was not a case of Spanish intervention because the troops which had risen against the legal government of Portugal were Portuguese: “They are Portuguese troops, but they are armed by Spain. We will not uphold by force or against the will of the country the constitution which Portugal has given herself, but neither will we permit others to overthrow it by force and against the will of the country.” His words were meant to alarm and warn the Spanish government; but they also alarmed all those who had long been forcibly intermeddling with the internal politics of other states in behalf of principles opposed to liberty and friendly to absolutism.

[1826-1832 A.D.]

Canning pursued his policy with moderation. He showed the strength of a giant without using it in a giant’s fashion. On the 1st of January the English army corps under Clinton landed at Lisbon, and eleven English ships of the line cast anchor in the mouth of the Tagus. The news of their arrival sufficed to prevent the further spread of rebellion. The marquis of Chaves with ten thousand men stood ready for battle on the way to Coimbra. The constitutional troops, about seven thousand in number, marched against him; on the 9th of January a battle was fought which lasted till darkness fell. But in the night the news of the approach of the English spread amongst the Miguelites; this was enough to scatter their army. The English had no need to take action. Their mere presence facilitated the subjection of the rebels by the constitutional generals, Saldanha and others, and the Spanish government, which had understood Canning’s speech, disarmed those who thronged across the border and delivered their weapons to the Portuguese authorities.

DOM MIGUEL SEIZES THE POWER (1827 A.D.)

Thus far England had interfered in response to the queen-regent’s request for aid. Meantime Dom Miguel had taken the oath to the constitution, and had been betrothed to his niece; on the 5th of July, 1827, Dom Pedro appointed him regent of the kingdom. On the 22nd of February, 1828, after having presented himself in London, where he insinuated himself with the ministry, now no longer guided by a Canning, he landed at Lisbon. At a solemn meeting of the estates he repeated his oath, appointed a moderate ministry and kept himself in the background. But it was observed that the criers who daily shouted in front of the palace, “Long live the absolute king!” were no longer driven away or punished as they had been at first and that the constitutional officials and officers had been replaced by adherents of the opposite party; and after the withdrawal of the English troops, whose task was ended after the disbandment of the Spanish corps of observation on the frontiers, he threw off the mask.

On the 13th of March the chamber of deputies was dismissed, and a commission appointed to consider a new election law. On the 3rd of May the governor summoned the three estates of the realm, the “cortes of Lamego,” according to the ancient ordinances. It was now seen whither this true son of his mother was steering. In face of proceedings so manifestly in excess of the existing rights of the regent, the ambassadors of the powers provisionally laid down their offices, and the troops in Oporto rose in defence of the rights of their lawful ruler, Dom Pedro IV. There was no lack of recruits; the number of the constitutional troops increased to seven thousand, but there seems to have been a want of resolute leaders, some of them having taken their departure at Dom Miguel’s first move. The last-named had meanwhile assembled his forces; the mob and the country people armed, and on the 24th of June the constitutional troops suffered a defeat at the hands of the Miguelites under Povoas, in the neighbourhood of Coimbra. They retreated to Oporto, where some of the leaders of the constitutionalists, the marquis of Palmella, and the generals Saldanha, Villaflor, and Stubbs, who had now returned from their flight, in vain endeavoured to rally the disheartened army. Nothing was left to them but to escape from absolutist vengeance by a second flight; the remains of the constitutional army, four thousand strong, crossed into Spanish soil and Miguel’s troops marched into Oporto.

The seizure of the throne could now be completed undisturbed. The new estates which had met at Lisbon, passed, each for itself, the resolution that, according to the fundamental laws of the kingdom, Dom Miguel had been called to the throne. On the 7th of July they paid their homage to the usurper as king. Thus the country was delivered over to the tyranny of a man who for baseness of disposition might compete even with a Ferdinand, and who actually surpassed the latter in coarseness and brutality. Incarcerations, judicial murders, deportations were the order of the day, and reached figures of frightful magnitude. It was a despotism which relied on the mob and the clergy for support; yet the fashion in which Dom Miguel had stolen the crown had been too openly in the very face of the principle of legitimacy to allow of his recognition by the powers; the Spanish ambassador alone remained in Lisbon.

Dom Miguel de Braganza

All Portugal submitted; only on the island of Terceira, one of the Azores, the governor Cabrera had upheld the rights of Dom Pedro and his daughter. Repeated attempts of the usurper to subdue the island were frustrated. The leaders of the constitutional party collected there, and there in March, 1830, Dom Pedro established a regency composed of the marquis of Palmella, the lawyer Guerreiro, and General Villaflor, who took possession of the whole group of islands in the name of the lawful government of Portugal.

By injuries to English and French subjects the barbarous reign of violence which prevailed under Dom Miguel soon added the enmity of those two powers to its native opponents. They exacted compensation and the humiliation of the usurper encouraged the party opposed to him which now found further and more energetic support. For in April, 1831, a revolt in Brazil had obliged the emperor Dom Pedro to resign his throne in favour of his son, Dom Pedro II, who was still a minor. In Europe a task lay ready to his hand: that of assisting his daughter Maria da Gloria to her throne, and at the same time freeing Portugal from her tyrant.

Countenanced by England and France, the duke of Braganza, as Dom Pedro now called himself, obtained a small land-force and a fleet, and with these he appeared at Terceira in March, 1832. With seventy-five hundred men he sailed thence to Portugal, landed in the neighbourhood of Oporto, and on the 8th of July obtained possession of this rich commercial city. But he did not succeed in rousing the country to enthusiasm in his cause. In the summer of 1833 his means were exhausted and only a bold decision availed to give a new turn to the undertaking, which, just in itself, had degenerated into a mere aimless adventure. By a loan raised in the city of Oporto he settled the demands of an English free-lance, named Sartorius, who was in his service, and replaced him by Captain Charles Napier. With the latter there embarked a corps of three thousand men under the duke of Terceira, General Villaflor, to try their fortune in the southern province of Algarve. The result exceeded all expectation; the province went over to the cause of Dom Pedro and the queen, and as the ships were on their way back to Oporto, Napier attacked Dom Miguel’s fleet off Cape St. Vincent and won a complete victory. Five ships of war with 280 cannon fell into his hands, and those on board, thirty-two hundred soldiers and sailors, entered Dom Pedro’s service. The news encouraged the duke of Terceira to venture a march on Lisbon, and this bold action also succeeded. Queen Maria da Gloria was proclaimed in the city, and four days later Dom Pedro also entered the town and took over the regency in his daughter’s name.

[1832-1834 A.D.]

But the new government was by no means securely established. The regent understood little of Portuguese matters and, as always in these southern revolutions, the victorious party were strangers to the moderation required to restore tranquillity to the country. Dom Miguel had preserved the greater part of his army and its ranks were swelled by the peasants who were completely subjected to him and the priests, and by a numerous and continually multiplying rabble. This army maintained itself in the neighbourhood of Coimbra and on the upper Tagus; frequently it even penetrated to Lisbon and thus the two representatives of priest-ridden absolutism, Dom Miguel and Don Carlos, stood opposed to the two minor queens, whom chance had made the representatives of the principle of liberalism.

It was in Portugal that matters first came to an issue. To England, Portugal was the most important country as Spain was to France, and for both powers a real neutrality was an impossibility. A complete victory for Dom Miguel, signified to England—apart from the indignation which must be excited by that monster’s system of rule—the complete loss of her influence in Portugal, and at the same time the destruction of the constitutional principle which naturally had the sympathies of the English nation and the Whigs who were then in power, and which was identified with the government of those classes of society whom a commercial people like the English must necessarily consider. And England had already long since broken through her neutrality.

In regard to the government of France, the position was similar: Louis Philippe was the natural ally of Queen Isabella, whose claims to the throne rested, like his own, on a violation of the principle of legitimacy. But the victory of the Portuguese pretender would of necessity lead to that of the Spanish claimant whose cause had equal chances in its favour, and moreover there could not be a better opportunity of opposing a liberal solidarity on the part of the western powers to the legitimatist solidarity of the eastern, and thus confirm the stability of the new throne of France. This community of interests brought about the conclusion of a quadruple alliance between Portugal and Spain, England and France (12th of April, 1834), by which the regents of Portugal and Spain agreed to expel the two pretenders, and for this object a Spanish corps was to co-operate with the Portuguese troops; the undertaking was to be supported by England with her warships and by France, if necessary, with troops.

[1834-1835 A.D.]

The result was soon apparent. On the 12th of May Dom Miguel’s army was defeated by the united Spanish and Portuguese army at Asseiceira and on the 26th the two allies, Dom Miguel and Don Carlos, surrounded by a superior force, capitulated at Evora in the province of Alemtejo. The former took a money payment, which he might squander anywhere but in Spain and Portugal, promised to respect his niece’s rights and retired from the scenes, taking ship for Genoa. Don Carlos went to England.

Affairs quieted down in Portugal. Dom Pedro summoned the cortes and restored the Constitution of 1826; monastic and knightly orders and various abuses were abolished; the Jesuits had to leave the country; but the establishment of the new order of things was completed with moderation and without revenge, and above all the law was treated with respect. On the 18th of September in that year the estates declared the queen, though only fifteen, to be of age, since the state of the regent’s health did not permit of his attending to business. On the 24th Dom Pedro died at the age of thirty-seven.[b]

MARIA II (1834-1853 A.D.)

Donna Maria was sixteen years old at her father’s death. The cortes believed nevertheless that it ought to declare the majority of the queen, which she would not have attained according to the charter until her eighteenth year. Donna Maria hastened to put all her confidence in the duke of Palmella. Senhor de Palmella and his friends, while they brought great support to the government, did not make up for the strength of which it had been deprived by Dom Pedro’s death, and did not disarm any adversary. The position of the entire Portuguese ministry with regard to England was truly intolerable; placed between an imperious national sentiment and unconquerable necessities it was at all times accused by the opposition of sacrificing the country’s interests to those of an insatiable ally. The question of customs duties and the renewal of the treaties furnished the enemies of the ministry with national weapons, for nothing was so unpopular in Portugal as the lowering of the tariff and free trade.

In spite of the enormous expenditure due to civil war and the general ruin, the raising of loans contracted in London easily covered at first the deficit in the treasury. The abundance of money was such that they even foolishly employed specie to retire a paper currency in circulation since the time of João V. This false prosperity had no other result than to close all eyes to the dangers of the future. At the beginning of 1835 the minister of finance was compelled to admit an enormous deficit. The government was unable to borrow any longer nor even increase their taxes. It became necessary to have recourse to expedients and to set out on the deplorable road of anticipations.

Officials’ salaries and officers’ pay were no longer regularly paid, and the number of malcontents grew in proportion to the impossibility of satisfying them. The army and the national guard of Lisbon were entirely in the clutches of the secret societies. The internal dissensions among the ministers led several of them to associate themselves with clubs and to seek in the anarchist party a passing point of support against their colleagues; for, while all attacks were directed against Palmella, and especially Carvalho, there were in the space of one year eight changes of cabinet. The motives of these changes were always of a personal nature, and were to be found in the intrigues of the clubs which often crossed and clashed with those of other clubs.

[1835-1837 A.D.]

Upon this state of affairs there broke the revolt of La Granja, which served as a signal for a similar movement in Portugal. For more than a year alarming symptoms had been showing themselves. The chamber of deputies had refused the chief command of the army to the queen’s first husband, Prince Augustus of Leuchtenberg. After four months of marriage he succumbed to a short illness.[c] In less than a year the queen remarried. Her second husband was Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, nephew of the Belgian king. He obtained the chief command of the army, which made matters more difficult as he was unpopular.[a]

Then the queen ordered the dissolution of the cortes at the moment when all the Spanish juntas were in insurrection. The government was playing with the frivolity and light-mindedness of the people when, on the 9th of September, 1836, the newly elected deputies from Oporto arrived in Lisbon. They all belonged to the radical party. A band of musicians advanced to meet them, the city was illuminated, and enthusiastic cheers filled the streets and byways. By the end of the evening the ministers became alarmed at the demonstration and sent out a battalion to restore order. The soldiers fraternised with the people and all cried, “Down with the ministers; long live the Constitution of 1822.” This excited mob, really more joyous than hostile, made its way to the palace and sent the surprised queen a deputation ordering her to dismiss the ministers and adhere to the constitution.

The queen refused to obey, and rejected the revolutionists’ commands. A little later she resigned herself to the necessity, and she burst into tears. The count of Lumiares, Bernardo de Sá da Bandeira, and Passos were named ministers, and the queen promised to convoke the cortes according to the forms of the Constitution of 1822, in order that they might recast the fundamental law of the kingdom.

Passos planned out a pantheon, issued a thousand regulations relating to libraries and museums, and abolished bull-fights through motives of philanthropy. Bernardo de Sá destroyed all that he could, his principle being that things would arrange themselves afterward as well as they could and what was once overthrown would never be re-established.

November 3rd a few persons of the court tried to work a counter-revolution. The queen secretly betook herself to the castle of Belem, from which place she called the army and the people of the court around her and abjured the forced oath she had taken on the 10th of September. This scheme, bad and unpracticable in itself, presented one difficulty among many others which had not been seen by the prime movers of the plot. Belem is separated from Lisbon by a little river, and the constitutionalists in seizing the bridge of Alcantara cut off all communication between the castle and the partisans of the charter. The hostile attitude of his Britannic majesty’s warships intimidated no one. The constitutionalists strengthened their love of the constitution with their hatred for England, and this time the people of Lisbon seemed led by a common sentiment. At the end of three days the queen renounced her dangerous project and returned to the city amid bonfires and the enthusiastic acclamations of the people.

This unlucky and abortive affair proved three things: the solidity of Donna Maria’s throne, which was never for one moment shaken by this foolish experiment; the aversion of the people for the English yoke; and the hatred of the radicals towards a few political men. Freire was assassinated at the bridge of Alcantara. On the 18th of January, 1837, after four months and a half of dictatorial power, exercised according to the statutes of the constitution by Bernardo de Sá and Passos, the constituent cortes met at Lisbon. According to the law of 1822 it formed a single chamber and was elected by almost universal suffrage. The 6th of May the cortes submitted the basis of the constitution and sixty-four votes against sixteen declared for absolute veto, the two chambers and the leading principles of all fundamental laws.

[1837-1838 A.D.]

This was the opportunity for its enemies, and the baron de Leiria, who commanded in the north, raised the banner of insurrection on the 12th of July. Several garrisons, more important for the names of the towns than for the number of the soldiers, rose up to cries of “Long live the charter!” Marshal Saldanha proceeded to Castello Branco. The duke of Terceira soon joined him, and for a month the two insurgent marshals overran the country without opposition. The Lisbon government confided extraordinary powers to the viscount de Sá and the baron de Bomfim.

These two officers, with the constitutional forces, attacked the marshal’s troops at Rio Mayor on the 28th of August, and, although on both sides they had had more than six weeks in which to make preparations, neither of the armies counted eight hundred men. But the soldiers were more prudent than their leaders. After a slight infantry skirmish in which the Portuguese nobility had sensible losses to deplore, the two marshals gave the order to charge to their little squadron and the viscount de Sá advanced at the head of his troops. The cavalry on both sides stopped at fifty paces, replaced their sabres in the scabbards, and having fraternised returned faithfully to the flags of their respective commanders. The latter saw themselves compelled to sign an armistice, and the marshals retired to the north to rejoin baron de Leiria who still held out in the suburbs of Valencia.

Forces were equal and victory depended on the side that would get hold of the corps which, having served in the army of Queen Christina, was returning to Portugal under the orders of the viscount das Antas. This general decided in favour of the constitutionals, and, after a bloody fight at Ruivaes on the 20th of September, the remains of the chartist army was obliged to take refuge in Galicia.

But the evil which no constitution could remedy was growing day by day. On the 14th of October bankruptcy was declared—the necessity of paying the victors had drained the last drop of the state’s finances. The body of workmen at the arsenal, who for two weeks had been giving unequivocal signs of discontent, openly rebelled on the 13th of March, 1838. Baron Bomfim surrounded the arsenal buildings by a line of troops and the rebels fired first upon the soldiers. This was truly a critical moment for Portugal. The cortes were opposed to any vigorous measures and clung to the side of the insurrection. But the fate of the ministers was nevertheless bound to the maintenance of order, and Bernardo took his stand boldly. He marched with Baron Bomfim against the rebels, who were completely defeated after a furious and bloody combat. After this time the arsenal party, as it was called, attempted fresh insurrections and more than once threatened the peace of the kingdom, but the events of the 13th of March had irrevocably fixed the government’s position. Besides, when on the 4th of April the queen took an oath to the new constitution and proclaimed a general amnesty for the past, the chartists and the moderate portion of the constitutionalists found themselves naturally united against the more radical faction. Afterwards they were almost completely confused under the name of the “friends of order.”[b] On the 16th of September, 1837, Queen Maria had given birth to a son. This greatly improved the queen’s position, but the king-consort continued very unpopular, and the condition of affairs encouraged Dom Miguel to seek aid in London. But he sought in vain and returned to Rome. Discontent was still rife in Portugal, cabinets played see-saw, and in August, 1840, the 6th regiment of the line mutinied and shot its colonel.

Meanwhile England was pressing its claims for £375,475 [$1,807,475] for commissariats in 1826 and for half-pay for the British officers who had served under Wellington and Beresford. The claim provoked only indignation in Portugal. In 1841 Spain came in for hostility.[a]

[1835-1842 A.D.]

In 1835 the navigation of the Douro had caused considerable excitement between Spain and Portugal, which nearly led to a war between the two countries. There appeared in the Gazette de Madrid a violent article against Portugal, also an insulting one against Donna Maria II. Saldanha gave the Spanish government forty-eight hours to make reparation, notifying it that in the event of refusal a Portuguese fleet should fire the towns from Cadiz to Barcelona. Apology was made. Portugal had difficulties also with Denmark, when Saldanha requested the Portuguese minister to leave, if, after three days, satisfaction was not given. The Danish minister was recalled, but Saldanha obtained his wishes.

England complained that Portugal was too complaisant to France and the United States, and forgot her old ally, and declared she felt disposed to occupy the Portuguese Indian possessions on account of claims. Saldanha went to London with instructions to do as he pleased. Lord Palmerston told him to tell his government that England acceded to his desire to modify the convention, for his sake, and not for that of the Portuguese government.

Dom Miguel’s party in Portugal, as well as the absolutos on the continent, considered he had now another chance of returning to his country. He left Rome for England, remaining some time, but he could make no move, and returned again to Italy. In December, 1841, the municipal elections commenced in Lisbon. There were now two great contending parties, the moderados, who supported the ministry, and the constitutionals, that of order; the pure Septembrists[184] were considered as revolutionists or even republicans, and there were most probably many Miguelites amongst them.[d]

CABRAL AND THE CHARTISTS IN POWER (1842 A.D.)

[1842-1847 A.D.]

In January, 1842, Portugal once more found herself face to face with the sad prospect of revolution, and the leader no less a person than the minister of justice, Costa Cabral, formerly one of the most ardent of Septembrists, now entirely converted to Dom Pedro’s charter. Secretly seconded by the king and by Dietz and Drummond, who composed the occult government at Lisbon, he went to Oporto and thence to Coimbra, proclaiming the abolition of the established constitution.

The queen, who was not in the secret of the plot, in vain confided its repression to Palmella, Das Antas, and Bomfim. The duke of Terceira pronounced in favour of Costa Cabral; Palmella took no action and the revolution was brought to a head before anyone had seriously thought of suppressing it. Costa Cabral completed his triumph with the promise that the cortes would be immediately convoked for the revision of the charter, and from that time it was he who reigned under the name of the duke of Terceira, president of the council. It goes without saying that Donna Maria was content to subscribe to everything she formerly had opposed. Most docile, subject to the wishes of her husband and her confessor, she had, moreover, never liked the constitution, and had herself twice attempted to destroy it in 1837.

Sustained by the high protection of the court, by the servility of the two chambers, by the friendship of his brother the governor of Lisbon, and finally by the friendly neutrality of the Miguelites, for whom the fall of the constitution would be nothing less than a triumph, Costa Cabral had nothing to restrain him. And he was not the man to hesitate before despotism. It was not sufficient that the tribune was almost silenced; he soon affirmed his power by the promulgation of three decrees which abolished almost the last of Portugal’s liberties. The first concerned the judges, whose independence he destroyed; the second delivered the officers over to the absolutism of the minister; the third submitted all education to a censor and struck a death-blow at the universities. Is there need to add that the press was not less abused, and no longer had freedom but to praise?

