The attacks made on him, therefore, served chiefly to draw to his works the attention he solicited, and in the end advanced his cause, instead of retarding it. Even the Inquisition, to which he was more than once denounced, summoned him in vain before its tribunals.[309] His faith could not be questioned, and his cause was stronger than they were. Fifteen editions of his principal work, large as it was, were printed in half a century. The excitement it produced went on increasing as long as he lived; and when he died, in 1764, he could look back and see that he had imparted a movement to the human mind in Spain, which, though it was far from raising Spanish philosophy to a level with that of France and England, had yet given it a right direction, and done more for the intellectual life of his country than had been done for a century.[310]
CHAPTER III.
Intolerance, Credulity, and Bigotry. — Reign of Ferdinand the Sixth. — Signs of Improvement. — Literature. — Saladueña. — Moraleja. — Academy of Good Taste. — Velazquez. — Mayans. — Nasarre.
It can hardly be said, that, during the forty-six years of the reign of Philip the Fifth, the intolerance which had so long blighted the land relaxed its grasp. The progress of knowledge might, indeed, be gradually and silently accumulating means to resist it, but its power was still unbroken, and its activity as formidable as ever. Louis the Fourteenth, in whom an old age of bigotry naturally ended a life of selfish indulgence, had counselled his grandson to sustain the Inquisition, as one of the means for insuring tranquillity to the political government of the country; and this advice, not given without a knowledge of the Spanish character, was, on the whole, acted upon with success, if not with entire consistency.
At first, indeed, the personal dispositions of the king in relation to this mighty engine of state seemed somewhat unsettled. When it was proposed to him to celebrate an auto da fé, as a part of the pageant suitable to the coming in of a new dynasty, the young monarch, fresh from the elegance of the court of Versailles, refused to sanction its barbarities by his presence. Even later he encouraged Macanaz, a person high in office, to publish a work in defence of the crown against the overgrown pretensions of the Church, and at one time he went so far as to entertain a project for suspending the Holy Office, or suppressing it altogether.[311]
But these dispositions were transient. The Spanish priesthood early obtained control of the king’s mind. In one of the sieges of Barcelona, during the War of the Succession, he was induced to consult an image of the Virgin, and to avow afterwards, very solemnly, that she had given him a miraculous promise of the fidelity of the Catalonians,—a promise, it should be added, such as would be likely to insure its own fulfilment. The death of the queen, in 1714, which plunged him into a deep melancholy, further contributed to give power to the clergy who surrounded him; and, a year afterwards, when the Inquisition took firm ground against Macanaz and the royal prerogative, the king yielded, and Macanaz fled to France. And finally, when, in 1724, after a few months of abdication, Philip resumed the reins of government, which he should never have laid down, no small part of the increased energy, with which he fulfilled the duties of his high place, was inspired by the influence of the Church. As he grew older, he grew more bigoted; and in his last years, when the accumulated power placed in his hands by the destruction of the few remaining privileges of Aragon and Catalonia had made him a more absolute monarch than ever before sat on the Spanish throne, he seemed to rejoice, as much as any of his predecessors, in devoting the whole of his prerogatives to advance the interests of the priesthood.[312]
But, from first to last, there was no real relaxation in the intolerance of the Church. The fires of the Inquisition had burnt as if Philip the Second were on the throne. At least one auto da fé was celebrated annually in each of the seventeen tribunals into which the country was divided; so that the entire number of these atrocious popular exhibitions of bigotry during the reign of Philip the Fifth exceeded seven hundred and eighty. How many persons were burnt alive in them is not exactly known; but it is believed, that there were more than a thousand, and that at least twelve times that number were, in different ways, subjected to public punishments and disgrace. Judaism, which had penetrated anew into Spain, from the period of the conquest of Portugal, was the great crime, to be hunted down with all the ingenuity of persecution; and undoubtedly all that could be found of the Hebrew nation or faith was now for the second time extirpated, as nearly as it is possible to extirpate what conscience refuses to give up, and fear and hatred have so many ways to hide. But some men of letters—like Belando, who wrote a civil history of part of the reign of Philip the Fifth, which he dedicated to that monarch, and which bore on its pages all the regular permissions to be printed—were punished without the pretence of being guilty of heresy or unbelief; and many more disappeared from society, who, like Macanaz, were known to entertain political opinions offensive to the Church or the government, but of whom nothing else was known that could render them obnoxious to censure. On the whole, therefore, down to the death of Philip the Fifth, the old alliance between the government of the state and the power of the Church—an alliance supported by the general assent of the people—must still be assumed to have continued unbroken, and its authority must still be felt to have been sufficient to control all freedom of discussion, and effectually to check and silence such intellectual activity as it deemed dangerous.[313]
In the reign of Ferdinand the Sixth, which lasted thirteen years, and ended in 1759, there is evidently an improvement in this state of things. The seeds sown in the time of his father, if less cared for and cultivated than they should have been, were beginning to germinate and disencumber themselves from the cold and hard soil into which they had been cast. Foreign intercourse, especially that with France, brought in new ideas. Ferreras, the careful, but dull, annalist of his country’s history; Juan de Yriarte, the active head of the Royal Library; Bayer, his learned successor; Mayans, who had a passion for collecting and editing books; and, above all, the wise and modest Father Feyjoó, had not labored in vain, and still survived to see the results of their toils.
The Church itself began slowly to acknowledge the irresistible power of advancing intelligence, and the Inquisition, without acknowledging it, felt its influence. Not more than ten persons were burnt alive in the time of Ferdinand the Sixth, and these were obscure relapsed Jews;—men whose fate is as heavy a reproach to the Inquisition as if they had been more intelligent and distinguished, but the example of whose punishment did not strike a terror such as that of the dying Protestants and patriots of Aragon had once done. The persecutions of the Holy Office, in fact, not only grew less frequent and cruel, but became more than ever subservient to the political authority of the country, and were now chiefly exercised in relation to Freemasonry, which was known at this period in Spain for the first time, and caused much uneasiness to the government. But the policy of the state, during the reign of Ferdinand the Sixth, was in the main peaceful and healing. Efforts, not without success, were made to collect materials for a history of the country from the earliest times. Spaniards were sent abroad to be educated at the public expense, and foreigners were encouraged to establish themselves in Spain, and to diffuse the knowledge they had acquired in their own more favored homes. Every thing, in short, indicated a spirit of change, if it did not give proof of much absolute progress.[314]