It is not our intention to go into the question of ecclesiastical espionage; but inasmuch as the Inquisition's operations in Europe were based mainly, in respect of its bloody triumphs, on the work of a vast network of espionage which assured to the Inquisitors their periodical supply of victims it is only fair, without taking sides, that the story should be told. Our authority for the following account of espionage as it was used by the Inquisition—the name itself suggests its spying character—is Joseph Lavallée, a French Catholic, who has dealt authoritatively with the whole subject of the Inquisition. Lavallée writes in effect:
The Inquisition was at Rome known as the Holy Office, all the members of which were nominated by the Pope. They were bound to do his bidding without question; they were removable at his pleasure and he could recall them without any formality, or even without letting them know the cause of their disgrace. We need no longer wonder, therefore, at the intrigues and crimes to which these men had recourse in order to preserve their places. The business of the Roman Inquisition was to examine the books, the opinions, the doctrines, the public and private conduct of those who were brought before its tribunals; in virtue of their office they were bound to make a report of all their proceedings, and it was almost always upon their statements that the cardinals formed their judgments and decrees. The number of subordinate officers was immense and these mainly constituted the corps d'espionnage proper, forming the Hermandad, or Brotherhood, and the Cruciata, or Crusade. When any particular crime was necessary in order to "establish" a case, no matter how revolting or iniquitous or sacrilegious, the Office could always find among its spies men and women both competent and willing to execute its orders. Whatever crime they might commit, the secular power had no authority over them; they were amenable only to the Inquisition, and it is not to be wondered at if the very dross and scum of human kind eagerly sought out the work of espionage as being most congenial. In Spain and Portugal, the Holy Office was known as the Inquisition. Its bands of informers were mostly drawn from the most unmanageable pupils of the schools; they were sent into the world at maturity, ostensibly to earn a living, but in reality to carry out the work of the Inquisition in the capacity of spies, as the historian Infessura tells us. The supreme council of the Inquisition was composed of the Grand Inquisitor and five members, one of them a Dominican necessarily. The number of "familiars," or spies, surpasses belief and was in the proportion of one to every family in Madrid and Valladolid of that period. As in Italy, they were placed above the ordinary civil courts and were amenable only to the Inquisition.
In order to qualify as an Inquisitor, or to hold any office in the Inquisition, it was necessary for the candidate to be descended, and to be able to prove his descent, from a line of "perfect Christians." Having given this proof, he was obliged to take an oath of secrecy and fidelity to the Inquisition, the violation of which was punishable with death. The body of informers were bound by the same oaths, and if it was necessary to procure the "removal" of any person or persons, these men were employed as agents provocateurs, death being the alternative if ever they disclosed the methods of their Christlike patrons and employers. As we have seen, both the Hermandad and the Cruciata were the Inquisition's agents throughout the Peninsula, and were employed mostly for the purposes of watching and seizing victims. The smallest hamlets swarmed with these vermin and they were mainly drawn by the Inquisitors from the worst characters in the country. They themselves were often victims of the Inquisition, whose influence had destroyed all kinds of secular industry in order that the Church should profit by it, and members of both brotherhoods served for the lowest wage the system which had robbed them of all chance of procuring an honourable livelihood. In order to possess the better claim upon their patrons, they had devoted all the faculties of mind and heart to perfecting the arts of espionage, and no system has ever produced more crafty, more ruthless, more persevering servants. When once their attention was fixed upon a victim, it was but of small importance that he was innocent, for his doom was settled from that moment. If his reputation, his rank, his riches did not allow of his immediate seizure, then recourse was had to stratagem. All means, however vile or base, were allowed; they employed all arts, they assumed all characters, they made use of every dress, they adopted every possible method of circumventing and capturing their prey. Caresses, flattery, entertainments, gold, were all employed in forwarding their designs; months and years often passed before a victim was entrapped, but the Hermandad never lost a victim once it had fixed its eyes upon his belongings. The Cruciata was formed with the object of watching over members of the Catholic body and seeing that its members performed their religious duties. It is not difficult to conceive to what a degree of hypocrisy such an establishment must have brought a nation, and if "most Catholic Spain" were Catholic at all in those days, it was rather from fear of the Cruciata than from love of God. So then the Inquisition had two first-class corps d'espionnage which formed two active armies, always on the alert and always moving among the masses, through which both their political and their spiritual ascendancy remained assured.