It was not long before he went a little further. For a long time one of the greatest plagues of the Portuguese administration was that they could not exist without loans. They borrowed to meet even the ordinary expenses, they borrowed to pay interest on the debt; they borrowed for redemptions—all the while accumulating a more onerous burden. Costa Cabral finally had his eyes opened to this state of affairs, pointed it out to the queen, and while he himself was responsible for twenty-three loans in three years, he dared undertake to get rid of them, understanding well that irreparable ruin would be the result of the continuation of such a policy. But whether the taxation he established to reopen the true sources of prosperity to the finances of his country was really too heavy, or the strangeness of the thing made it seem so, Costa Cabral did not have the time to carry out and improve this great reform. He had presumed too much on his own strength and the intelligence of the people; no government was solid enough in Portugal to stand such a test.

THE SEPTEMBRISTS OVERTHROW COSTA CABRAL

[1847-1850 A.D.]

But from the day that Costa Cabral himself set the example of insurrection, by rousing Oporto and Coimbra in the name of the charter, all his former friends became allied to punish him as soon as possible for his apostasy. Their leaders were Das Antas, Passos, Sá da Bandeira, Loulé, and especially Bomfim, who represented the mixed party.

When he had furnished them an opportunity by the introduction of a new tax which could not fail to arouse the anger of the peasants, they induced the whole province of Minho to revolt; and the majority of the other towns showing similar inclinations, Costa Cabral found it impossible to hold up his head to the storm.[185] Cabral fled to Spain with his brother the governor, under pretext of a year’s leave of absence which the queen herself had granted him. During this time those whom he had formerly exiled and despoiled succeeded to his high power.

But it was not for long. Costa Cabral had been in power at least four years. Scarcely had his adversaries entered into possession of the authority, when they had to contend with a new counter-revolution hatched in the queen’s palace and soon supported by England, France, and Spain.

Donna Maria’s victory was also Costa Cabral’s, the latter in truth was only awaiting the signal to reappear in Portugal, and (astonishing thing, and one that shows well how superficial these agitations are!) he was cordially received there. It seemed as if everybody was his friend. Justice must be rendered Cabral in that, far from being intoxicated with a victory as complete as it was unexpected, he appeared only desirous of wiping it out—perhaps because he feared to raise again all the resentment under which he had once succumbed, perhaps because he preferred to hold back, or perhaps because, scorned plebeian that he was, he feared to offend the aristocratic pride of the great families by the immediate occupation of the highest office. He therefore refused the ministry and, content with an anonymous supremacy, transferred the honour to Pombal’s grandson, the old marshal the duke of Saldanha, January, 1848.

This policy of Costa Cabral’s showed itself still better at the moment when Marshal Saldanha refused to retain the post which was a source of trouble to him. Costa Cabral begged the duke of Terceira and Duarte-Leitao to accept the presidency of the council, and it was only upon their positive refusal that he decided to reassume it himself. If nobody wanted it, how could he be blamed for taking it? Still, he tried to disarm the anger that might be aroused at his accession by accepting a feudal title which undoubtedly he cared little about. But was it not better to defer solemnly to the unconquerable prejudices of the Portuguese aristocracy by concealing a plebeian name under the pompous title of the count of Thomar? However that might be, the new president of the council used his power energetically for the reformation of abuses, to complete the reconciliation of Portugal and Rome, to improve the state of the finances, to stimulate agriculture and commerce, and to restore the navy. Never, whatever might be said of it afterward, had Portugal been so prosperous since the glorious era when Pombal had undertaken to revive the glories of olden times. If this administration, rigorous but able, could have maintained itself for only ten years, Portugal would have lifted itself out of the abyss into which it was threatening to disappear.

But unfortunately this was not to be. All his old adversaries, disconcerted for a moment by the suddenness of his return, returned on their side to their intrigues and their alliances. The Miguelites irritated at his reforms, the great nobles offended at his supremacy, the Septembrists indignant at what they called his apostasy, the journalists embittered at the severities of his new law against the press (1850)—all these combined to overthrow him again. There remained to find a leader, and that did not take long. The marshal Saldanha was there, discontented and anxious to avenge himself at any cost.

Having voluntarily left the ministry, the duke of Saldanha proclaimed himself at first the friend and devoted adherent of the count of Thomar. He even went so far as to say one day that in politics he and the count were one and the same person. But constancy and fidelity were not distinguishing qualities of the noble duke, and this effervescence of friendship did not prevent his regretting the authority he had just given up of his own accord. As his claims were admitted neither by the count of Thomar nor his colleagues, he was thrown roughly into the ranks of the opposition and his first declaration of hostilities was a virulent attack upon the minister of war. Neither the chamber, the ministers, nor the queen paid much attention to this, and the latter even dared to reply that she did not allow her servants to give her advice, and especially written advice, unless she asked it. This was a cruel allusion to the post of first major-domo of the palace with which the duke was invested. Thereupon Saldanha’s anger put him at the disposition of all those who were willing to second his revenge.

[1850-1855 A.D.]

A not less seductive hope for Costa Cabral’s enemies was England’s declared assistance. Lord Palmerston was at that time at the head of foreign affairs, and no minister was ever more exclusively preoccupied with the interests of England. At the first news of the reforms which the Portuguese government had accomplished, or was meditating, he did not lose an instant in encouraging its enemies, in overwhelming it with threatening notes, in recommending a close friendship with the Septembrists to the representatives of Great Britain, and even in sending a fleet with provisions and money. If there were to be a Portuguese renaissance, what would in truth become of England’s commercial supremacy over that country, and through that country over the whole peninsula?

Accusations of embezzlement, intrigue, and corruption were renewed against Thomar which served to disconcert his friends. April 8th, 1851, the duke of Saldanha succeeded in raising two battalions. It was from Oporto that the signal for the revolt came. It extended from there to Coimbra and then to Lisbon, when it found a leader even in the prime minister’s brother, Sylva Cabral. Some personal resentment had ranged this unhappy personage with the bitterest adversaries and calumniators of the count of Thomar. Forced finally to hand in his resignation, he was exiled. The count of Thomar took his departure, with regret at leaving his reforms uncompleted, and without the wealth, of whose accumulation his enemies so persistently accused him. As for the queen, she tried vainly to soften the rough blow which royalty itself had received. Neither the conquerors of the count of Thomar, nor Lord Palmerston, nor Sir Henry Seymour, powerfully supported by an English fleet, would consent to spare her any of the bitterness of her defeat. They signified their wish that she should solemnly retract all the acts of the preceding ministry, that she should remove the king from the command of the army, restore Marshal Saldanha to his post of major-domo, and even accept him as prime minister in place of the marshal the duke of Terceira, whom she had been forced to substitute for the count of Thomar. What could she do against this triumphant power? Donna Maria agreed to everything, and a few days later Saldanha entered Lisbon amid flowers and cries of enthusiasm, which the fickle populace lavished upon every victory.[e] In 1852 the charter was revised to suit all parties; direct voting, one of the chief claims of the radicals, was allowed, and the era of civil war came to an end.[f]

When, under Saldanha’s more vigorous rule, peace was beginning to settle over the land, the queen died on November 15th, 1853, at the age of thirty-five. Her husband Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg became regent for his minor son, who mounted the throne of Portugal on September 17th, 1855, as Dom Pedro V.[186]

PEDRO V (1855-1861 A.D.)

[1855-1862 A.D.]

There was still that dream of uniting Spain to Portugal, but when the proposition was made to Pedro V, he replied: “They think to flatter my ambition and believe that I shall favour them; they are mistaken. Besides the reasons of propriety, policy, and honour which should restrain me, there are considerations which I must not forget—yes, I—if others do forget them. They do not reflect that if the house of Braganza mounts the throne of the peninsula, Portugal would be nothing but a Spanish province, and that our nationality would be absorbed. But I, who am the first of the Portuguese, the first citizen of a country which occupies an honourable place in the history of humanity—I should be a faithless vicar, if I favoured such a project. These people are even our great enemies, for they prevent many useful enactments which might be for the common good of the two peoples—for example, the development of international communication, progress in the material interests of the countries, and the unity of weights, measures, money, and customs regulations.”[g]

The only political event of any importance during the reign of Dom Pedro V, who in 1857 married the princess Stephanie of Hohenzollern, was the affair of the Charles et Georges. This French ship was engaged in what was undoubtedly the slave-trade, though slightly disguised, off the coast of Africa, when it was seized by the authorities of Mozambique, and, in accordance with the laws and treaties against the slave-trade, its captain, Roussel, was condemned to two years’ imprisonment. The emperor Napoleon III, glad to have a chance of posing before the French people, and counting on his close alliance with England, instantly sent a large fleet to the Tagus under Admiral Lavaud, and demanded compensation, which, as England showed no signs of assistance, Portugal was compelled to pay. The whole country, especially the city of Lisbon, was ravaged by cholera and yellow fever during this reign, itself evidence of the extreme neglect of all sanitary precautions; and on November 11th, 1861, the king, who refused to quit the pestilence-stricken capital, died of cholera, and was speedily followed to the grave by two of his brothers, Dom Ferdinand and Dom João.[f]

THE REIGN OF LUIZ (1861-1889 A.D.)

The development of affairs in Portugal now took a decidedly liberal course. The Portuguese government had recognised the new Italian monarchy already in June, 1861, and the following year King Luiz had married Princess Maria Pia, the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel. On December 22nd, 1861, Dom Luiz took the oath to the constitution and, since the people were alarmed at the frequent number of deaths in the royal family, the government laid before the cortes a law controlling the regency and another which declared princesses also to be eligible for the throne and thus put still further off the danger that a descendant of Dom Miguel might succeed to the throne of Portugal.

[1862-1868 A.D.]

Not a single Portuguese bishop appeared at the celebrated council at Rome in 1862 and, in a document dated July 3rd, the pope had occasion to complain that in the “lamentable state of the Catholic church in Portugal” the bishops were too lukewarm and tolerant; he reminded them that it was their duty to watch over the sheep intrusted to their care so that—in the language of the curial—“they should not be devoured by the ravenous beasts which make the surface of the earth unsafe to live upon.” When some of the clergy took advantage of this to preach against the government, they were reminded by a proclamation of the minister of justice (August 2nd) that there were prisons in Portugal for such cases. The ministers were of liberal colour; in April, 1863, an important law was passed abolishing the right of primogeniture, an old evil of their country; in May, 1864, a decision of the second chamber demanded that the peers’ title should no longer be hereditary.[b]

In spite of popular opposition the government entered resolutely on reform by abolishing capital punishment for any crime, civil or political. Following the example set by many European countries, they also adopted the metric system, organising consolidated funds and, what was a very important reform, abolishing the royal gifts of lands to support a title. In 1864, a treaty of delimitation which had been in progress for several years was definitely drawn up with Spain. New roads were marked out and furrowed the kingdom in every direction, making Lisbon the centre for all roads having direct communication with the province. Aqueducts were constructed; towns made sanitary; hospitals, almshouses, model dwellings rose in the large industrial centres. Newly made canals allowed these towns to transport their goods seawards without unnecessary costly relading. The smallest boroughs were provided with schools, etc. But all these works, useful, it is true, and almost necessary, made a large hole in the state coffers. Fontes Pereira de Mello tried to overcome this by getting votes for the modification and increase of old taxes of every kind, even of the yearly land tax, also the amending of indirect taxation. These reforms were the cause of new troubles in Oporto, but they were suppressed without recourse to arms. Lisbon and several other towns followed Oporto’s example, and the government, fearing lest troubles there should insensibly assume serious proportions and lead to civil war, yielded to the people’s will and withdrew the new taxes (1867).

In 1868, a fresh insurrection broke out in Spain and was necessarily felt in Portugal. It was an immediate question of conferring the Spanish crown so as to fuse the two peoples, a union which would have taken the title of the Iberian Union. But the Portuguese, remembering what their ancestors had suffered under the Spanish yoke, feared lest this union should lead to the surrender of Portugal to Spain, and profited by the anniversary of the coming to the throne of João IV (of the illustrious house of Braganza) in 1640, to make strong resistance against Spain. In view of this excitement, the Spaniards abandoned their first idea, not being willing to expose themselves any more to the vindictiveness of a people not able to forget oppression dating nearly four centuries back.

One of the wisest and most humane reforms, and one which adds most to the glory of Luiz I, was the entire abolition of slavery in every colony. But, by a curious and sad coincidence, as if in answer to the royal benefit, about five hundred Portuguese were pitilessly massacred by natives on the Zambesi. On this news being announced, an army corps embarked immediately to avenge the honour of the flag.[h]

[1864-1899 A.D.]

The history of Portugal for the years 1863-1866, as far as its connection with the rest of Europe is concerned, presents almost empty pages—which, however, was not precisely a misfortune to the country. We read in November, 1864, of differences between the government and the pope which ended in the recall from Rome of the Portuguese ambassador, who did not return thither until two years later; of the opening and closing of the sessions of the cortes, of elections, of satisfactory finances, of the modification and change of ministries. It was already something remarkable that the great state question was raised at the birth of a prince in August, 1865, that the papal nuncio would not permit King Victor Emmanuel, the father of the young mother, who was in a sense under a ban, to officiate as godfather, and that the royal child was not admitted to the privilege of baptism until after Napoleon III had added to his many rôles that of being sponsor to the Portuguese prince.[b]

In 1866 Dom Miguel died, after having stood at the head of the absolutists calling themselves the Party of the Faith, and sojourning at various European courts. He had been lampooned by the liberal press, but was given a magnificent funeral.

The old and stormy Saldanha threatened a pronunciamento in 1870, and succeeded in ousting from court the king’s favourite, the duke of Loulé. He was appeased by supplanting Loulé as minister, but after four months was gracefully disposed of on the pretext of the embassy to England, where he died in 1876. The ministry of Pereira de Mello lasted for three years, 1883-1886, in which year there was danger of collision with the French Republic in view of the marriage of Luiz’s heir to the daughter of the comte de Paris. The ceding of a portion of the Lower Congo territory to Belgium in 1885, the definition of German and Portuguese spheres of influence in Africa, the cession of the island of Macao by China, the building of a railroad in Angola marked colonial affairs. In 1889 there was alarm over the encroachments of England on Portuguese influence in Africa, and Major Serpa Pinto invaded territory on the Shiré river claimed by England. The British government demanded reparation and sent to Portugal a fleet which, January 11th, 1890, induced Portugal to withdraw from the Shiré region under protest.

CARLOS I BECOMES KING (1889 A.D.)

This surrender provoked outbreaks at Lisbon and Oporto; the ministry of José de Castro resigned, and the republicans, stimulated by the Brazilian success in establishing a republic the year before, turned the anti-British demonstration into a republican agitation. King Carlos had succeeded his father when King Luiz died of typhoid fever, October 19th, 1889. The new king assumed to side with the popular feeling and refused the order of the Garter which Queen Victoria had just offered him. The republican movement overshot itself, and, after various arrests were made, the elections were strongly for the government. August 20th, an agreement with England had been reached, after a vain appeal to international arbitration. The terms were again distasteful to the public and the cortes refused to accept them. Passages at arms took place between the Portuguese and the British in Nika (Manica), which by the terms of the August agreement were Portuguese. But the terms had been declined and the Portuguese were defeated. A military revolt was suppressed in January, 1891, and the republican press suppressed. The terms of the August agreement were now accepted and a treaty with Great Britain was signed May 28th, 1891.

Financial affairs had now reached a crisis after wrecking so many cabinets. In May, 1892, the government finally declared itself bankrupt. Still relief did not come and Oliveira Martins, after failing as minister to establish a sound financial condition, gave way to Ferreira, who yielded to Hintze-Ribeiro, who lasted from 1894 to 1897, and returned in 1899.

In 1895 a reform of the constitution of the cortes was achieved, the lower chamber was reduced from 170 to 145, the upper house was to be constituted of ninety members chosen by the king, the royal princes, and twelve bishops; the right of suffrage was based on the ability to read and write and the minimum payment of 500 reis (50 cents) in taxes. Domestic servants, government employees, and soldiers are, however, forbidden to vote. This same year the king visited England, accepted the order of the Garter, and began the cultivation of that British friendship which its liberal construction of the limits of neutrality during the South African War served to strengthen—at least in England, though violently attacked in Portugal. In 1900 the Delagoa Bay Railroad dispute with England was decided in Portugal’s favour by Switzerland as arbitrator.[a]

PORTUGUESE LITERATURE

[1812-1900 A.D.]

The country of Camoens and João de Barros has never lost its love for letters, and the Portuguese people have always possessed a poetic strain. If in the eighteenth century poetry reached the level of too Parnassian trifles, it redeemed itself after the war under the impulse of Francisco Manoel do Nascimento, and with still finer taste under the influence of Almo da Garot, and of Castilho, followed by a good number of lyric and dramatic poets and romancers. J. B. Gomes (died 1812), by his sole tragedy The New Iñes de Castro, has taken a place among the most remarkable of dramatists. Other authors have written for the theatre; for example, Vasconcellos, Reis Quita, Biester, Pimentet, and perhaps the first of them all is Almeida Garrett (died 1854).

Bulhão Pato has made a name among the poets as well as T. A. Gonzaga, João de Lemos, Antonio Pereira da Cunha, and Ribeiro, the minister. Like King Diniz of old and Philip of Lancaster, King Pedro IV was a poet. He has written verse destined to be set to music and he has given the country the “Constitution Hymn.” Dominic Buontempo founded the Philharmonic Academy at Lisbon, and the composer Marcos Portugal is known throughout all Europe.

Alexandre Herculano (died 1878), erudite and littérateur, rivalled the work of the Benedictines in his Portugalica Monumenta Historica; but he did not please the clergy, for he wrote of the Inquisition in Portugal and the Concordat of February 21st, 1857. In the Harp of the Believer he has told in verse of the eternal strife between doubt and faith.

Science, letters, and art have had illustrious representatives in José Ribeira, Antonio de Almeida (died 1839), Gaetan de Amaral, Antonio de Carmo, Velho de Barbosa, Costa de Macedo who has aroused much discussion by his opinions, Francisco Alexandre Lobo, de Carvalho, Manoel Coelho da Rocha. In geography, the viscount of Santarem (died 1856), Brito Capello, Robert Irens, Serpa Pinto, and Otto Schutt, count among African explorers.[g]

[1897 A.D.]

The present king of Portugal, Carlos I, born in 1863, has shown a decided determination to seek the peace his country so much needs. He has shown also a real interest in science and letters and since the five hundredth anniversary of Prince Henry the Navigator celebrated in March, 1894, he has shown a lively concern for deep-sea soundings and exploration. He has made personal studies and both published their results and shown them at an oceanographic exhibition which he opened in 1897. The world is too well mapped to offer such prizes as once lay hidden in the Sea of Darkness, but there is a peculiar fitness in the present monarch’s interest in that ocean across which his great predecessor showed the path that led Portugal to greatness, and through Portugal turned the whole world to exploration.[a]

FOOTNOTES

[184] [Partisans of the liberal constitution of 1838.]

[185] [This insurrection was called the War of Maria da Fonte or “Patuleia” and was ended through foreign influence, by the Convention of Granada, June 29th, 1847.]

[186] [“Dom Pedro V, although only sixteen, showed as soon as he ascended the throne a subtlety of spirit, a greatness of soul, and so precocious an intelligence that his people augured the most happy destiny for the country, and in its joy gave him the surname of ‘El Esperanzo,’ their hopes in him being so great. But a short time after (1861) the young prince in his turn also died, smitten in the flower of his age, in the midst of unfinished works.”—Silvercruys.[h]]

A Portuguese Peasant

APPENDIX A. THE INQUISITION[187]

The Inquisition was a judicial police organisation instituted by the Roman church with the concurrence of temporal rulers for the purposes of suppressing heresy and blasphemy.... It has left an odious memory—and not without reason. Anyone who denies that atrocities were committed by the Inquisition must indeed be blinded by a foolish and prejudiced desire to apologise for the deeds of history. But why is it against the Inquisition that the indignation inspired to-day by the memory of early religious persecutions is particularly directed? Thousands of human beings were burned for their faith before the Inquisition existed.... There is one circumstance, however, among others, which explains and justifies the general sentiment, and that is that the Inquisition pretended to be—and was—a regular judicial organisation. The worst excesses are forgotten when they are not systematic. It is the long-continued travesties of justice perpetrated in the service of fanaticism or for reasons of state that arouse the more lasting resentment. Therefore it is that, whatever be their number, the victims of the Roman Inquisition weigh so heavy in the scales of history.—From the article “L’Inquisition,” by C. V. Langlois, in La Grande Revue (Paris, 1901).

All the gods have been addicted to jealousy. Their worshippers have accordingly usually felt and often acted towards heretics with the characteristic ruthlessness of the most merciless of passions.

Egypt was not free from religious reigns of terror, nor yet India, nor China, and even the genial creeds of Greece brought the mildly unorthodox Socrates to his death. Rome was comparatively tolerant of alien religions for political convenience, but there were laws against foreign rites in Rome; the prætor Hispalus was banished for worshipping Jupiter Sabasius, and the temples of Isis and Serapis were thrown down after they had been erected in the city. Augustus and Tiberius proscribed Egyptian and Jewish worship in Rome, the latter sending four thousand Jews to Sardinia. The hideous sufferings of the early Christians and the martyrdoms they underwent in the arenas are well known.

When at length the victims became the victors and the emperor Constantine was persuaded to Christianity, the same intolerant zeal from which the Christians had suffered now turned the tables on the pagans. At this time the Christians had not developed an idolatry of their own such as later brought on the terrors of the war of the image-breakers, so they heaped contempt upon the objects of worship revered by the pagans. The Jews were as usual the first and the worst sufferers. Then, again, as usual, the bitterest of all punishments were spent upon those who differed only slightly in doctrine. Constantine tried confiscation and exile on the Donatists, in 316 A.D.; he branded Arius as an infamous outlaw and had his writings burned.[a]

All the laws of Constantine were subsequently renewed by his successors, and applied with more or less rigour to the different heretical sects. By an edict published in January, 381 A.D., Theodosius the Great deprives heretics of all their churches, and annuls all edicts to the contrary into which preceding emperors had been surprised. In this edict he condemns by name the Photinians, Arians, and Eunomians; he recommends the Nicene Creed, and prohibits all assemblies of heretics within the walls of cities; adding, moreover, that if they attempted to cause any disturbance, they should be even banished from the cities.

In the same year he published a much more severe law against the Manichæans; he declared them infamous; deprived them totally of the power of making a will, or even of succeeding to their paternal or maternal property; and ordered all such property to be confiscated, except in the case of children, who were qualified, if they embraced a more holy religion, to inherit their father’s or mother’s property. Another law of Theodosius treats still more rigorously those Manichæans who disguised themselves under the names of Encratites, Saccophori, and Hydroparastates; he subjected them to capital punishment. To insure the execution of this law the emperor orders the prefect of the prætorium to appoint inquisitors, charged to discover heretics and to inform against them.

This is the first time that the name of an inquisitor against heretics occurs; but the Inquisition itself was of older standing, for we have already seen Constantine institute one precisely similar against the Arians and the other heretics of his time. These severe measures were provoked by the abominable doctrine of the Manichæans, which had drawn down on them, from the very origin of their sect, the severity of even the pagan emperors.[c]

When the Arians secured an emperor of their creed they enforced on the Athanasians a heavy usury of exile, punishment, torture, and even death, till the emperor Julian was driven to exclaim, according to Ammianus,[h] “Even beasts are not so cruel to men as the generality of Christians to each other.”

This work is not the place for an account of all the heresies that have complicated Christianity without cessation. The great feud of iconoclasm has already been described and the major disagreements between the Greek and Roman churches have been recounted in the history of the papacy, where it was also shown how the growth of papal supremacy brought about a constant duel with the kings and the emperor.[a]

Whilst the hierarchy, unmindful of its spiritual calling, was entangling itself in ceaseless warfare, in order to bring all secular power under its sway; whilst the system of ecclesiastical doctrines, with its progressive development, was enclosing the reason with bonds ever narrowing; whilst the means of salvation held out by the church were at the same time ever more and more losing their spiritual character and their moral power, by the one-sided speculations of the schoolmen, and also sinking to a lifeless mechanism in their administration by a coarse priesthood which had lost all respect for morality; lastly, while this tortuous church system, despairing of any spiritual influence, was endeavouring to win consideration for itself by continual acts of external aggression; it could not but be that the rebellious against the church, who in earlier times came forward but one by one, should now be growing more numerous and more powerful.

The earlier divisions in the church employed themselves for the most part only in speculations of the understanding; and even for this very reason the church always succeeded, as soon as she could adopt strong measures, in bringing back the recusants, for the interest taken in a moral conception of nearly equivalent meaning seldom remained for many generations unconquered by persecution. But there lay at the root of the opposition to the church, which now began to feel its way forward, a living moral interest, which felt itself injured by the whole condition of the church; and even for this very reason this opposition was rather strengthened than weakened by the bloodshed resorted to as a means to destroy it. It stood always unconquered, although the opposing parties differed widely from each other in the peculiarities of their systems, and modified them in many ways.

THE CATHARI

At the same time that two frantic enthusiasts, Tanchelm, who wandered about from 1115 to 1124 in the Netherlands, and Eudes de Stella or Eon, who roved till 1148 in Brittany, perplexed the minds of men, two ecclesiastics in southern France, the priest, Pierre de Bruis or Bruys (from 1104-1124, Petrobrusiani) and Henry, formerly a monk of Cluny and deacon (from 1116-1148, Henriciani), declaimed zealously against the mechanical organisation of the church and the immorality of the clergy. But besides these, the Manichæans who trace their origin to the period of time before this were continually on the increase. The most common names for them now, were in Germany Cathari or Ketzer, in Italy Paterini, in France Publicani, though many other names were in use; not only did they make their appearance permanently in most distant quarters of France, but they also planted themselves in the neighbouring countries. The Cathari reached England in the year 1159; they were, however, quickly exterminated.

But the headquarters of the Cathari were those countries in which at that time, along with civic freedom, civilisation, and education, discontent at the wanton and avaricious clergy had grown up in a remarkable manner; such were southern France and northern Italy. In southern France, where Toulouse was their central point, the interest awakened by Pierre de Bruis and Henry worked for their advantage. The synodal decrees issued against them remained without effect, for almost all the barons of this country protected them, and so their numbers here received a very considerable increase. The bishops of the district vainly endeavoured in the council at Lombers (1165) to bring back these bonos homines, as they were here usually called, to the church; little more effect was produced by the cardinal-legate Peter of St. Chrysogonus in Toulouse (1178), and the severe decree of Alexander III, in the Third Lateran Council (1179). Against Roger II, viscount of Béziers, Carcassone, Albi, and Rasez, who protected the Cathari, the cardinal-legate Henry, abbot of Clairvaux, already headed a crusading army (in 1181), but he could produce no lasting effect. [See the history of the Crusades.] In the beginning of the thirteenth century the greater part of the daughters of the nobility were brought up in the educational establishments of the Perfectæ, who lived together in monastic style.

Testing the Book of the True Gospel by Fire. The Book is removed, unscorched, from the Flames

(From a sixteenth century cut in the Louvre)

THE WALDENSES

From the scriptural and reforming turn of mind which had been spread by means of Pierre de Bruis and Henry, along with the sect of the Cathari, in southern France, there arose from the year 1170 the party of the Waldenses [or Vaudois]:[188] free from all speculative enthusiasm they consecrated all their energies to realise once again apostolic Christendom, with all its simplicity and all its inward devotion. About that year began the founder of the sect, Peter Waldo or Waldensis from Lyons, with several companions, to preach the Gospel in the manner of the apostles. At first they had so little intention of separating from the church that, when the archbishop of Lyons forbade them to preach, they petitioned the pope Alexander III in 1179 for his permission. But when Lucius III (in 1184) pronounced sentence of excommunication against them, then they thought they must obey God rather than man, and withdrew from a church which cursed that which seemed to them a call from heaven. At first the only question at issue between them and the Roman church was on the exclusive right of the clergy to preach; and they spread themselves more easily in those countries where the deficiency of the church was exposed plainly enough for the conviction of all, but where many still felt themselves not less repulsed by the Catharism, which was set up in opposition; for instance in France, particularly the southern parts, down as far as Aragon, and in northern Italy, particularly in Milan. And in every place where they came fresh zeal went forth from them among the people, to learn to understand Holy Scripture for themselves.

The earlier measures taken against the heretics in southern France had caused so little hindrance to their extension that they constituted the dominant party at the end of the twelfth century in many parts of this country. For this reason Innocent III, immediately after his accession to the see in 1198, was induced to send legates thither armed with the most unlimited powers for the suppression of heretics. After they had produced, by forcible measures, effects more apparent than real, Diego, bishop of Osma, with Dominic, the subprior of his cathedral, persuaded them in the year 1206 to adopt a more apostolic way of proceeding. Now the two legates, the Cistercians Peter of Castelnau and Raoul, with these two Spaniards, wandered barefoot from place to place and held conferences with the heretics on the disputed points (1206 and 1207). When however all this continued without effect, they returned again to the old method with tenfold cruelty.

CRUSADE AGAINST THE ALBIGENSES

Raymond VI. count of Toulouse, though outwardly a Catholic, had fallen out with the ambitious legate Peter of Castelnau. So when the latter in 1208 was murdered by an unknown hand, the monks threw the blame on the count; and Innocent III seized this opportunity to have a crusade preached against him by Arnold, abbot of Citeaux; for which national jealousy and the allurements of the delicious south procured great popularity in northern France. In order to avert the threatening danger, Raymond sought for reconciliation. Innocent granted this with a view to weaken the resistance of the victims by division. When, in June, 1209, the count submitted to the most humiliating conditions which Milo the papal legate prescribed to him, and even took the cross himself from his hands, he only effected the delay of the blow destined for himself, that it might strike with so much the greater certainty.

The crusading army assembled against the Albigenses, with the frantic Arnold[189] as papal legate at its head, first marched upon the domain of Raymond Roger, viscount of Béziers (1209). After the fall of Béziers and Carcassonne, the devastated land was conquered. But among the noble crusaders only Simon de Montfort was willing to receive the spoil from the legate. Next they turned against Raymond of Toulouse, who had been spared till now. Extravagant demands, which he could not satisfy, formed the pretext for excommunicating and attacking him (1211). The pope himself was no longer able to check his own instruments; the crusade was preached with fresh ardour; the territory of the count was conquered by Simon de Montfort, and formally adjudged to him by a council at Montpellier in 1215 for his own possession.

Innocent III did not only confirm this grant at the great Lateran Council in this same year, but also held up the principle of the method of procedure hitherto adopted against these countries, as a precedent in similar cases. Then at length Raymond sought for help in the attachment of his former subjects, and after Simon’s death (1218) he made a considerable advance in the reconquest of his country, although the pope, without ceasing, used every means of resistance. When, after the death of Raymond VI (1222), Raymond VII regained his whole ancestral heritage, and had even forced his enemy Amaury, son of Simon, to a complete surrender, then Honorius III, elsewhere so mild, still thought it due to the papal honour to hate the father in the son, however guiltless. He stirred up Louis VIII, king of France, to conquer Toulouse for himself in a new crusade. Hostilities began on the 6th of June, 1226, but they were greatly crippled by the death of Louis VIII on the 18th of November of the same year; at length Raymond obtained peace on the hardest conditions, by which a part of his domain passed into the power of France, and the annexation of the rest to this kingdom was furthered.

THE INQUISITION ESTABLISHED

The unhappiness of this country was accomplished by the horrors of the Inquisition which now rose up.[190] In order to perpetuate the work of blood begun by the papal legate in a permanent institution, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 made it the chief business of the episcopal synodal tribunals to search out and punish heretics; and the Council of Toulouse (1229) achieved the organisation of this episcopal Inquisition. However, soon after it was in fact almost annihilated; for in 1232 and 1233 Gregory IX appointed the Dominicans to be the standing papal inquisitors, and forthwith they began their hideous work in the countries tainted with heresy. In order that the church may not seem to soil herself with blood, the secular princes must serve the office as executioner. Louis IX in 1228, Frederick II in 1232, the ill-fated Raymond VII in 1233, each passed the requisite laws.

That the new Inquisition might strike more of the guilty, a way of proceeding was prescribed for it, to which of necessity many of the guiltless must fall victims. Thus armed, this monster raged with most frightful fury in southern France, where the heretics had only learned from former events to keep themselves more secret. Germany for a short space of time (1231-1233) was taught to know the Inquisition in its maddest rage in Conrad of Marburg, and in the Dominican monk Conrad Dorso who came to Strasburg; and at the same time acquired the most fearful experience of the abuse of the new laws against heretics in the crusade on the Stedinger, the lovers of freedom, in 1234. But by these events so universal a resistance against every Inquisition was aroused, that Germany for a long time after remained free from this monster.

In the twelfth century the executions of heretics were for the most part the handiwork of the irritated populace, and even found much opposition among the clergy. However, the theory of religion, which in the thirteenth century was especially flexible, in this case also adapted itself to the practice of the church by the vindication of the new laws against heresy.

Another no less evil result of this period, so fraught with outrage, was that the laity were entirely forbidden Holy Scripture, so that the possession of a translation of the Bible was forthwith accounted a token of heresy, and only translations prepared for the purpose of supporting the Romish church were tolerated.

The regulations which were adopted against the heretics, and the cruel manner in which their so-called conversion was pursued, could only produce exactly the contrary effect to that they had in view upon their convictions. This, however, they did accomplish, that the persecuted persons, filled with exaggerated hatred and horror of the church, spread themselves with the greatest secrecy over other countries also. Thus in the thirteenth century public feeling was roused ever more and more against Rome, against the clergy, and against the abuses of the church, and from time to time there rose a stirring sense of the necessity of a reformation to counteract them. On comparison of the morals of the clergy with those of the heretics, the advantage is decidedly in favour of the latter; so it cannot seem strange if in the thirteenth century we find the earlier parties more widely spread than before, and fresh sects springing up alongside of them. Yet the number of new names of heretics in this period is far greater than that of new parties.

Costume of a Person condemned to be burned, but who confessed before his Condemnation

(From Historia Inquisitionis, 1592)

The Cathari, or as they are now more commonly called the Albigenses or Bulgarians, did not only maintain their ground in southern France, but increased in number chiefly in upper Italy, where the political distraction of the country was advantageous to them, and where Milan continued to be their principal abode. But they spread themselves also into the rest of Italy as far as Spain, and throughout Germany; they were very numerous in Bosnia and the adjoining countries, often the prevailing party, and they maintained in all lands a close connection with each other.

When the persecutions began, the Waldenses were standing so near the Catholic church that a reconciliation seemed to be by no means difficult. But the horrors of the persecution had no further effect on the Waldenses than to confirm them more and more in their anti-hierarchical system, and to place their doctrine and ecclesiastical constitution on a more independent footing. The more plainly their departure from church teaching could vindicate itself as a purification of the church, the more easy acceptation they found with the thoughtful of their time. As early as in the thirteenth century they showed themselves in the valleys of Piedmont, in which they have maintained themselves until now. Still, not only did they spread in other countries, as for instance as far as Germany, but also put in circulation among numbers, who did not come over to their society, ideas unfavourable to the prevailing faith of the church.

Besides the old sects, new ones were engendered in the thirteenth century. The pantheistic system introduced by Amalric of Bène, after the persecution it underwent in Paris in the year 1210, only spread more widely than before. In the course of the thirteenth century its disciples might be found in different places; at the end of this century they were already so numerous among the Beghards on the Rhine that the people understood them only to be meant by the name of Beghards, although they called themselves brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit. In the beginning of the fourteenth century they made their appearance also in Italy.

Other sects pass quickly in review before us. As the universal discontent of the advancing tyranny of the hierarchy aroused isolated resistances in England and in France, so the ill usage of the Hohenstaufen family gave rise to a sect in Halle in Swabia (about 1248), which declared the hierarchy to be abolished in consequence of its moral corruption of the entire purpose of the church. After the extermination of the Hohenstaufen family the detestation caused by this deed of the hierarchy was maintained for centuries by the expectation that one time an emperor Frederick would wreak vengeance in blood on the papacy. This expectation also found place among the manifold superstitions, chiefly borrowed from the Fratricelli, with which the apostolic brothers from 1260 to 1307 disquieted the north of Italy.[d]

The statutes of the Council of Toulouse (1229), framed after the successful termination of the war against the Albigenses, in order to absolutely extirpate every lingering vestige of heresy, form the code of persecution, which not merely aimed at suppressing all public teaching but the more secluded and secret freedom of thought. It was a system which penetrated into the most intimate sanctuary of domestic life; and made delation not merely a merit and a duty, but an obligation also, enforced by tremendous penalties.

The archbishops, bishops, and exempt abbots were to appoint in every parish one priest, and three or more lay inquisitors, to search all houses and buildings, in order to detect heretics, and to denounce them to the archbishop or bishop, the lord, or his bailiff, so as to insure their apprehension. The lords were to make the same inquisition in every part of their estates. Whoever was convicted of harbouring a heretic forfeited the land to his lord, and was reduced to personal slavery. If he was guilty of such concealment from negligence, not from intention, he received proportionate punishment. Every house in which a heretic was found was to be razed to the ground, the farm confiscated. The bailiff who should not be active in detecting heretics was to lose his office, and be incapacitated from holding it in future. Heretics, however, were not to be judged but by the bishop or some ecclesiastical person.

Anyone might seize a heretic on the lands of another. Heretics who recanted were to be removed from their homes, and settled in Catholic cities; to wear two crosses of a different colour from their dress, one on the right side, one on the left. They were incapable of any public function unless reconciled by the pope or by his legate. Those who recanted from fear of death were to be immured forever. All persons, males of the age of fourteen, females of twelve, were to take an oath of abjuration of heresy, and of their Catholic faith; if absent, and not appearing within fifteen days, they were held suspected of heresy. All persons were to confess, and communicate three times a year, or were in like manner under suspicion of heresy. No layman was permitted to have any book of the Old or New Testament, especially in a translation, unless perhaps the Psalter, with a breviary, or the Hours of the Virgin. No one suspected of heresy could practise as a physician. Care was to be taken that no heretic had access to sick or dying persons. All wills were to be made in the presence of a priest. No office of trust was to be held by one in evil fame as a heretic. Those were in evil fame who were so by common report, or so declared by good and grave witnesses before the bishop.

But statutes of persecution always require new statutes rising above each other in regular gradations of rigour and cruelty. The legate found the canons of Toulouse to be eluded or inefficient. He summoned a council at Melun, attended by the archbishop of Narbonne and other prelates. The unhappy count of Toulouse was compelled to frame the edicts of this council into laws for his dominions. The first provision showed that persecution had wrought despair. It was directed against those who had murdered, or should murder, or conceal the murderers of persecutors of heretics. A reward of one mark was set on the head of every heretic, to be paid by the town, or village, or district to the captor.

It was evident that the heretics had now begun to seek concealment in cabins, in caves, and rocks, and forests; not merely was every house in which one should be seized to be razed to the ground, but all suspected caves or hiding-places were to be blocked up; with a penalty of twenty-five livres of Toulouse to the lord on whose estate such houses or places of concealment of evil report should be found. Those who did not assist in the capture of heretics were liable to punishment. If any one was detected after death to have been a heretic, his property was confiscated. Those who had made over their estates in trust, before they became heretics, nevertheless forfeited such estates. Those who attempted to elude the law by moving about, under pretence of trade or pilgrimage, were ordered to render an account of their absence. A council at Béziers (1233) enforced upon the clergy, under pain of suspension or of deprivation, the denunciation of all who should not attend divine service in their churches on the appointed days, especially those suspected of heresy.[g]

METHOD OF PROCEDURE WITH A SUSPECT

The method of proceeding in the courts of the Inquisition was at first simple, and not materially different from that in the ordinary courts. But gradually the Dominicans, guided by experience, rendered it far more complex; and so shaped their proceedings that the mode of trying heretical causes (if the phrase be allowable) became altogether different from that usually practised in judicial proceedings. For these good friars, being wholly unskilled in forensic affairs, and acquainted with no other tribunal than that which in the Romish church is called the penitentiary tribunal, regulated these new courts of the Inquisition, as far as possible, according to the plan of those religious proceedings. And hence arose that strange system of jurisprudence, bearing in many respects the most striking features of injustice and wrong. Whoever duly considers this history of their origin will be able to account for many things that seem unsuitable, absurd, and contrary to justice, in the mode of proceeding against offenders in the courts of the Inquisition.[e]

When the Inquisition discovered a transgressor of their laws, either by common report, or by their spies, or by an informer, he was cited three times to appear before them; and if he did not appear, he was forthwith condemned. It was safest to appear on the first citation; because the longer a man delayed the more guilty he would be; and the Inquisition had their spies, and a thousand concealed ways for getting an absconding heretic in their power.

When a supposed heretic was once in the hands of the Inquisition, no one dared to inquire after him, or write to him, or intercede for him. When everything belonging to the person seized was in their hands, then the process began; and it was protracted in the most tedious manner.

Costume of a condemned Person who confessed, after Conviction

(From Historia Inquisitionis, 1592)

After many days, or perhaps months, which the accused dragged out in a loathsome dungeon, the keeper of the prison asked him, as it were accidentally, if he wished to have a hearing. When he appeared before his judges, they inquired, just as if they knew nothing about him, who he was, and what he wanted. If he wished to be informed what offence he had committed, he was admonished to confess his faults himself. If he confessed nothing, time was given him for reflection, and he was remanded to prison. If, after a long time allowed him, he still confessed nothing, he must swear to answer truly to all the questions put to him. If he would not swear, he was condemned without further process. If he swore to give answer, he was questioned in regard to his whole life, without making known to him his offence. He was, however, promised a pardon if he would truly confess his offences; an artifice this, by which his judges often learned more than they knew before against him.

At last the charges against him were presented to him in writing, and counsel also was assigned him, who, however, only advised him to confess fully his faults. The accuser and informer against him were not made known to him, but the real charges against him were put into his hands. He was allowed time for his defence; but his accuser, and the witnesses against him, he could know only by conjecture. Sometimes he was so fortunate as to discover who they were; but rarely were they presented before him, and confronted with him.

If his answers did not satisfy the judges, or if the allegations against him were not adequately proved, resort was had to torture. Each of these tortures was continued as long as, in the judgment of the physician of the Inquisition, the man was able to endure them. He might now confess what he would, but still the torture would be repeated, first to discover the object and motives of the acknowledged offence, and then to make him expose his accomplices.

If, when tortured, he confessed nothing, many snares were laid to elicit from him unconsciously his offence. The conclusion was that the accused, when he seemed to have satisfied the judges, was condemned, according to the measure of his offence, to death, or to perpetual imprisonment, or to the galleys, or to be scourged; and he was delivered over to the civil authorities, who were intreated to spare his life, as the church never thirsted for blood; but yet they would experience persecution if they did not carry the decisions of the court into execution.

What an infernal device is the Inquisition! What innocent person could escape destruction, if an inquisitor were disposed to destroy him? A heretic, even if he had been acquitted by the pope himself, might still be condemned to die by the Inquisition. An equivocal promise of pardon might be given to induce him to make confession, but the promise must not be fulfilled when the object of it was obtained. Even death did not free a person from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition; for a deceased heretic must be burned in effigy. Would not every feeling of humanity be outraged by following such horrid principles? The inquisitorial judges did not deny that by such proceedings many innocent persons unavoidably perished, along with the guilty; but this did not trouble them. “Better,” they said, “that a hundred innocent persons should be cut off and go to paradise, than let one heretic escape, who might poison many souls and plunge them into endless perdition.”[f]

JOHN FOXE ON THE EVILS OF THE INQUISITION

“The abuse of this Inquisition is most execrable. If any word shall pass out of the mouth of any, which may be taken in evil part; yea, though no word be spoken, yet if they bear any grudge or evil will against the party, incontinent they command him to be taken, and put in a horrible prison, and then find out crimes against him at leisure, and in the meantime no man living is so hardy as once to open his mouth for him. If the father speak one word for his child, he is also taken and cast into prison as a favourer of heretics; neither is it permitted to any person to enter in to the prisoner; but there he is alone, in a place where he cannot see so much as the ground where he is, and is not suffered either to read or write, but there endureth in darkness palpable, in horrors infinite, in fear miserable, wrestling with the assaults of death.

“By this it may be esteemed what trouble and sorrow, what pensive sighs and cogitations they sustain, who are not thoroughly instructed in holy doctrine. Add, moreover, to these distresses and horrors of the prison, the injuries, threats, whippings, and scourgings, irons, tortures, and racks which they endure. Sometimes also they are brought out, and showed forth in some higher place to the people, as a spectacle of rebuke and infamy. And thus are they detained there, some many years, and murdered by long torments, and whole days together treated much more cruelly, out of all comparison, than if they were in the hangman’s hands to be slain at once. During all this time, what is done in the process no person knoweth, but only the holy fathers and the tormentors, who are sworn to execute the torments. All this is done in secret, and (as great mysteries) pass not the hands of these holy ones. And after all these torments so many years endured in the prison, if any man shall be saved, it must be by guessing; for all the proceedings of the court of that execrable Inquisition are open to no man, but all is done in hugger-mugger and in close corners, by ambages, by covert ways, and secret counsels. The accuser is secret, the crime secret, the witness secret, whatsoever is done is secret, neither is the poor prisoner ever advised of anything. If he can guess who accused him, whereof and wherefore, he may be pardoned peradventure of his life; but this is very seldom, and yet he shall not incontinent be set at liberty before he hath long time endured infinite torments; and this is called their “penitence,” and so is he let go; and yet not so but that he is enjoined, before he pass the inquisitor’s hands, that he shall wear a garment of yellow colours for a note of public infamy to him and his whole race. And if he cannot guess right, showing to the inquisitors by whom he was accused, whereof, and wherefore (as is before touched), incontinent the horrible sentence of condemnation is pronounced against him, that he shall be burned for an obstinate heretic. And yet the sentence is not executed by and by, but after he hath endured imprisonment in some heinous prison.”[j]

HOW A PENITENT WAS TREATED

Costume of a condemned Person who had not confessed

(From Historia Inquisitionis, 1592)

It was a peculiar horror of the Inquisition that while almost anyone might be haled before it, even on an anonymous complaint, hardly anyone ever escaped certain penalties. If the fate of the wretch was heavy, who, being innocent of heresy would not confess his guilt and therefore was tortured until he confessed imaginary guilt, and was then burned to death, hardly less was the misery of the victim who repented or recanted and was freed from the death penalty. The penalty for recantation can hardly be more plainly stated than an actual order quoted by Llorente,[k] giving the punishment awarded by St. Dominic himself to a repentant heretic even before the actual organisation of the Inquisition.[a]

“To all faithful Christians to whom these presents may come. Friar Dominic, canon of Osma, the least of the preachers, greeting in Christ. By the authority of the lord abbot of Cister (Citeaux), legate of the apostolic see (whose power we exercise) we have reconciled the bearer of these presents, Poncio Roger, converted from the sect of the heretics by the grace of God; and we have enjoined him in virtue of the sworn promise which he has made to comply with our precepts that on three Sunday festivals he be led, stripped, by a priest, who shall scourge him from the gates of the city to those of the church.

“We further lay upon him, by way of penance, that he abstain from eating flesh meat, eggs, cheese, and other foods derived from animals, forever. Save only on the day of the resurrection, of Pentecost, and of the Lord’s nativity, on which days we command him to partake thereof as a mark of his detestation of his former error. He shall observe four Lents in the year, abstaining from fish, and shall forever fast and abstain from fish, oil, and wine three days in the week, save only when physical infirmities or the labours of his station require a dispensation. He shall wear religious garments both in shape and colour, with two small crosses sewn on each side of his breast. He shall hear mass every day when occasion serves, and on feast days he shall assist at vespers in the church. Every day he shall recite the Hours for the day and night, and shall repeat the prayer ‘Our Father’ seven times during the day, ten times in the night, and twenty times at midnight. He shall observe chastity, and shall present this letter one day, in the morning, every month, in the town of Cereri to his parish priest, whom we enjoin to watch over the conduct of Poncio, who shall faithfully observe all that is here expressed until the lord legate shall manifest his will. And should Poncio fail in his observance we command that he be held perjured, heretic, and excommunicated, and be separated from the company of the faithful.”[k]

THE HISTORY OF TORTURE

If the above document gives a foreshadowing of the rigours of the Inquisition towards those whose only error was a temporary wavering of opinion, what can be expected as the fate of those who persisted in their error, or denied it in spite of witnesses?—surely some distinguished form of punishment. Death was not enough, for thus the heretic instantly escaped the clutches of the disciplinarians. Torture was the resource. Before taking up this blackest subject on the page of human history, it is desirable to trace briefly its evolution, for torture was by no means the invention or monopoly of the Inquisition, though it has come to be thought so in the popular mind.

It is only justice to the church and to the zealots of that time to emphasise the fact that when the inquisitors sought a tool for special punishment, they found it ready at hand, made familiar and natural by the civil law of the day. Furthermore torture was a venerable institution.

The Greeks used torture for cross-examining slaves and at times nonresidents and even free citizens; the Romans under the republic practised it on slaves, and under the empire on citizens; the man accused of treason was always liable to it, as well as those whose testimony was open to the charge of confusion or inconsistency. Even in Cicero’s time there was a grim machinery for the purpose. Torture in England though not legal was practised, as it was on the continent, and in Scotland where it had the best civil sanction. Even in the United States there is one instance of torture, but that was during the Salem witchcraft insanity, though, like the inquisitorial processes, it was conducted by the church and civil government, and like so many of the inquisitorial punishments was due to an accusation of sorcery. The belief in witchcraft, now obsolete among even the common people, was once supported by a papal bull and by Sprenger’s[l] tremendous work, called The Hammer of Witches, which Henry C. Lea[n] calls “the most portentous monument of superstition which the world has produced.”

The civil powers had then used torture from time immemorial. The people were as used to it in that day as we of to-day are to certain torments of animals cooked alive or otherwise worried to death. The crime of treason was specifically devoted to torture. As heresy was in the days of temporal church power distinctly a crime of treason, the secular authorities were ordered to punish it. In fact the church took the stand that it was simply hunting for justice, and when it found the accused innocent, it technically “intervened” in his behalf and “stayed the arm of the law.”[191]

But while using these facts to prevent us from thinking of the inquisitors as men of diabolical invention unlike their kind or their time in manner of thought or action, and while giving these facts their due weight in palliation of the personal offences of the inquisitors against fundamental principles of justice and mercy, we must not forget that, though the church took the idea of torture from the civil law and compelled the civil officials to administer it, yet the church enlarged the methods of torment and the causes for its use; the church forced upon the law and upon the monarchs many extremes of cruelty to which they were reluctant and against which they often mutinied.

And finally, seeing that the best men of the time were supposed to enter the church, and that the church appointed as inquisitors only its most exemplary members,[192] the defence of the Inquisition by some of its apologists on the ground of its origin in the customs of the period, really amounts to the astounding implication that the best men of the church were only a little worse than the average of their time.

It is stupefying to reflect on the character of the torments which crowds of people once watched for hours with joy, and which the supposedly best and gentlest spirits, the church fathers, inflicted day after day with all the fascination of ingenuity put to its utmost test. Such torments we of to-day can neither approve nor permit, and can hardly read of without nausea. None the less, lest we forget the horrors to which the doctrine of religious intolerance can drive mankind, and lest we lose the lesson of all history that no excess of punishment ever yet stopped the human hunger for liberty of thought and action, it will be well to place here a few of the more authentic instances of inquisitorial outrage.

We may well begin with the description from contemporaries, such as the history of Gonsalvius Montanus[o] or Gonzalez de Montés, a Spanish Protestant, who narrowly escaped death, whose friend was martyred, and who published a book on the Inquisition at Heidelberg in 1597. He is quoted with others in the history of Limborch,[b] which was published in 1692, and based almost solely on the church’s own accounts.[a]

A Contemporary Account of the Preliminaries to Torture

The place of torture in the Spanish Inquisition is generally an underground and very dark room, to which one enters through several doors. There is a tribunal erected in it, where the inquisitor, inspector, and secretary sit. When the candles are lighted, and the person to be tortured is brought in, the executioner, who was waiting for the other, makes an astonishing and dreadful appearance. He is covered all over with a black linen garment down to his feet, and tied close to his body. His head and face are all hid with a long black cowl, only two little holes being left in it for him to see through. All this is intended to strike the miserable wretch with greater terror in mind and body, when he sees himself going to be tortured by the hands of one who thus looks like the very devil.[o]

Whilst the officers are getting things ready for the torture, the bishop and inquisitor by themselves, and other good men zealous for the faith, endeavour to persuade the person to be tortured freely to confess the truth, and if he will not, they order the officers to strip him, who do it in an instant. Clergymen however must not be tortured by a lay officer or torturer unless they cannot find any clergymen who know how to do it, or are willing, because it would be in vain for the judges to order any clergyman or monk to the torture, if there was nobody to inflict it; and therefore in such a case it is usual to torture them by lay officers.

Whilst the person to be tortured is stripping, he is persuaded to confess the truth. If he refuses it, he is taken aside by certain good men, and urged to confess, and told by them that if he confesses, he will not be put to death, but only be made to swear that he will not return to the heresy he hath abjured. The inquisitor and bishop promise the same, unless the person be a relapse.

If he is persuaded neither by threatenings nor promises to confess his crime, he is tortured either more lightly or grievously, according as his crime requires, and frequently interrogated during the torture, upon those articles for which he is put to it, beginning with the lesser ones, because they think he will sooner confess the lesser matters than the greater. According to the directions of Royas,[u] one of the Spanish inquisitors: “The criminals are with great care and diligence to be admonished by the inquisitors, and especially when they are under torture, that they should not by any means bear false witness against themselves or others, through fear of punishment or torments, but speak the truth only. Nor may the inquisitors promise pardon or forgiveness of the offence, to compel the criminals to confess crimes which they have not committed, out of their great zeal to inquire out the truth. And such a false confession the accused person may safely revoke.”

The inquisitors themselves must interrogate the criminals during their torture, nor can they commit this business to others, unless they are engaged in other important affairs, in which case they may depute certain good and skilful men for the purpose. Although in other nations criminals are publicly tortured, yet in Spain it is forbidden by the royal law for any to be present whilst they are torturing, besides the judges, secretaries, and torturers. The inquisitors must also choose proper torturers, born of ancient Christians, who must be bound by oath by no means to discover their secrets, nor to report anything that is said. The judges also usually protest that if the criminal should happen to die under his torture, or by reason of it, or should suffer the loss of any of his limbs, it is not to be imputed to them, but to the criminal himself, who will not plainly confess the truth before he is tortured. A heretic may not only be interrogated concerning himself, but in general also concerning his companions and accomplices in his crime, his teachers and his disciples, for he ought to discover them, though he be not interrogated; but when he is interrogated concerning them, he is much more obliged to discover them than his accomplices in any other the most grievous crimes.

A person also suspected of heresy, and fully convicted, may be tortured upon another account, i.e., to discover his companions and accomplices in the crime. This must be done when he hesitates, or it is half fully proved at least that he was actually present with them, or he hath such companions and accomplices in his crime; for in this case he is not tortured as a criminal, but as a witness. But he who makes full confession of himself is not tortured upon a different account; whereas if he be a negative, he may be tortured upon another account, to discover his accomplices and other heretics, though he be full convicted himself, and it be half fully proved that he hath such accomplices. The reason of the difference in these cases is this, because he who confesses against himself would certainly much rather confess against other heretics if he knew them. But it is otherwise when the criminal is a negative.

Whilst these things are doing, the notary writes everything down in the process, as what tortures were inflicted, concerning what matters the prisoner was interrogated, and what he answered. If by these tortures they cannot draw from him a confession, they show him other kind of tortures and tell him he must undergo all of them, unless he confesses the truth. If neither by this means they can extort the truth, they may, to terrify him and engage him to confess, assign the second or third day to continue, not to repeat, the torture, till he hath undergone all those kinds of them to which he is condemned.

The degrees of tortures formerly used were five, which were inflicted in their turn, and are described by Julius Clarus[v] [member of the council to Philip II of Spain]. “Know therefore,” says he, “that there are five degrees of torture, viz., first, the being threatened to be tortured; secondly, being carried to the place of torture; thirdly, by stripping and binding; fourthly, the being hoisted upon the rack; fifthly, squassation.”

The stripping is performed without any regard to humanity or honour, not only to men, but to women and virgins, though the most virtuous and chaste, of whom they have sometimes many in their prison. For they cause them to be stripped, even to their very shifts, which they afterwards take off, forgive the expression, and then put on them straight linen drawers, and then make their arms naked quite up to their shoulders.

As to squassation, it is thus performed: the prisoner hath his hands bound behind his back, and weights tied to his feet, and then he is drawn up on high till his head reaches the very pulley. He is kept hanging in this manner for some time, that by the greatness of the weight hanging at his feet all his joints and limbs may be dreadfully stretched, and on a sudden he is let down with a jerk, by the slacking the rope, but kept from coming quite to the ground, by which terrible shake his arms and legs are all disjointed, whereby he is put to the most exquisite pain; the shock which he receives by the sudden stop of the fall, and the weight at his feet stretching his whole body more intensely and cruelly.[b]

The inquisitors sometimes shamefully and rashly proceed to the torture of innocent persons, as will evidently appear by one instance, not to mention more, given us by Gonsalvius.[o] “They apprehended in the Inquisition at Seville a noble lady, Joan Bohorquia, the wife of Francis Varquius, a very eminent man, and lord of Higuera, and daughter of Peter Garsia Xeresius, a wealthy citizen of Seville. The occasion of her imprisonment was that her sister, Mary Bohorquia, a young lady of eminent piety, who was afterwards burned for her pious confession, had declared in her torture that she had several times conversed with her sister concerning her own doctrine. When she was first imprisoned, she was about six months gone with child, upon which account she was not so straightly confined, nor used with that cruelty which the other prisoners were treated with, out of regard to the infant she carried in her.

“Eight days after her delivery, they took the child from her, and on the fifteenth shut her close up, and made her undergo the fate of the other prisoners, and began to manage her with their usual arts and rigour. In so dreadful a calamity she had only this comfort, that a certain pious young woman, who was afterwards burned for her religion by the inquisitors, was allowed her for her companion. This young creature was, on a certain day, carried out to her torture, and being returned from it into her jail, she was so shaken, and had all her limbs so miserably disjointed, that when she laid upon her bed of rushes it rather increased her misery than gave her rest, so that she could not turn herself without the most excessive pain. In this condition, as Bohorquia had it not in her power to show her any, or but very little outward kindness, she endeavoured to comfort her mind with great tenderness. The girl had scarce begun to recover from her torture, when Bohorquia was carried out to the same exercise, and was tortured with such diabolical cruelty upon the rack, that the rope pierced and cut into the very bones in several places, and in this manner she was brought back to prison, just ready to expire, the blood immediately running out of her mouth in great plenty. Undoubtedly they had burst her bowels, insomuch that the eighth day after her torture she died.

“And when, after all, they could not procure sufficient evidence to condemn her, though sought after and procured by all their inquisitorial arts, yet as the accused person was born in that place, where they were obliged to give some account of the affair to the people, and indeed could not by any means dissemble it, in the first act of triumph appointed her death, they commanded her sentence to be pronounced in these words: ‘Because this lady died in prison (without doubt suppressing the causes of it), and was found to be innocent upon inspecting and diligently examining her cause, therefore the holy tribunal pronounces her free from all charges brought against her by the fiscal, and absolving her from any further process, doth restore her both as to her innocence and reputation, and commands all her effects, which had been confiscated, to be restored to those to whom they of right belonged,’ etc. And thus, after they had murdered her by torture with savage cruelty, they pronounced her innocent!”[o]

LIMBORCH’S ACCOUNT OF THE FATE OF A JEW

The method of torturing and the degree of tortures used in the Spanish Inquisition will be well understood from the history of Isaac Orobio, a Jew, and doctor of physic, who was accused to the Inquisition as a Jew by a certain Moor, his servant, who had by his order before this been whipped for thieving; and four years after this he was again accused by a certain enemy of his for another fact, which would have proved him a Jew. But Orobio obstinately denied that he was one. I will here give the account of his torture, as I had it from his own mouth. After three whole years which he had been in jail, and several examinations, and the discovery of the crimes to him of which he was accused, in order to his confession and his constant denial of them, he was at length carried out of his jail, and through several turnings brought to the place of torture. This was towards the evening.

It was a large underground room, arched, and the walls covered with black hangings. The candlesticks were fastened to the wall, and the whole room enlightened with candles placed in them. At one end of it there was an enclosed place like a closet, where the inquisitor and notary sat at a table, so that the place seemed to him as the very mansion of death, everything appearing so terrible and awful. Here the inquisitor again admonished him to confess the truth before his torments began.

When he answered he had told the truth, the inquisitor gravely protested that, since he was so obstinate as to suffer the torture, the Holy Office would be innocent, if he should shed his blood, or even expire in his torments. When he had said this, he put a linen garment over his body, and drew it so very close on each side, as almost squeezed him to death. When he was almost dying, they slackened at once the sides of the garment, and after he began to breathe again, the sudden alteration put him to the most grievous anguish and pain. When he had overcome this torture, the same admonition was repeated, that he would confess the truth in order to prevent further torment.

And as he persisted in his denial, they tied his thumbs so very tightly with small cords as made the extremities of them greatly swell, and caused the blood to spurt out from under his nails. After this he was placed with his back against a wall and fixed upon a little bench. Into the wall were fastened little iron pulleys, through which there were ropes drawn, and tied round his body in several places, and especially his arms and legs. The executioner drawing these ropes with great violence, fastened his body with them to the wall so that his hands and feet, and especially his fingers and toes being bound so straightly with them, put him to the most exquisite pain, and seemed to him just as though he had been dissolving in flames. In the midst of these torments the torturer, of a sudden, drew the bench from under him, so that the miserable wretch hung by the cords without anything to support him, and by the weight of his body drew the knots yet much closer.

After this a new kind of torture succeeded. There was an instrument like a small ladder, made of two upright pieces of wood and five cross ones sharpened before. This the torturer placed over against him, and by a certain proper motion struck it with great violence against both his shins, so that he received upon each of them at once five violent strokes, which put him to such intolerable anguish that he fainted away. After he came to himself, they inflicted on him the last torture.

The torturer tied ropes about Orobio’s wrists and then put those ropes about his own back, which was covered with leather, to prevent his hurting himself. Then falling backwards and putting his feet up against the wall, he drew them with all his might till they cut through Orobio’s flesh, even to the very bones; and this torture was repeated thrice, the ropes being tied about his arms about the distance of two fingers’ breadth from the former wound, and drawn with the same violence.

But it happened that, as the ropes were drawing the second time, they slid into the first wound, which caused so great an effusion of blood that he seemed to be dying. Upon this the physician and surgeon, who are always ready, were sent for out of a neighbouring apartment to ask their advice whether the torture could be continued without danger of death, lest the ecclesiastical judges should be guilty of an irregularity if the criminal should die in his torments.

They, who were far from being enemies to Orobio, answered that he had strength enough to endure the rest of the torture, and hereby preserved him from having the tortures he had already endured repeated on him, because his sentence was that he should suffer them all at one time, one after another. So that if at any time they are forced to leave off through fear of death, all the tortures, even those already suffered, must be successively inflicted to satisfy the sentence. Upon this the torture was repeated the third time, and then it ended. After this he was bound up in his own clothes and carried back to his prison, and was scarce healed of his wounds in seventy days. And, inasmuch as he made no confession under his torture, he was condemned, not as one convicted, but suspected of Judaism, to wear for two whole years the infamous habit called sambenito, and it was further decreed that after that term he should suffer perpetual banishment from the kingdom of Seville.

OTHER FORMS OF TORTURE

Gonsalvius[o] tells us of another kind of torture. There is a wooden bench, which they call “the wooden horse,” made hollow like a trough, so as to contain a man lying on his back at full length, about the middle of which there is a round bar laid across, upon which the back of the person is placed, so that he lies upon the bar instead of being let into the bottom of the trough, with his feet much higher than his head. As he is lying in this posture, his arms, thighs, and shins are tied round with small cords or strings, which being drawn with screws at proper distance from each other, cut into the very bones, so as to be no longer discerned.

The Tormento di Toca

Besides this, the torturer throws over his mouth and nostrils a thin cloth, so that he is scarce able to breathe through them, and in the meanwhile a small stream of water like a thread, not drop by drop, falls from on high upon the mouth of the person lying in this miserable condition and so easily sinks down the thin cloth to the bottom of his throat, so that there is no possibility of breathing, his mouth being stopped with water and his nostrils with the cloth, so that the poor wretch is in the same agony as persons ready to die, and breathing out their last. When this cloth is drawn out of his throat, as it often is, that he may answer to the questions, it is all wet with water and blood, and is like pulling his bowels through his mouth.

The Chafing-dish; The Water-cure

There is also another kind of torture peculiar to this tribunal, which they call the fire. They order a large iron chafing-dish full of lighted charcoal to be brought in and held close to the soles of the tortured person’s feet, greased over with lard, so that the heat of the fire may more quickly pierce through them.

This is inquisition by torture, when there is only half full proof of their crime. However, at other times torments are sometimes inflicted upon persons condemned to death, as a punishment preceding that of death. Of this we have a remarkable instance in William Lithgow,[w] an Englishman, who, as he tells us in his travels, was taken up as a spy in Malaga, and was exposed to the most cruel torments upon the Wooden Horse. But when nothing could be extorted from him, he was delivered to the Inquisition as an heretic. He was condemned, in the beginning of Lent, to suffer the night following eleven most cruel torments, and after Easter to be carried privately to Grenada, there to be buried at midnight, and his ashes to be scattered into the air; when night came on his fetters were taken off, then he was stripped naked, put upon his knees, and his head lifted up by force; after which, opening his mouth with iron instruments, they filled his belly with water till it came out of his jaws. Then they tied a rope hard about his neck, and in this condition rolled him seven times the whole length of the room, till he almost quite strangled. After this they tied a small cord about both his great toes, and hung him up thereby with his head down, letting him remain in this condition till all the water discharged itself out of his mouth, so that he was laid on the ground as just dead, and had his irons put on him again. But beyond all expectation, and by a very singular accident, he was delivered out of jail, escaped death, and fortunately sailed home to England.[b]

Details of another revolting case are quoted by Limborch from an official contemporary document, which may best be reproduced here in its original form.[a]

THE PROCEEDINGS AGAINST AN ENGLISHWOMAN

Elizabeth Vasconcellos, now in the city of Lisbon, doth, on the 10th day of December, anno 1706, in the presence of John Milner, Esq., her majesty’s consul-general of Portugal, and Joseph Willcocks, minister of the English factory at Lisbon, declare and testify:

That she was born at Arlington, in the county of Devon, and a daughter of John Chester, Esq., bred up in the church of England; and in the eleventh year of her age her uncle, David Morgan, of Cork, intending to go and settle in Jamaica as a physician, by her father’s consent, he having several children, took her with him to provide for her.

In 1685, they went in an English ship, and near the island they were attacked by two Turkish ships; in the fight her uncle was killed, but the ship got clear into Madeira, and she, though left destitute, was entertained by Mr. Bedford, a merchant, with whom, and other English, she lived as a servant till 1696. In that year she was married by the chaplain of an English man-of-war to Cordoza de Vasconcellos, a physician of that island, and lived with him eight years, and never in the least conformed to the Romish church.

In 1704, her husband being gone on a voyage to Brazil, she fell dangerously ill, and, being light-headed, a priest gave her the sacrament, as she was told afterwards, for she remembered nothing of it. It pleased God she recovered, and then they told her she had changed her religion, and must conform to the Romish church, which she denied and refused to conform; and thereupon, by the bishop of that island, she was imprisoned nine months, and then sent prisoner to the Inquisition at Lisbon, where she arrived the 19th of December, 1705. The secretary of the house took her effects, in all above £500; she was then sworn, that that was all she was worth, and then put into a straight dark room, about five feet square, and there kept nine months and fifteen days.

That the first nine days she had only bread and water, and a wet straw bed to lie on. On the ninth day, being examined, she owned herself a Protestant, and would so continue; she was told she had conformed to the Romish church, and must persist in it or burn, she was then remanded to her room; and after a month’s time brought out again, and persisting in her answer as to her religion, they bound her hands behind her, stripped her back naked, and lashed her with a whip of knotted cords a considerable time, and told her afterwards that she must kneel down to the court, and give thanks for their merciful usage of her, which she positively refused to do.

After fifteen days she was again brought forth and examined, and a crucifix being set before her, she was commanded to bow down to it and worship it, which she refusing to do, they told her that she must expect to be condemned to the flames, and be burned with the Jews, at the next auto da fé, which was nigh at hand. Upon this she was remanded to her prison again for thirty days, and being then brought out, a red hot iron was got ready, and brought to her in a chafing-dish of burning coals, and her breast being laid open, the executioner, with one end of the red hot iron, which was about the bigness of a large seal, burned her to the bone in three several places, on the right side, one hard by the other, and then sent her to her prison, without any plaster, or other application, to heal the sores, which were very painful to her.

A month after this she had another severe whipping, as before; and in the beginning of August she was brought before the table, a great number of inquisitors being present, and was questioned, whether she would profess the Romish religion or burn. She replied, she had always been a Protestant, and was a subject of the queen of England, who was able to protect her, and she doubted not would do it, were her condition known to the English residing in Lisbon; but as she knew nothing of that, her resolution was to continue a Protestant, though she were to burn for it. To this they answered that her being the queen of England’s subject signified nothing in the dominions of the king of Portugal; that the English residing in Lisbon were heretics, and would certainly be damned; and that it was the mercy of that tribunal to endeavour to rescue her out of the flames of hell, but if her resolution were to burn rather than profess the Romish religion, they would give her a trial of it beforehand.

Accordingly the officers were ordered to seat her in a fixed chair, and to bind her arms and her legs, that she could make no resistance, nor motion, and the physician being placed by her, to direct the court how far they might torture her without hazard of life, her left foot was made bare, and an iron slipper, red hot, being immediately brought in, her foot was fastened into it, which continued on burning her to the bone, till such time as by extremity of pain she fainted away, and the physician declaring her life was in danger, they took it off, and ordered her again to her prison.

On the 19th of August she was again brought out, and whipped after a cruel manner, and her back was all over torn, and being threatened with more and greater tortures, and, on the other hand, being promised to be set at liberty if she would subscribe such a paper as they should give her, though she could have undergone death, yet not being able to endure a life of so much misery, she consented to subscribe, as they would have her, and accordingly, as she was directed wrote at the bottom of a large paper, which contained she knew not what; after which they advised her to avoid the company of all English heretics, and not restoring to her anything of all the plate, goods, or money she brought in with her, and engaging her by oath to keep secret all that had been done to her, turned her out of doors, destitute of all relief, but what she received from the help and compassion of charitable Christians.

The above said Elizabeth Vasconcellos did solemnly affirm and declare the above written deposition to be true, the day and year above written.

John Milner,
Joseph Willcocks.

Lisbon, January 8th, 1707, N.S.

(A copy examined from the original, by J. Blisse.)[b]

INQUISITORIAL DOCUMENTS

That the above affidavit is not a mere party document is only too plainly proved by the very manual of procedure, the Cartilla of the Inquisition at Seville, which W. H. Rule[y] has translated. It was meant for the guidance of all the Spanish inquisitors, and its business-like calm is not its least horrible feature, as is this insistence upon a full report of the torture and its results:[a]

How the Record was Kept

“If the criminal is under age, the guardian must be present at pronouncing sentence, in order that he may appeal if he wishes; but he must not be present at the torture.

“All that the criminal says has to be set down, and the questions that were put to him, and his answers, without omitting anything, and how they ordered him to be stripped, and his arms to be bound, and the rounds of cord that are put on him, and how they ordered him to be placed on a rack, and to bind his legs, head, and arms, and how he was bound, and how they ordered the garrotes to be put on, and how they were put on, and how compressed, declaring if it was on leg, thigh, or shin, or arms, etc., and what was said to him at each of these operations.

“If the torture is of pulley, it must be entered how the irons were put; and the weight or weights, and how he was hoisted, and how many times, and how long he was up each time. If it is of rack, it shall be said how the toca[193] was put on him, and how many pitchers of water were thrown over him, and how much each contained.”[y]

The Proper Form of Torture for Women

Even more ghastly is the blank form for convenience in recording the various steps. The following from the same manual, as translated by Rule,[y] corroborates the testimony of Elizabeth Vasconcellos quoted above, inasmuch as it prescribes the gentler forms of discipline to be used when the errant one was a woman. There is something peculiarly terrible in the very omission of a special name and the consequent thought of the number of wretches whose vain words and torments were thus recorded.[a]

“She was told to tell the truth, or orders would be given to strip her. She said, etc. She was commanded to be stripped naked.

“She was told to tell the truth, or orders would be given to cut off her hair. She said, etc.

“Orders were given to cut off her hair; and when it was taken off, she was examined by the doctor and surgeon, who said there was not any objection to her being put to the torture.

“She was told to tell the truth, or she would be commanded to mount the rack. She said, etc.

“She was commanded to mount, and she said, etc.

“She was told to tell the truth, or her body should be bound. She said, etc. She was ordered to be bound.

“She was told to tell the truth, or, if not, they would order her right foot to be made fast for the trampazo.[194] She said, etc. They commanded it to be made fast.

“She was told to tell the truth, or they would command her left foot to be made fast for the trampazo. She said, etc. They commanded it to be made fast. She said, etc. It was ordered to be done.

“She was told to tell the truth, or they would order the binding of the right arm to be stretched. She said, etc. It was commanded to be done. And the same with the left arm. It was ordered to be executed.

“She was told to tell the truth, or they would order the fleshy part of her right arm to be made fast for the garrote. She said, etc. It was ordered to be made fast.

“And by the said lord inquisitor it was repeated to her many times that she should tell the truth, and not let herself be brought into so great torment; and the physician and surgeon were called in, who said, etc. And the criminal, etc. And orders were given to make it fast.

“She was told to tell the truth, or they would order the first turn of mancuerda. She said, etc. It was commanded to be done.

“She was told to tell the truth, or they would command the garrote to be applied again to the right arm. She said, etc. It was ordered to be done.

“She was told to tell the truth, or they would order the second turn of mancuerda. She said, etc. It was commanded to be done.

“She was told to tell the truth, or they would order the garrote to be applied again to the left arm. She said, etc. It was ordered to be done.

“She was told to tell the truth, or they would order the third turn of mancuerda. She said, etc. It was commanded to be done.

“She was told to tell the truth, or they would order the trampazo to be laid on the right foot. She said, etc. It was commanded to be done.

“For women you do not go beyond this.”[y]

LATER HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION IN SPAIN

It would be gratuitously harrowing to multiply such instances of human misery, and we may return to the chronicle of the progress of the Inquisition, leading up to its culmination in Spain and Portugal, instances of whose severity have already been quoted. It is a pitiful chronicle, and one that the humanitarian might well wish to pass over in silence; but one which the historian cannot altogether ignore.[a]

The notion of heresy was enlarged so as to comprehend not only the slightest deviation from the creed of the church, but also usury, sorcery, contempt of the cross and clergy, dealings with Jews, etc.

The people in many places rose up against the inquisitors, as in Albi, and Narbonne (1234), and Toulouse; and in France, where the Inquisition had first been put in force, it was first abolished.[195] The Jesuits sought to restore the Inquisition in Bavaria (1599), and during the Thirty Years’ War found an occasional victim; but Maria Theresa abolished it in her kingdom, and it soon afterwards disappeared in Germany. It had no hold in England, Sweden, Norway, or Denmark; but in Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands it enjoyed a luxuriant growth.[z]

The tribunal, after having been successively adopted in Italy and Germany, was introduced into Aragon, where, in 1242, additional provisions were framed by the Council of Tarragona, on the basis of those of 1233, which may properly be considered as the primitive instructions of the Holy Office in Spain.

This “ancient” Inquisition, as it is termed, bore the same odious peculiarities in its leading features as the modern; the same impenetrable secrecy in its proceedings, the same insidious modes of accusation, a similar use of torture, and similar penalties for the offender. A sort of manual, drawn up by Eymerich,[p] an Aragonese inquisitor of the fourteenth century, for the instruction of the judges of the Holy Office, prescribes all those ambiguous forms of interrogation by which the unwary and perhaps innocent victim might be circumvented. The arm of persecution, however, fell with sufficient heaviness, especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, on the unfortunate Albigenses, who, from the proximity and political relations of Aragon and Provence, had become numerous in the former kingdom. The persecution appears, however, to have been chiefly confined to this unfortunate sect, and there is no evidence that the Holy Office, notwithstanding papal briefs to that effect, was fully organised in Castile before the reign of Isabella. This is perhaps imputable to the paucity of heretics in that kingdom. It cannot, at any rate, be charged to any lukewarmness in its sovereigns; since they, from the time of St. Ferdinand, who heaped the fagots on the blazing pile with his own hands, down to that of John II, Isabella’s father, who hunted the unhappy heretics of Biscay like so many wild beasts among the mountains, had ever evinced a lively zeal for the orthodox faith.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Albigensian heresy had been nearly extirpated by the Inquisition of Aragon; so that this infernal engine might have been suffered to sleep undisturbed from want of sufficient fuel to keep it in motion, when new and ample materials were discovered in the unfortunate race of Israel, on whom the sins of their fathers have been so unsparingly visited by every nation in Christendom among whom they have sojourned, almost to the present century.

Under the Visigothic empire the Jews multiplied exceedingly in Spain, and were permitted to acquire considerable power and wealth. But no sooner had their Arian masters embraced the orthodox faith than they began to testify their zeal by pouring on the Jews the most pitiless storm of persecution. One of their laws alone condemned the whole race to slavery; and Montesquieu[aa] remarks, without much exaggeration, that to the Gothic code may be traced all the maxims of the Modern Inquisition, the monks of the fifteenth century only copying, in reference to the Israelites, the bishops of the seventh.

State of the Jews in Spain

After the Saracenic invasion, which the Jews, perhaps with reason, are accused of having facilitated, they resided in the conquered cities and were permitted to mingle with the Arabs on nearly equal terms. The Jews accordingly, under these favourable auspices, not only accumulated wealth with their usual diligence, but gradually rose to the highest civil dignities, and made great advances in various departments of letters.

The ancient Castilians of the same period, very different from their Gothic ancestors, seem to have conceded to the Israelites somewhat of the feelings of respect which were extorted from them by the superior civilisation of the Spanish Arabs. We find eminent Jews residing in the courts of the Christian princes, directing their studies, attending them as physicians, or more frequently administering their finances. For this last vocation they seem to have had a natural aptitude; and, indeed, the correspondence which they maintained with the different countries of Europe by means of their own countrymen, who acted as the brokers of almost every people among whom they were scattered during the Middle Ages, afforded them peculiar facilities both in politics and commerce. We meet with Jewish scholars and statesmen attached to the courts of Alfonso X, Alfonso XI, Pedro the Cruel, Henry (Enrique) II, and other princes. Their astronomical science recommended them in a special manner to Alfonso el Sabio, who employed them in the construction of his celebrated tables. James I of Aragon condescended to receive instruction from them in ethics; and in the fifteenth century we notice Juan (John) II of Castile employing a Jewish secretary in the compilation of a national Cancionero.

But all this royal patronage proved incompetent to protect the Jews when their flourishing fortunes had risen to a sufficient height to excite popular envy, augmented as it was by that profuse ostentation of equipage and apparel for which this singular people, notwithstanding their avarice, have usually shown a predilection. Stories were circulated of their contempt for the Catholic worship, their desecration of its most holy symbols, and of their crucifixion, or other sacrifice, of Christian children at the celebration of their own passover. With these foolish calumnies, the more probable charge of usury and extortion was industriously preferred against them; till at length, towards the close of the fourteenth century, the fanatical populace, stimulated in many instances by the no less fanatical clergy, and perhaps encouraged by the numerous class of debtors to the Jews, who found this a convenient mode of settling their accounts, made a fierce assault on this unfortunate people in Castile and Aragon, breaking into their houses, violating their most private sanctuaries, scattering their costly collections and furniture, and consigning the wretched proprietors to indiscriminate massacre, without regard to sex or age.

“Conversion” of the Jews

A Jew of the Middle Ages

In this crisis the only remedy left to the Jews was a real or feigned conversion to Christianity. St. Vincent Ferrier, a Dominican of Valencia, performed such a quantity of miracles, in furtherance of this purpose, as might have excited the envy of any saint in the calendar; and these, aided by his eloquence, are said to have changed the hearts of no less than thirty-five thousand of the race of Israel, which doubtless must be reckoned the greatest miracle of all.

The legislative enactments of this period, and still more under Juan II during the first half of the fifteenth century, were uncommonly severe upon the Jews. While they were prohibited from mingling freely with the Christians, and from exercising the professions for which they were best qualified, their residence was restricted within certain prescribed limits of the cities which they inhabited; and they were not only debarred from their usual luxury of ornament in dress, but were held up to public scorn, as it were, by some peculiar badge or emblem embroidered on their garments.

Such was the condition of the Spanish Jews at the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella. The “new Christians,” or “converts,” as those who had renounced the faith of their fathers were denominated, were occasionally preferred to high ecclesiastical dignities, which they illustrated by their integrity and learning. They were intrusted with municipal offices in the various cities of Castile; and as their wealth furnished an obvious resource for repairing, by way of marriage, the decayed fortunes of the nobility, there was scarcely a family of rank in the land whose blood had not been contaminated, at some period or other, by mixture with the mala sangre, as it came afterwards to be termed, of the house of Judah; an ignominious stain, which no time has been deemed sufficient wholly to purge away.

Notwithstanding the show of prosperity enjoyed by the converted Jews, their situation was far from secure. Their proselytism had been too sudden to be generally sincere; and as the task of dissimulation was too irksome to be permanently endured, they gradually became less circumspect, and exhibited the scandalous spectacle of apostates returning to wallow in the ancient mire of Judaism. The clergy, especially the Dominicans, who seem to have inherited the quick scent for heresy which distinguished their frantic founder, were not slow in sounding the alarm; and the superstitious populace, easily roused to acts of violence in the name of religion, began to exhibit the most tumultuous movements, and actually massacred the constable of Castile in an attempt to suppress them at Jaen, the year preceding the accession of Isabella. After this period the complaints against the Jewish heresy became still more clamorous, and the throne was repeatedly beset with petitions to devise some effectual means for its extirpation (1478).

It is easy to discern, in the medley of credulity and superstition, the secret envy entertained by the Castilians of the superior skill and industry of their Hebrew brethren, and of the superior riches which these qualities secured to them; and it is impossible not to suspect that the zeal of the most orthodox was considerably sharpened by worldly motives.

Be that as it may, the cry against the Jewish abominations now became general. Among those most active in raising it were Alfonso de Ojeda, a Dominican, prior of the monastery of St. Paul in Seville, and Diego de Merlo, assistant of that city, who should not be defrauded of the meed of glory to which they are justly entitled by their exertions for the new establishment of the Modern Inquisition. These persons, after urging on the sovereigns the alarming extent to which the Jewish leprosy prevailed in Andalusia, loudly called for the introduction of the Holy Office, as the only effectual means of healing it. In this they were vigorously supported by Niccolo Franco, the papal nuncio then residing at the court of Castile. Ferdinand listened with complacency to a scheme which promised an ample source of revenue in the confiscations it involved. But it was not so easy to vanquish Isabella’s aversion to such repugnant measures.

Queen Isabella persuaded to Persecution

Well had it been for the land if the queen’s conscience had always been intrusted to the keeping of persons of such exemplary piety as her confessor, Talavera. Unfortunately, in her early days, during the lifetime of her brother Henry, that charge was committed to a Dominican monk, Thomas (Tomas) de Torquemada, a native of Old Castile, subsequently raised to the rank of prior of Santa Cruz in Segovia, and condemned to infamous immortality by the signal part which he performed in the tragedy of the Inquisition. This man, who concealed more pride under his monastic weeds than might have furnished forth a convent of his order, was one of that class with whom zeal passes for religion, and who testify their zeal by a fiery persecution of those whose creed differs from their own; who compensate for their abstinence from sensual indulgence by giving scope to those deadlier vices of the heart, pride, bigotry, and intolerance, which are no less opposed to virtue and are far more extensively mischievous to society. This personage had earnestly laboured to infuse into Isabella’s young mind, to which his situation as her confessor gave him such ready access, the same spirit of fanaticism that glowed in his own. Fortunately this was greatly counteracted by her sound understanding and natural kindness of heart. Torquemada urged her, or indeed, as is stated by some, extorted a promise that, “should she ever come to the throne, she would devote herself to the extirpation of heresy, for the glory of God and the exaltation of the Catholic faith.” The time was now arrived when this promise was to be discharged.

It is due to Isabella’s fame to state thus much in palliation of the unfortunate error into which she was led by her misguided zeal; an error so grave that, like a vein in some noble piece of statuary, it gives a sinister expression to her otherwise unblemished character. It was not until the queen had endured the repeated importunities of the clergy, particularly of those reverend persons in whom she most confided, seconded by the arguments of Ferdinand, that she consented to solicit from the pope a bull for the introduction of the Holy Office into Castile. Sixtus IV, who at that time filled the pontifical chair, easily discerning the sources of wealth and influence which this measure opened to the court of Rome, readily complied with the petition of the sovereigns, and expedited a bull bearing date November 1st, 1478, authorising them to appoint two or three ecclesiastics, inquisitors for the detection and suppression of heresy throughout their dominions.

The queen, however, still averse to violent measures, suspended the operation of the ordinance, until a more lenient policy had been first tried. By her command, accordingly, the archbishop of Seville, Cardinal Mendoza, drew up a catechism exhibiting the different points of the Catholic faith, and instructed the clergy throughout his diocese to spare no pains in illuminating the benighted Israelites, by means of friendly exhortation and a candid exposition of the true principles of Christianity. How far the spirit of these injunctions was complied with, amid the excitement then prevailing, may be reasonably doubted. There could be little doubt, however, that a report, made two years later by a commission of ecclesiastics with Alfonso de Ojeda at its head, respecting the progress of the reformation, would be necessarily unfavourable to the Jews.

In consequence of this report the papal provisions were enforced by the nomination, on the 17th of September, 1480, of two Dominican monks as inquisitors, with two other ecclesiastics, the one as assessor and the other as procurator-fiscal, with instructions to proceed at once to Seville and enter on the duties of their office. Orders were also issued to the authorities of the city to support the inquisitors by all the aid in their power. But the new institution proved so distasteful to them in its origin that they refused any co-operation with its ministers, and during the first years it can scarcely be said to have obtained a footing in any other places in Andalusia than those belonging to the crown.

The Inquisition of 1481

On the 2nd of January, 1481, the court commenced operations by the publication of an edict, followed by several others, requiring all persons to aid in apprehending and accusing all such as they might know or suspect to be guilty of heresy, and holding out the illusory promise of absolution to such as should confess their errors within a limited period. As every mode of accusation, even anonymous, was invited, the number of victims multiplied so fast that the tribunal found it convenient to remove its sittings from the convent of St. Paul, within the city, to the spacious fortress of Triana, in the suburbs.

The presumptive proofs by which the charge of Judaism was established against the accused are so curious that a few of them may deserve notice. It was considered good evidence of the fact, if the prisoner wore better clothes or cleaner linen on the Jewish Sabbath than on other days of the week; if he had no fire in his house the preceding evening; if he sat at table with Jews, or ate the meat of animals slaughtered by their hands, or drank a certain beverage held in much estimation by them; if he washed a corpse in warm water, or when dying turned his face to the wall; or, finally, if he gave Hebrew names to his children—a provision most whimsically cruelly, since, by a law of Henry II, he was prohibited under severe penalties from giving them Christian names. He must have found it difficult to extricate himself from the horns of this dilemma.

On the sixth day of January six convicts suffered at the stake. Seventeen more were executed in March, and a still greater number in the month following; and by the 4th of November in the same year no less than 298 individuals had been sacrificed in the autos da fé of Seville. Besides these, the mouldering remains of many, who had been tried and convicted, after their death, were torn up from their graves, with a hyena-like ferocity which has disgraced no other court, Christian or pagan, and condemned to the common funeral pile. This was prepared on a spacious stone scaffold, erected in the suburbs of the city, with the statues of four prophets attached to the corners, to which the unhappy sufferers were bound for the sacrifice. This monument of fanaticism continued to disgrace Seville till 1810, when it was removed in order to make room for the construction of a battery against the French. The sword of justice was observed, in particular, to strike at the wealthy, the least pardonable offenders in times of proscription.

The plague which desolated Seville this year, sweeping off fifteen thousand inhabitants, as if in token of the wrath of heaven at these enormities, did not palsy for a moment the arm of the Inquisition, which, adjourning to Aracena, continued as indefatigable as before. A similar persecution went forward in other parts of the province of Andalusia; so that within the same year, 1481, the number of the sufferers was computed at two thousand burned alive, a still greater number in effigy, and seventeen thousand “reconciled”; a term which must not be understood by the reader to signify anything like a pardon or amnesty, but only the commutation of a capital sentence for inferior penalties, as fines, civil incapacity, very generally total confiscation of property, and not infrequently imprisonment for life.[196]

The Jews were astounded by the bolt which had fallen so unexpectedly upon them. Some succeeded in making their escape to Granada, others to France, Germany, or Italy, where they appealed from the decisions of the Holy Office to the sovereign pontiff.[197] Sixtus IV appears for a moment to have been touched with something like compunction, for he rebuked the intemperate zeal of the inquisitors, and even menaced them with deprivation. But these feelings, it would seem, were but transient; for in 1483 we find the same pontiff quieting the scruples of Isabella respecting the appropriation of the confiscated property, and encouraging both sovereigns to proceed in the great work of purification by an audacious reference to the example of Jesus Christ, who, says he, consolidated his kingdom on earth by the destruction of idolatry.

The Spanish or “Modern” Inquisition established

In the course of the same year he expedited two briefs, appointing Thomas de Torquemada inquisitor-general of Castile and Aragon, and clothing him with full powers to frame a new constitution for the Holy Office (August 2nd and October 17th, 1483). This was the origin of that terrible tribunal, the Spanish or Modern Inquisition, familiar to most readers whether of history or romance, which for three centuries extended its iron sway over the dominions of Spain and Portugal.

Edicts were ordered to be published annually, on the first two Sundays in Lent, throughout the churches, enjoining it as a sacred duty on all who knew or suspected another to be guilty of heresy to lodge information against him before the Holy Office; and the ministers of religion were instructed to refuse absolution to such as hesitated to comply with this, although the suspected person might stand in the relation of parent, child, husband, or wife. All accusations, anonymous as well as signed, were admitted; it being only necessary to specify the names of the witnesses, whose testimony was taken down in writing by a secretary, and afterwards read to them, which, unless the inaccuracies were so gross as to force themselves upon their attention, they seldom failed to confirm.

Not the least odious feature of the whole was the connection established between the condemnation of the accused and the interests of his judges; since the confiscations, which were the uniform penalties of heresy, were not permitted to flow into the royal exchequer until they had first discharged the expenses, whether in the shape of salaries or otherwise, incident to the Holy Office. The most humane provisions were constantly evaded in practice; and the toils for ensnaring the victim were so ingeniously multiplied that few, very few, were permitted to escape without some censure. Not more than one person, says Llorente, in one or perhaps two thousand processes, previous to the time of Philip III, received entire absolution. So that it came to be proverbial that all who were not roasted were at least singed:

“Devant l’Inquisition, quand on vient à jubé,

Si l’on ne sort rôti, l’on sort au moins flambé.”

The “Auto da fé”

The last scene in this dismal tragedy was the “act of faith” (auto da fé),[198] the most imposing spectacle, probably, which has been witnessed since the ancient Roman triumph, and which, as intimated by a Spanish writer, was intended, somewhat profanely, to represent the terrors of the Day of Judgment. The proudest grandees of the land, on this occasion, putting on the sable livery of familiars of the Holy Office and bearing aloft its banners, condescended to act as the escort of its ministers; while the ceremony was not unfrequently countenanced by the royal presence. It should be stated, however, that neither of these acts of condescension—or, more properly, humiliation—was witnessed until a period posterior to Isabella’s reign. The effect was further heightened by the concourse of ecclesiastics in their sacerdotal robes, and pompous ceremonial which was intended to consecrate, as it were, this bloody sacrifice by the authority of a religion which has expressly declared that it desires mercy and not sacrifice.[199]

The most important actors in the scene were the unfortunate convicts, who were now disgorged for the first time from the dungeons of the tribunal. They were clad in coarse woollen garments, styled san benitos, brought close round the neck and descending like a frock down to the knees. These were of yellow colour, embroidered with a scarlet cross, and well garnished with figures of devils and flames of fire, which, typical of the heretic’s destiny hereafter, served to make him more odious in the eyes of the superstitious multitude.[200] The greater part of the sufferers were condemned to be “reconciled,” the manifold meanings of which soft phrase have been already explained. Those who were to be “relaxed,” as it was called, were delivered over, as impenitent heretics, to the secular arm, in order to expiate their offence by the most painful of deaths, with the consciousness, still more painful, that they were to leave behind them names branded with infamy, and families involved in irretrievable ruin.[201]

It is remarkable that a system so monstrous as that of the Inquisition, presenting the most effectual barrier, probably, that was ever opposed to the progress of knowledge, should have been revived at the close of the fifteenth century, when the light of civilisation was rapidly advancing over every part of Europe. It is more remarkable that it should have occurred in Spain, at this time under a government which had displayed great religious independence on more than one occasion, and which had paid uniform regard to the rights of its subjects and pursued a generous policy in reference to their intellectual culture. Where, we are tempted to ask, when we behold the persecution of an innocent, industrious people for the crime of adhesion to the faith of their ancestors—where was the charity which led the old Castilian to reverence valour and virtue in an infidel, though an enemy, where the chivalrous self-devotion which led an Aragonese monarch, three centuries before, to give away his life in defence of the persecuted sectaries of Provence, where the independent spirit which prompted the Castilian nobles, during the very last reign, to reject with scorn the purposed interference of the pope himself in their concerns, that they were now reduced to bow their necks to a few frantic priests, the members of an order which, in Spain at least, was quite as conspicuous for ignorance as intolerance? True, indeed, the Castilians, and the Aragonese subsequently still more, gave such evidence of their aversion to the institution, that it can hardly be believed the clergy would have succeeded in fastening it upon them, had they not availed themselves of the popular prejudices against the Jews.[202] Providence, however, permitted that the sufferings thus heaped on the heads of this unfortunate people should be requited in full measure to the nation that inflicted them. The fires of the Inquisition, which were lighted exclusively for the Jews, were destined eventually to consume their oppressors. They were still more deeply avenged in the moral influence of this tribunal, which, eating like a pestilent canker into the heart of the monarchy at the very time when it was exhibiting a most goodly promise, left it at length a bare and sapless trunk.

Torquemada and his Successors

Notwithstanding the persecutions under Torquemada were confined almost wholly to the Jews, his activity was such as to furnish abundant precedent, in regard to forms of proceeding, for his successors; if, indeed, the word forms may be applied to the conduct of trials so summary that the tribunal of Toledo alone, under the superintendence of two inquisitors, disposed of 3,327 processes in little more than a year. The number of convicts was greatly swelled by the blunders of the Dominican monks, who acted as qualificators or interpreters of what constituted heresy, and whose ignorance led them frequently to condemn, as heterodox, propositions actually derived from the fathers of the church. The prisoners for life, alone, became so numerous that it was necessary to assign them their own houses as the places of their incarceration.

The data for an accurate calculation of the number of victims sacrificed by the Inquisition during this reign are not very satisfactory. From such as exist, however, Llorente has been led to the most frightful results. In this enormous sum of human misery is not included the multitude of orphans, who, from the confiscation of their paternal inheritance, were turned over to indigence and vice.[203] Many of the reconciled were afterwards sentenced as relapsed; and the curate of Los Palacios[cc] expresses the charitable wish that “the whole accursed race of Jews, male and female, of twenty years of age and upwards, might be purified with fire and fagot!”[204]

The vast apparatus of the Inquisition involved so heavy an expenditure, that a very small sum comparatively, found its way into the exchequer, to counterbalance the great detriment resulting to the state from the sacrifice of the most active and skilful part of its population. All temporal interests, however, were held light in comparison with the purgation of the land from heresy; and such augmentations as the revenue did receive, we are assured, were conscientiously devoted “to pious purposes and the Moorish war”![205]

Torquemada

The Roman see is charged with duplicity, characteristic of Alexander VI, in making a gainful traffic by the sale of dispensations from the penalties incurred by such as fell under the ban of the Inquisition, provided they were rich enough to pay for them, and afterwards revoking them, at the instance of the Castilian court. Meanwhile, the odium excited by the unsparing rigour of Torquemada raised up so many accusations against him that he was thrice compelled to send an agent to Rome to defend his cause before the pontiff; until, at length, Alexander VI, in 1494, moved by these reiterated complaints, appointed four coadjutors, out of a pretended regard to the infirmities of his age, to share with him the burdens of his office.

This personage, who is entitled to so high a rank among those who have been the authors of unmixed evil to their species, was permitted to reach a very old age, and to die quietly in his bed. Yet he lived in such constant apprehension of assassination that he is said to have kept a reputed unicorn’s horn always on his table, which was imagined to have the power of detecting and neutralising poisons; while, for the more complete protection of his person, he was allowed an escort of fifty horse and two hundred foot in his progresses through the kingdom.

This man’s zeal was of such an extravagant character that it may almost shelter itself under the name of insanity. His history may be thought to prove that of all human infirmities, or rather vices, there is none productive of more extensive mischief to society than fanaticism. The opposite principle of atheism, which refuses to recognise the most important sanctions to virtue, does not necessarily imply any destitution of just moral perceptions, that is, of a power of discriminating between right and wrong, in its disciples. But fanaticism is so far subversive of the most established principles of morality, that, under the dangerous maxim, “For the advancement of the faith, all means are lawful,” which Tasso has rightly, though perhaps undesignedly, derived from the spirits of hell, it not only excuses, but enjoins the commission of the most revolting crimes as a sacred duty. The more repugnant, indeed, such crimes may be to natural feeling or public sentiment, the greater their merit, from the sacrifice which the commission of them involves. Many a bloody page of history attests the fact that fanaticism armed with power is the sorest evil which can befall a nation.[m]

Under Charles I (the emperor Charles V) the cortes sought for a modification of the laws of the Inquisition; but under Philip II the flames burned brightly again, at first in Seville and Valladolid (1559 seq.). But by the end of the seventeenth century all vestiges of the Reformation were effaced, and the activity of the Inquisition became limited to the destruction of prohibited books, of which an Index had been prepared in 1558. Under Charles III, in 1770, an edict was passed, securing an accused party from arbitrary imprisonment; and other regulations were passed, curtailing the powers of the Inquisition, until, in 1808, Joseph Bonaparte abolished it entirely. In 1814 Ferdinand VII restored it; but the popular rage in 1820 destroyed the inquisitor’s palace at Madrid, and the cortes again abolished it. But in 1825, by the efforts of the clergy, another inquisitorial commission was appointed. It continued till 1834, when it was finally abolished, and its property applied to the payment of the public debt. But it may be a long while before the country will revive from the effects of the court which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extinguished her active literary life and placed this nation, so richly endowed, almost outside of the circle of European civilisation. Spain, it is true, remained free from heresies and religious wars; but her rest was the rest of the grave, so far as religious vitality was concerned.

The fortunes of the Inquisition in Portugal were similar to those which it had in Spain. In the reign of John VI (1818-1826) it was finally abolished. The last relics of the Italian Inquisition disappeared at the unification of the nation. The Congregation of the Inquisition at Rome, appointed by Sixtus V in 1587, is all that remains of it. In its day it likewise had crushed out the Reformation, and had raged the most fearfully in Venice; but there its activity seems to have ceased in 1781, and in 1808 Napoleon abolished it. Restored under Pius VII in 1814, it directed its energies to prevent the diffusion of the Italian Bible, and to check the introduction of evangelical truth.

In the Netherlands, where the Inquisition was first introduced in the thirteenth century, it became a terrible weapon in the time of the Reformation. In 1521, Charles V passed a rigorous edict against heretics, and appointed Franz van der Hulst inquisitor-general. In 1525 three inquisitors-general were appointed, in 1537 the number was increased to four, and in 1545 one was appointed for each of the provinces. According to Grotius, a hundred thousand victims died under Charles V; according to the prince of Orange, fifty thousand. Both computations are probably too large. Under Philip II the inquisitors developed the most zeal; and the duke of Alva, in 1567, appointed the Bloody Council, which proceeded with unheard-of cruelty against those whose wealth excited their avarice, or whose heresy aroused their suspicion. In 1573 Alva was recalled; and three years later the provinces concluded the League of Ghent, whose fifth article abolished the edicts against heresy.[z]

Torture lasted as late as 1817 in Spain, where Van Halen suffered it, notwithstanding the papal bull of 1816; and, according to Mackenna,[t] it lasted in Spanish America until 1809.

In conclusion it is possible to present a fairly accurate total of the ruinous sweep of the Inquisition. The historian Llorente[k] accomplished the seemingly impossible task of unearthing the records. He was a Spanish priest, and from 1785 was an officer of the Inquisition in its then milder form. In 1808 he became a Bonapartist, and was concerned in the suppression of monastic orders. The archives were at his disposal, and he studied them thoroughly. He fled to France on the Restoration in 1814, and there brought out his monumental work in French. His life was not safe even there, and he suffered much persecution. His work has been convicted of many faults, but not of dishonesty, and his conclusions may be quoted with a reasonable amount of confidence.[a]

Llorente’s Computation of the Victims of the Inquisition

In summing up, it appears that the Spanish Inquisition, during the first eighteen years of its existence under Torquemada, condemned 8,800 persons to perish in the flames, 6,500, dead or fugitives, to be burned in effigy; and imposed different pains and penalties upon 90,004 who were reconciled; making a total of 105,294 victims. I propose to take each tribunal separately and to place the number of victims as low as circumstances will permit.

Were I guided by the autos da fé of the Inquisition of Toledo and Saragossa I might triple the number of victims, for in eight years alone 6,341 were punished by the inquisitors of Seville, which is at the rate of 792 a year, not including the many victims of other autos da fé which I have found mentioned, but of which I cannot find the reports. Saragossa shows almost similar results, and if the same is assumed of the other tribunals the total would be twice as much again as by my reckoning. But I do not wish to give anyone grounds for saying that I have tried to exaggerate the evil.

The second general inquisitor was Diego Deza, a Dominican, tutor to the prince of Asturias, Don Juan, bishop of Zamora, Salamanca, Jaen, Palencia, and finally archbishop of Seville. He held the office from the beginning of 1499 to the end of 1506, when he resigned it by order of king Ferdinand V, regent of Castile. In his time there were the same twelve tribunals in the peninsula as in the time of his predecessor; therefore I reckon only 208 burned, 104 burned in effigy, and 4,057 subjected to penances, making a total of 4,369 victims a year. This number, multiplied by eight makes the number of victims in his time, 1,664 of the first class, 832 of the second class, and 32,456 of the third class; a total of 34,952 victims.

The third general inquisitor was the cardinal-archbishop Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, a Franciscan. He held the office from the year 1507 until the 8th of November, 1517, when he died. During that time there was a separate office of general inquisitor of Aragon which was first held by Juan Enguera, a Dominican, bishop of Vique. He died in 1513 and was succeeded by Luis Mercader, a Carthusian, who upon his death on the 1st of June, 1516, was succeeded by Cardinal Adriano de Florencio, then dean of Lobania, tutor of Charles V, afterwards bishop of Tortosa, and ultimately sovereign pontiff (Adrian VI). In 1513 Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros created a tribunal of the Inquisition for the bishopric of Cuenca and its districts, separating them from the jurisdiction of Murcia in 1516; another for the fortress of Oran in Africa, and another for America in the island of Cuba. We will leave the two last out of our calculations, as well as those of Caller in the island of Sardinia, and of Palermo in Sicily.

The twelve former tribunals of the peninsula produced, according to the inscription in Seville, with the modification adopted, 208 burned, 104 burned in effigy, 4,057 subjected to penances, a year, making from the year, 1507 to 1513 inclusive a total of 1,456 of the first class, 728 of the second class, and 28,399 of the third class.

The tribunal of Cuenca was established in 1514, and according to my method of computation I assign to it 200 of the first class, 200 of the second, and 1,700 of the third, which added to the 208, 104, and 4,057 of the other twelve tribunals gives a total for that year of 408, 304, and 5,757. In 1515, the tribunal of Cuenca is counted as one of the old tribunals, with only 16 of the first class, 8 of the second, and 312 of the third, which added to the total of the other tribunals amounts to 224, 112, and 4,369. In 1516 and 1517, the result is similar. The total of the eleven years during which Ximenes de Cisneros was general inquisitor is 2,536 burned, 1,368 burned in effigy, and 47,263 penitents, 51,167 in all.

Cardinal Adriano, bishop of Tortosa, was the fourth general inquisitor. He was appointed at the beginning of March, 1518, and though he was elected pope on the 9th of January, 1522, he had no successor as head of the Holy Office until the end of 1522; for Adriano issued the bulls on the 10th of September of that year, fourteen days before his death. For this reason the number of tribunals in the peninsula was not increased for six years, but in America one was established at Puerto Rico for the West Indies in 1519.

According to the inscription in the castle of Triana, in the thirteen tribunals of our continent there were every year 224 persons burned, 112 burned in effigy, and 4,369 subjected to penances; consequently the total for the six years was 1,344 of the first class, 672 of the second class, and 26,214 of the third class; 28,230 victims in all.

The fifth general inquisitor was Cardinal Alfonso Manrique, successively bishop of Badajoz and of Cordova, and archbishop of Seville. In 1524, he ordered the inscription which has guided our calculations for the preceding years to be placed in the castle of Triana in Seville. In this same year the tribunal of Granada, which had been established the year before, began to exercise its functions. Although the number of those punished as Judaical heretics was diminished, there was no lack of victims, their places being supplied by the Mohammedan Moriscoes, Lutherans, and Sodomites, whose punishment, and that of other criminals, was confided to the inquisitors by Pope Clement VII. Manrique died on the 28th of September, 1538, having established tribunals of the Inquisition in Canaria, Jaen, and Granada, and two in America for Tierrafirme (Terra Firma) and the West Indies. It is calculated that the yearly victims would be about 10 burned, 5 burned in effigy, and 50 subjected to penances, a total of 65 victims. There were thirteen tribunals in the peninsula, two in the adjacent islands, and multiplying by the fifteen years of Manrique’s ministry there were 2,250 of the first class, 1,125 of the second class, and 11,250 of the third class, a total of 14,625 victims.

[Llorente continues thus his record from inquisitor to inquisitor through the centuries. We shall omit these till we reach the last years of the Holy Office.]

Fortieth, Felipe Beltran, bishop of Salamanca, was general inquisitor after Quintano, in 1774. He exercised this function until he died, which appears to me to have been about 1783. In his time there were 2 burned, none burned in effigy, 16 condemned to public penances, and very many in secret without infamy or confiscation. My departure from Madrid for Valencia on the 10th of August, 1812, since which I never returned to court, prevented me from completing this catalogue with the exact dates, but the substance of my narrative is most exact. The last victim who perished in the flames was a beata of Seville, on the 7th of November, 1781. She was condemned for having a compact and illicit personal intercourse with the devil, and for impenitent denial of the offence, according to the trial. Her life would have been spared had she pleaded guilty to the crimes of which she was accused.

Forty-first, Augustin Rubin de Cevallos, bishop of Jaen, knight of the grand cross of the royal Spanish order of Charles III. He immediately succeeded Beltran and was general inquisitor from 1784 until 1792, when he died. No one was burned in person nor in effigy in his time; 14 were condemned to public penances, and many in secret but without infamy or confiscation. Forty-second, Manuel Abad-y-la-Sierra, bishop of Astorga, archbishop of Selimbra and general inquisitor, appointed in 1792. He resigned in 1794 by order of Charles IV. In his time 16 were condemned to public and many to private penances; no one was burned. Forty-third, Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana, cardinal-archbishop of Toledo, was appointed general inquisitor in 1794, and resigned by order of Charles IV in 1797. In his time 14 were condemned to public and many to private penances; no one was burned.

Forty-fourth, Ramón Josef de Arce, archbishop of Burgos and of Saragossa, patriarch of the Indies, councillor of state, general director of the Royal University of Madrid, and knight of the grand cross of the royal order of Charles III. He was general inquisitor from 1798 to 1808. In his time 20 were condemned to public and many to private penances, without infamy or confiscation of goods. One effigy was burned at Cuenca, but no one was burned in person, for though sentence was pronounced against the curate of Esco, the general inquisitor and supreme council refused to confirm it, in order to prevent its execution. Recapitulation: burned in person, 31,912; burned in effigy, 17,659; condemned to severe penances, 291,450; total, 341,021.

My design is to calculate the number of victims at the lowest figure possible, and I am convinced that from the year 1481, when the tribunal was established, until the end of the reign of Philip II, the numbers were much more than I have stated, considering the records of the tribunals of Toledo and Saragossa, which did not notably exceed the rest. If we were to add the victims punished by the tribunals of Mexico, Lima, Cartagena de las Indias (Cartagena in Colombia), Sicily, and in the galleys at sea, the number would be incalculable. Still more so were we to count the victims which resulted from the attempts to establish the Inquisition in Naples, Milan, and Flanders, for all these belonged to Spain, and felt the influence of the Spanish tribunal. How many died in their beds of illness caused by the infamy which fell upon them through the condemnation of their relations? No possible calculation could include all this misery.[k]

EFFECTS AND INFLUENCES OF THE INQUISITION

Geddes,[q] in 1714, made this contemporary observation, and his point should not be forgotten in an estimate of the far-reaching evils. “By this list we see what a terrible havoc is made by the Inquisition in Portugal, and especially among the trading people, to the great diminution both of its stock in trade and of the number of its current and expert merchants. For though there were but four persons burned this year in Lisbon by the Inquisition, there were above threescore undone by it. Anyone of a family’s being taken up by the Inquisition goes a great way towards ruining it, filling them with such horrors as drive them into countries that are out of the reach of the Inquisition.”

A recent writer, a churchman, Dean Kitchin,[ll] has said:

“The hand of the Holy Office was outstretched against all; no lofty dignity in church or state, no eminence in art or science, no purity of life, could defend from its attacks. It is said to have threatened Charles V and Philip II; it persecuted Archbishop Carranza, head of the church in Spain; destroyed De Dominis, archbishop of Spalatro; it smote Galileo, murdered Giordano Bruno, attacked Pico di Mirandola, and even is said to have threatened Cæsar Borgia. With equal vigour, in combination with the Jesuits, the Inquisition made war on books and learning, religious or secular alike; we have seen how baleful was its effect in earlier days on literature and art in Provence, and in the time of the Catholic sovereigns on the material well-being of Spain. ‘In the love of Christ and his maid-mother,’ says Queen Isabella, ‘I have caused great misery, and have depopulated towns and districts, provinces and kingdoms.’”[ll]

A CATHOLIC VIEW OF THE INQUISITION (C. J. HEFELE)

The word inquisition with the original signification of an ecclesiastical court of faith, was later applied to a state institution which, on account of its real or alleged harshness, has become a by-word in Europe for everything horrible. There is no doubt that, an ecclesiastical court of inquiry existed among the Christians from the beginning, but it is equally certain that in the earliest times the penalties for heresy were only ecclesiastical and clerical without any civil effect. The case was altered when Emperor Constantine appeared as both the protector and the secular arm of the church, for which reason he considered it necessary to exile the heretics, who were threatening the church with danger, in order to put them out of the way of doing harm. More severe punishments than exile were first inflicted upon the Catholics by the Arians when their co-religionists Constantius and Valens occupied the throne. The former introduced the practice of imprisoning the orthodox, the latter of drowning them, and Arian princes in the later Germanic kingdoms always exercised violence towards those of different faiths.

The connection of church and state was made much closer by the great theocratic idea, emanating from Gregory VII, which aimed at the bringing together of all peoples of the occident into one theocratic union, the protector of which was to be the pope, in the name of God; but the members of which could naturally be only those who belonged to the church. From this standpoint, heretics necessarily appeared as criminals of state because, through their wrong teaching, they rebelled against God as the king of the theocratic union: hence the civil codes of the middle ages punished heresy with death.

Whereas, after the time of Constantine the Great, the civil punishments of heretics were inflicted by the secular rulers, the decision as to whether a person was a heretic or not, was from the very beginning made by the bishops and synods. Hence, if we wish to get at the fundamental idea of the Inquisition, that it was a seeking out and a punishing of heretics, we must say that, in the former sense, it has existed since the time of the apostles; and, in the latter, since that of Constantine the Great. The actual Inquisition had its beginning in the great synod of Toulouse in 1229. Soon after this synod in southern France, we meet especially appointed inquisitors in Italy. Here also heresy had ravaged widely and had become so dangerous that even Emperor Frederick II, who is the last person one could accuse of bigotry, immediately upon his coronation and repeatedly afterwards uttered the death penalty against heretics. Gradually the episcopal inquisition became changed into a Dominican inquisition and was introduced into nearly all the countries of Europe. In the Pyrenaean peninsula likewise, which is here our main subject of interest, it came into Castile, Navarre, and Portugal, as well as into Aragon. Castile was to become the home of the “New Inquisition,” as Llorente[k] calls it,—more correctly of the Spanish Inquisition, the direct impulse to which was given by a peculiar condition which existed nowhere else than in Spain.

Already in the first centuries after the birth of Christ, the Jews in Spain had become so numerous and powerful that they began to think of Judaising the whole land. Hence it came about that the synod of Eliberis (303-313), an old Spanish city in the vicinity of which the later Granada is said to have been built, passed a resolution that in the future no Christian landholder was to let his fields be blessed by Jews. On the other hand there was no lack of attempts on the part of the old Visigothic kings in Spain to force the Jews to become Christians; but this was forbidden by the fourth council of Toledo, in its 57th canon, with the words: “Hereafter no Jew may be made to accept Christianity by force, but those who are already converted, even though it was by force, since they have already received the holy sacraments, must keep their faith and may in no wise blaspheme or despise it.”

Much more dangerous than the real Jews were those who were seemingly converted to Christianity and whose numbers had increased enormously after the persecutions at the end of the 14th century. While the former had seized upon a large part of the national wealth and the Spanish commerce, the latter threatened both the Spanish nationality and the Christian religion, since these disguised Jews on the one hand invaded clerical offices and even occupied episcopal chairs, while on the other they attained high civil honours, married into all noble families and used all these connections, together with their wealth, to bring about the victory of Judaism over Spanish nationality and over the Christian faith. Many laymen as well as churchmen recognised the danger threatened by the Jews and were convinced that something must be done by the government, for which reason repeated requests were made to Ferdinand and Isabella to take measures against the disguised Jews: it was against them that the inquisition was directed later, but never against the real Jews.

Soon after Ferdinand and Isabella had decided to introduce the Inquisition into Castile, Pope Sixtus IV, on November 1st, 1478, gave the ecclesiastical permission and allowed the two rulers to appoint two, or three clerical dignitaries, secular or regular priests, to question and to punish heretics. Two royal inquisitors were now appointed for Seville on the strength of the papal bull. In this step we have the beginning of the New or the Spanish state inquisition which differs principally from the ecclesiastical institution of the same name in the fact that the persons intrusted with the examination and the punishment of heretics—whether they were clericals or laymen—appeared not as servants of the church but as state officials who received their appointment and instructions from the ruling princes.

There was a second political reason why the Spanish monarchs in every way should have favoured an institution which, while appearing to be ecclesiastical, was almost continually accused and fought by the heads of the church, by the popes and bishops. With the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the transition began from the old state to the new, from the Germanic to the abstract and absolute. In the old state the central or royal power was limited by three comparatively free corporations, the nobility, the clergy, and the municipalities, and this the more so as these estates were closely connected with powers abroad, the clergy with Rome, the nobility and municipalities with their foreign peers, so that the union of the state within itself and therewith the superiority of the throne was not a little hindered. In both Castile and Aragon the inquisition was the most effective means of bringing all subjects, especially the clergy and nobility, under the power of the throne, and of perfecting the absolute authority of the sovereign.

Hence it was that it was precisely the two higher estates which most hated the Inquisition and which were persecuted as its enemies more often than the heretics; it was also principally the prelates who were soon involved in numerous suits with the new tribunals. The popes also could not fail to see that the Spanish Inquisition served the political absolutism much more than it did ecclesiastical purism, and hence they tried to intercept its growth in the same degree that they had promoted the old ecclesiastical inquisition.

This state character of the Spanish Inquisition has also been fully recognised by the more exact historical investigation of modern times, and even Ranke[mm] has expressed himself to the same effect as follows: “We have a celebrated book concerning it (the Inquisition) by Llorente,[k] and if I make so bold as to say anything in disagreement with such a predecessor let this be an excuse, that that so well informed author wrote in the interest of the Alfrancesados of the Josephinian government [i.e. the Gallicising faction supporting King Joseph Bonaparte]. In their interest he opposes the liberties of the Basque provinces, although the latter can hardly be denied. In the same interest he sees in the Inquisition also a usurpation of clerical power over state authority. If I am not mistaken, however, from the very facts which he relates it appears that the Inquisition was a royal court, but one provided with clerical weapons.”

Guizot[nn] agrees with this opinion in the words: “It (the Inquisition) was at first more political than religious, and destined to maintain order rather than to defend the faith.”

That the Portuguese Inquisition also was always regarded by the government itself as a state institution is shown by an ordinance dated March 20th, 1769, in which King Joseph I says: “It has been reported to me that whereas all other courts of justice, because they represent my royal person, have always borne and still bear the title Majesty, the misuse has arisen in connection with the Holy Office, a tribunal which by its organisation and its service is most closely and directly connected with my royal person, of giving it another title of address.”

The Inquisition is often judged according to standards of the 19th instead of the 15th and 16th centuries, and hence it is judged incorrectly. Whereas during the past hundred years it has been the tendency to regard wrong believers and unbelievers of all kinds as the most educated and the noblest citizens, the Inquisition on the contrary was based on the mediæval view that erring in religion was high treason and that only the advocate of the state religion could be a safe and trustworthy citizen. It is natural that the upholder of one standpoint cannot possibly judge impartially, events which have arisen from the other, unless in giving his judgment he is able to transport himself from his own time into the other and into its views.

This is done by every true historian. But the Inquisition is a subject which has been most discussed and described by those who give mere phrases instead of investigations, mere arbitrary statements instead of critical examinations, mere romantic descriptions instead of objective judgments, and who try to replace a lack of knowledge by so called liberally-minded phrases. People of this sort do not remember that the principle, cujus est regio, illius et religio,[206] on which the whole Inquisition rests, was universally recognised in olden times, and was so little questioned that Protestants especially upheld it and put it into execution.

For example in the palatinate, when the Kurfürst Frederick III, who had been a Lutheran until then, went over to Calvinism in 1563, he compelled all congregations in his land to take the same step, and exiled everyone who would not accept the Heidelberg catechism. Thirteen years later, in 1576, his son Ludwig restored the orthodox Lutheranism, drove out the Calvinistic preachers and teachers, and forced his dependents to become Lutheran again. The Religious Peace of the year 1555 gave every government the power of giving its dependents the alternative of accepting the religion of the sovereign or of emigrating, upon paying a certain sum, just as was done in Spain with the Jews and Moors; and it is a well-known fact that the Reformation owed its spread in Germany in large measure to this lenient Spanish alternative.

Furthermore, in judging the Inquisition it is often forgotten that the penal code of that time was much more severe and sanguinary than that of the 19th century. Many a trespass which is now atoned for by a slight penalty had at that time to be paid for with blood; and the criminal code of Charles V of the year 1532 is a most speaking witness for the severe criminal justice of the period out of which the Spanish Inquisition grew. Also the Carolina, for example, inflicts punishments on body, life, and limb for blasphemy of God and of the Blessed Virgin (§CVI); and witches are punished with death (§CXVI).

It must also not be overlooked, in judging the Inquisition, that the death penalty for heresy was not peculiar to it alone, but was common at that time to all lands and confessions. The reformer Buzer said of Michael Servetus, in the public pulpit at Strassburg, that he deserved the most humiliating death on account of his article against the Trinity. And that this was not merely a strong figure of speech of the Reformers is shown two decades later by Calvin, when on October 27th, 1553, he had that very “heretic” slowly burned to death at Geneva. That there may remain no doubt that the Protestants of that time wished to punish heresy with death, the “gentle” Melanchthon wrote on this subject to Calvin,

“I have read thy article, wherein thou hast refuted in detail the terrible blasphemies of Servetus and therefore I thank the Son of God who has given thee the victory in this thy struggle. The church is greatly indebted to thee for it, now and in all future time. I wholly agree with thy opinion and claim that your highness (eure Obrigkeit) has acted wholly in accordance with justice in executing a blasphemous person after a regular examination.”

In addition I will note that Theodore Beza also wrote an article De hereticis a magistrau civili puniendis and that many others besides Servetus, as Valentine Gentilis, Bolsec, Carlstadt, Grüet, Castellio, the councillor Ameaur, and others, could convince themselves through imprisonment, banishment, and death that in the Protestant church there was no milder an inquisition than in Spain. This is acknowledged even by many Protestants, as for example by Prescott[m] in his history of Ferdinand and Isabella.

But we do not need to go back to the 16th century or even to consider the terrible mistreatment of the Catholics in England,[207] in order to discover counterparts to the Spanish Inquisition among the Protestants. A remarkable case of this kind from the eighteenth century is related by Pfeilschifter: In the year 1724 at Rendsburg a young soldier, because he had wished to make a compact with the devil, as an act of royal favour was merely beheaded. Even more recently, e.g. in the year 1844, on the third of April the painter J. O. Nilson in Sweden was banished on account of “apostasy from the Lutheran faith and of going over to a mistaken religion” (the Catholic) and was declared to have forfeited all civil rights and rights of inheritance; this decision was confirmed by the highest court of the land in the year 1845. The unfortunate Nilson died in February 1847 at Copenhagen, in poverty.

I say all this not in reproach but only to show that the Protestants also have recognised the sanguinary rule: “Deviation from the state religion is to be punished with death.” If any one had any doubts as to the justice of this principle in the 16th and 17th centuries, it seems to me that these doubts should first have arisen in the minds of the Protestants, because their own apostasy from the church should have taught them to think more leniently of other apostates.

Among the victims of the Inquisition the so-called witches and sorcerers held a considerable place, and it would be superfluous to expend many words in proving that these unfortunates were just as severely persecuted in Germany as in Spain and in just as sanguinary a fashion by Protestants as by Catholics. Not only a Torquemada, but also a Benedict Carpzov two hundred years later, erected a stake for burning witches. Even the reformer Beza reproached the French parliament for being too lax in seeking out witches, and Walter Scott acknowledges that the stronger Calvinism grew in England the more numerous were the processes against witches. The Jesuit Frederick Spee of Langenfeld overthrew the belief in witches among the Catholics seventy years earlier than the Protestant Thomasius, and even in the year 1713 the legal faculty of Tübingen condemned a witch to death; indeed just a year later than in Spain, was the last witch burned in the canton of Glarus by a reformed court, in 1782.[208] On the whole, a comparison of the German processes against witches with the workings of the Spanish Inquisition, could hardly be made to appear to the advantage of the former.

Moreover it must not be forgotten with all this that the tribunal of the Inquisition always delivered only the sentence, that the accused was more or less, wholly or partly, or not at all guilty of heresy, blasphemy and the like. It itself never condemned to death though its decisions led to this penalty, in that the one found “guilty of heresy” by the Holy Office was turned over to the secular arm and by this, namely by the council of Castile, was led before the highest Spanish court for death or imprisonment.

The Spanish Inquisition is often declared to be a product of the Roman doctrinal despotism, without attention being given to the fact that it was precisely the popes who were least inclined to this institution and who at nearly all times tried to limit it. Even Llorente,[k] who can be accused of partiality to the popes no more than of a Jacobite partiality for the kingdom, shows this in almost innumerable instances and examples.

Stories are told of the cruel torments and tortures which the unfortunate beings in the dungeons of the Inquisition had to suffer, but even the most gentle character must not forget that the torture was used in those days in all secular courts in all countries, that it even existed legally in many German states in the 19th century and did not go out of general use until about the middle of the 18th century, in the courts of inquisition at the same time as in the secular courts. Besides execution by fire, sword, quartering, the wheel, gallows, and water, the Carolina speaks of burying alive, of tearing with glowing tongs, of cutting off the tongue and ears, of hacking off fingers and the like. Of all these ignominious and painful punishments, however, the Inquisition knows nothing. Moreover, at a time when in all Europe prisons were dark damp holes and real graves, full of mould, filth, and pest-breeding smells, the Inquisition brought its prisoners, to use the words of Llorente[k] into “well arched, light and dry rooms where they could make some movement.” No more did any prisoner of the Inquisition, as again Llorente testifies, groan under the weight of chains, hand cuffs, iron neck bands etc., and Llorente tells of only one on whom fetters were put, in order to keep him from suicide. The prisoners were asked if the gaoler treated them well and good care was also taken of the sick. Special buildings, by the name of “penitence houses,” were erected for the prisoners for life and these were subject to vistation from time to time.

It has furthermore become customary to think of the Inquisition as an ever-threatening and never-satisfied catch-and-seize-institution, whose polyp arms greedily grasped the poor unfortunate at the least sign of suspicion. But this view, which has such a drastic effect in historical romances and in romantic histories is wholly wrong and mistaken and must be entirely abandoned, unless Llorente is to be accused of partiality for the Inquisition. In the first place, every tribunal of the Inquisition began its activity by promulgating a time of grace and proclaimed publicly that: “whoever is conscious of apostasy from the faith but within the fixed time will voluntarily come forth and do penance, shall be absolved in grace and protected from severe penalty.” After the expiration of the term, however, the severity of the law was to be exercised towards the apostates; but again and again were the times of grace renewed and lengthened.

Further, the statutes of the Inquisition regarding young heretics deserve attention. “If sons and daughters of heretics,” so ordained Torquemada, “who have fallen into error through the teachings of their parents, and have not reached the age of twenty years, themselves apply to be taken back into favour, the inquisition shall receive such young people kindly, even if they should come after the time of reprieve, shall impose lighter penances upon them than upon grown persons and shall take pains that they receive instruction in the faith and the sacraments of the Holy Mother, the church.”

It is said that the least expression, often an innocent one, brought an unfortunate into the prisons of the Inquisition. But the second great inquisitor, Deza, who is considered even stricter than Torquemada himself, issued the order on June 17th, 1500 that “no one may be arrested for trivial reasons, not even on account of blasphemy which was uttered in anger.” There was no inclination to take the testimony of any person who happened to make an accusation before the tribunal of the Inquisition; on the contrary Llorente himself tells of cases in which only repeated accusations against a person could move the inquisitors to action and they were very much inclined to ascribe the mad behaviour of many heretics to mental aberration.

Wonderful stories are told of the incomes of the inquisitors, who are said to have condemned many only in order to enrich themselves from the confiscated goods. It is true that the cause of justice is in a bad way when condemnation is to bring a pecuniary profit to the judge and it would have been truly a dangerous and disreputable arrangement if the income of the inquisitors had depended on the number of those they condemned. Prescott[m] (I, 287) would really like to make us believe that such was the case, but we know from Llorente that the confiscated goods of the condemned fell to the royal treasury, and that the Inquisition officers of all kinds had a fixed salary which they received quarterly. Hence it comes that Llorente accused the Spanish king of avarice and not the inquisitors, in which Ranke[mm] bears him out.

Terrible is the picture which we make to ourselves of an auto da fé (actus fidei, i.e., “an act of faith”) as if it were nothing else than an enormous fire and a colossal stewing pan, around which the Spaniards sat like cannibals, in order to enjoy the spectacle of the roasting and broiling of several hundred unfortunates, four or five times a year. But let me be allowed to state that in the first place an auto da fé did not consist of burning and killing but, in part, of the exculpation of those who had been falsely accused and in part of the reconciliation of the repentant with the church, and there were even many autos da fé at which nothing burned but the candles which the penitent carried in their hands in token of the light of faith rekindled in their hearts.

Furthermore it must not be overlooked that those who were condemned by the Inquisition were not only heretics, but also such as lived in polygamy, priests and monks who had married, laymen who exercised clerical functions, deacons who heard confessions and those who falsely gave themselves out to be commissioners of the Inquisition, which as we know from Gil Blas happened not infrequently.

If in the little Protestant city of Nördlingen, as Soldan shows in his history of the witch processes, out of a total population of 6,000, not less than 35 witches were burned in the four years from 1590 to 1594; this ratio, applied to Spain for four years, would give at least 50,000 witches, whereas Llorente himself gives the number of those condemned to death by the Inquisition during the 330 years of its existence as only 30,000, including heretics, witches, sorcerers, smugglers and all the rest; this even if we wish to accept Llorente’s figures as not exaggerated.

But I think I may claim and can prove that they are exaggerated. Above all we must never forget that Llorente’s figures are not taken from official registers, not even from private records, but originated only from a system of probable reckonings which in part rests on false premises. He himself confesses this unreservedly, and often describes the theory he has used in his conjectural reckoning. Llorente’s arbitrariness and injustice are most clearly shown in regard to Ximenes. Llorente states explicitly that this archbishop tried to make the Inquisition less severe, that he removed bad officials, that he pardoned many of the accused, etc. Nevertheless, that does not hinder him from supposing just as many executions annually under Ximenes as under Deza and his helper Lucero, both of whom he repeatedly accuses of the most boundless cruelty and severity. That such a reckoning is untrue and unjust needs no proof.

After all these observations we are still far removed from wishing to justify the Spanish Inquisition; on the contrary we would everywhere oppose the right of a secular power to interfere with the conscience, but we wished to prove that the institution of the Inquisition was not the outrageous monstrosity which party passions and lack of knowledge have often made it out to be.[oo]

Another Catholic View (Heinrich Brück)

Opinions differ as to the character of the Spanish Inquisition. A number of scholars (Hefele[oo], Gams[pp] and others) claim that it was purely a state institution, whereas the Spanish writers emphasize its ecclesiastical character, without denying the great influence of the crown upon it. The correct view is probably given by Rodrigo[ii] and Orti y Lara.[jj] The former says (I, 276): “The tribunals of the Holy Office had no secular character of themselves. They were ecclesiastical tribunals in respect to the cases which they judged and in respect to the authority which created them. In respect to the royal delegation, however, which was granted to the judges, it may be said that they had a mixed character.” Orti y Lara expresses himself in like manner. According to him (p. 27), “the Inquisition united the papal sword of the church and the secular sword of the king into one single sword.”

The accusation that the Spanish Inquisition was unpopular is just as false as the statement that it caused the ruin of science and literature in Spain. As Balmes testifies (Protestantismus and Katholicismus, I, 412, et seq.), the Catholic kings fulfilled the universal wish of the people by establishing the Inquisition; the people were always in sympathy with it, whereas it was opposed by the nobility and higher clergy. The decline of literary activity moreover can not have been caused by the Inquisition for the reason that the golden age of Spanish literature coincided with the time when the Inquisition was in full sway. The greatest theologians, philosophers, and poets, whose works were approved by the Inquisition, lived at that time. Schools were founded and classical studies diligently pursued.

One of the chief accusations brought against the Spanish Inquisition is the alleged extraordinary number of its victims. This accusation is based chiefly on the statements of Antonio Llorente.[k] But it needs only a nearer acquaintance with the character of this embittered free mason and with his proofs, to perceive the incorrectness of his statements. Far from citing historical documents he builds up his argument upon evident falsification, arbitrary assumptions which are in wide contrast with the authorities, and, as the Protestant Peschel[rr] says (page 151), upon a “frivolous calculation from probabilities,” so that he cannot be trusted in regard to his data. According to Gams[pp] (III, 274) the number of those executed for heresy during the whole period of the Inquisition was about four thousand, a number not equal to that of the victims of the witch processes in Catholic and Protestant Germany.[ss]

FOOTNOTES

[187] [This brief study, inserted here because Spain and Portugal were the chief centres of the fury of the Inquisition, will afford glimpses also of its development in other countries.]

[188] Confusion has been introduced by both friend and foe into the history of the Waldenses. At first they were confounded with the Cathari or Albigenses by Catholics in order to represent them as Manichæans; by reformed writers in order to clear the Albigenses also from the charge of Manichæism. Further, the origin of the Waldenses is often referred to an earlier period than that of Peter Waldensis, though it is so clearly proved by the witness of contemporaries that he is the founder of the sect.

[189] [This terrible man, in his letter to Innocent III announcing his victories, relates himself with triumph: “Our troops sparing neither sex nor age put to the sword nearly twenty thousand; splendid deeds were accomplished in the overthrow of the enemies, the whole city was sacked and burned by a divine revenge marvellous fierce.”]

[190] [Some Catholic writers would fain excuse St. Dominic from the imputation of having founded the Inquisition. It is true he died some years before the organisation of that tribunal; but he established the principles on which, and the monkish militia by whom, it was administered. The Sicilian Paramo,[i] traces it up to a much more remote antiquity. According to him, God was the first inquisitor, and his condemnation of Adam and Eve furnished the model of the judicial forms observed in the trials of the Holy Office. The sentence of Adam was the type of the inquisitorial “reconciliation,” his subsequent raiment of the skins of animals was the model of the san-benito, and his expulsion from paradise the precedent for the confiscation of the goods of heretics. This learned personage deduces a succession of inquisitors through the patriarchs, Moses, Nebuchadrezzar, and King David, down to John the Baptist, and even Christ, in whose precepts and conduct he finds abundant authority for the tribunal.[m]]

[191] [Among the modern apologists for the Inquisition may be named Rodrigo[ii] and Orto y Lara.[jj]]

[192] [Thus in Spain, Pope Sixtus IV, in a special bull of November 1st, 1478, quoted by Llorente,[k] conferring on Ferdinand and Isabella the power to appoint inquisitors, insisted that they be “two or three bishops or archbishops, or other competent and honest men, secular or regular priests upwards of forty years of age, of good life and customs, masters or bachelors of theology, and doctors or licentiates in canon law, by virtue of a strict examination.”]

[193] [In the tormento de toca, a gauze bag was placed in the throat and water poured in it, forcing the gauze gradually down the œsophagus into the stomach. Other torments were the gradual pouring of water drop by drop on one spot of the body, and the great swinging pendulum, or péndola, with the knife affixed, as described in Poe’s haunting story.]

[194] [The trampazo was an iron shoe heated red hot and clamped to the bare foot.]

[195] [Philip the Fair in the course of his war with Pope Boniface VIII condemned the Inquisition, though he burned the Templars; or as Dean Kitchin puts it, the Inquisition “was effectively used by Philip the Fair to crush the Templars, though that greedy prince quickly interfered when he found the Inquisition laying hands on his special preserves, the wealthy Jews.” See the Papacy.]

[196] L. Marineo[bb] diffuses the two thousand capital executions over several years. He sums up the various severities of the Holy Office in the following gentle terms: “The church, who is the mother of mercy and the fountain of charity, content with the imposition of penances, generously accords life to many who do not deserve it; while those who persist obstinately in their errors, after being imprisoned on the testimony of trustworthy witnesses, she causes to be put to the torture, and condemned to the flames. Some miserably perish, bewailing their errors, and invoking the name of Christ, while others call upon that of Moses. Many, again, who sincerely repent, she, notwithstanding the heinousness of their transgressions, merely sentences to perpetual imprisonment.”

[197] Bernáldez[cc] states that guards were posted at the gates of the city of Seville in order to prevent the emigration of the Jewish inhabitants, which indeed was forbidden under pain of death. The tribunal, however, had greater terrors for them, and many succeeded in effecting their escape.

[198] [The Spanish form is auto de fe, but the Portuguese form—auto da fé, was the first to obtain English usage.]

[199] So says Puigblanch[ee]: The inquisitors after the celebration of an auto da fé at Guadaloupe, in 1485, wishing probably to justify these bloody executions in the eyes of the people, who had not yet become familiar with them, solicited a sign from the Virgin (whose shrine in that place is noted all over Spain) in testimony of her approbation of the Holy Office. Their petition was answered by such a profusion of miracles that Dr. Francis Sanctius de la Fuente, who acted as scribe on the occasion, became out of breath, and, after recording sixty, gave up in despair, unable to keep pace with their marvellous rapidity, according to Paramo.[i]

[200] Voltaire[dd] remarks (Essai sur les Mœurs, Chap. cxl) that “An Asiatic, arriving at Madrid on the day of an auto da fé, would doubt whether it were a festival, religious celebration, sacrifice, or massacre; it is all of them. They reproach Montezuma with sacrificing human captives to the gods. What would he have said had he witnessed an auto da fé?”

[201] The government, at least, cannot be charged with remissness in promoting this. We find two ordinances in the royal collection of pragmáticas,[ff] dated in September, 1501 (there must be some error in the date of one of them), inhibiting, under pain of confiscation of property, such as had been “reconciled,” and their children by the mother’s side, and grandchildren by the father’s, from holding any office in the privy council, courts of justice, or in the municipalities, or any other place of trust or honour. They were also excluded from the vocation of notaries, surgeons, and apothecaries. This was visiting the sins of the fathers, to an extent unparalleled in modern legislation. The sovereigns might find a precedent in a law of Sulla.

[202] The Aragonese made a manly though ineffectual resistance, from the first, to the introduction of the Inquisition among them by Ferdinand. In Castile, its enormous abuses provoked the spirited interposition of the legislature at the commencement of the following reign. But it was then too late.

[203] By an article of the primitive instructions, the inquisitors were required to set apart a small portion of the confiscated estates for the education and Christian nurture of minors, children of the condemned. Llorente[k] says that, in the immense numbers of processes which he had occasion to consult, he met with no instance of their attention to the fate of these unfortunate orphans!

[204] Torquemada waged war upon freedom of thought in every form. In 1490 he caused several Hebrew Bibles to be publicly burned and some time after, more than six thousand volumes of oriental learning, on the imputation of Judaism, sorcery, or heresy, at the autos da fé of Salamanca, the very nursery of science. This may remind one of the similar sentence passed by Lope de Barrientos, another Dominican, about fifty years before, upon the books of the marquis of Villena. Fortunately for the dawning literature of Spain, Isabella did not, as was done by her successors, commit the censorship of the press to the judges of the Holy Office, notwithstanding such occasional assumption of power by the grand inquisitor.

[205] The prodigious desolation of the land may be inferred from the estimates, although somewhat discordant, of deserted houses in Andalusia. Garibay[gg] puts these at three thousand, Pulgar[hh] at four, L. Marineo[bb] as high as five thousand.

[206] [This may be roughly translated “The man that rules the region, rules also its religion.”]

[207] [The reader will find full treatment of Protestant excesses in the histories of Germany, Switzerland, and England. The persecution of Catholics in England is discussed, in vol. XIX, pp. 148-155, 159-161, 199-200, 354-355, 406-408, 444-453, including an account of tortures used in England during Elizabeth’s reign, and a comparison of her cruelties with those of “Bloody Mary.” As part of religious history, one should also note the persecutions inflicted on dissenters by the Church of England, in Scotland and Ireland, as discussed in the histories of those countries.]

[208] [The reader will find in vol. XXIII page 177, a statement that a man was “swam for a wizard” in England in 1825. He should consult this same volume, pages 171-177, for an account of the witchcraft persecutions in the United States, at Salem, in 1692, and pages 177-178 for an account of the mutilation and execution of Quakers in Massachusetts.]