That few could escape the attentions of these spies must be evident when we consider that the Inquisition characterised as Heretics all who taught, wrote, or spoke against the Church, its teachings, its hierarchy and priesthood, or even those who wrote in favour of methods or teachings belonging to non-Catholic bodies, or who simply criticised the Church. To be a suspect was practically to be a man who was already dead. To have spoken irreverently of holy things, or to have failed to inform of those who had so spoken, to have read forbidden books, or to have lodged or entertained an heretical friend—these were sufficient to condemn a man, and according to the principles of the Inquisition, a man was obliged to inform against his father, his brother, his wife, his children, under pain of himself being brought within the notice of the Inquisitors. As it happened, the larger percentage of men and women who became its victims were such as possessed large means which the ecclesiastical powers desired to possess. Jews, Moslems, non-Catholics of all sorts were, equally with Catholics, amenable to the Inquisition for specified "crimes," all of which were punishable by death if the accused were unable to justify themselves. Public report, secret information, discovery by means of spies and voluntary accusation were the four ways employed by the Inquisition, in order to bring matters under its jurisdiction. Flight was impossible in view of the ubiquitous Hermandad, and the summary seizure of an accused person and his immediate incarceration constituted the usual procedure, once the spies had reported to headquarters. These spies, or "familiars," as they were called, were invariably supported by the Inquisitors, even if evidence had to be fabricated in order to make up a plausible case. What was the quality of the Justice dispensed may be gathered from the following facts: first, the names of witnesses deposing against the accused were never given to these last; secondly, witnesses were not obliged to prove their depositions; thirdly, all and sundry who cared to volunteer testimony were accepted, so that men who were notorious for infamy, for perjury and for the most scandalous vices were welcomed to bear witness to the "truth"; fourthly, two hearsay witnesses were equivalent to one ear-witness; fifthly, the spies were always accounted the most reliable witnesses, notwithstanding that they were in the pay of the Inquisition. Finally, a son might be witness against his father, a father against his son, a wife against her husband, a husband against his wife, a domestic against his master, or a master against his servant—an inexhaustible source of treachery, revenge and the worst qualities of the human heart. The tortures to which the accused were subjected in order to make them confess to the commission of crimes of which they were guiltless were of three kinds. In the first place the victim was taken to a vault which lay sometimes as many as one hundred feet below the surface of the highway. According to the nature of the charge, he was put through the torture of dislocation by being fastened as to his extremities, with cords, then raised by means of a pulley, kept some time in suspension and suddenly let fall to within a foot of the ground. If on repetition this means was found insufficient to make the "subject" confess, his Christian tormentors resorted to the water-trough, laying him on his back, binding him as to the legs, and having stopped his nostrils, poured water from a considerable height in such a way that its weight fell upon the throat. Occasionally the master of ceremonies turned off the flow, not, however, to give the victim relief, but to prevent his death by suffocation. Perhaps, even then, he refused to surrender, and in order to cure his obstinacy a couple of religious smeared his feet with lard or oil, stretched him on the ground with the soles exposed to a terrific fire, and after half-an-hour's subjection to this ordeal invited him to speak. If he refused, he was put through the torture once more and then removed to a dungeon where he invariably found some others in apparently as bad a plight as his own, who, as soon as he was brought in, began to curse the Inquisition and all connected with it. These were nearly always spies whose evidence constituted subsequently that on which the unfortunate man was eventually condemned to death. The executioners of the torture-room were as a rule monks clothed in cassocks of black buckram, with the head and face concealed under a cowl of the same colour, with holes for the eyes, nose and mouth. A Prior was accustomed to supervise the torture, assisted by a clerk who referred to his spy agents as occasion required, or summoned them from an adjoining hall, where most of them wiled the time away at dice, in order to fortify all accusations against the victim. Sometimes an innocent man, in the vain hope of saving his life, confessed his guilt. He was then accounted a happy repentant and, by a special favour, was permitted to be strangled before being cast into the flames. Those who persisted in their obstinacy were summarily burned to death.
In modern foreign congregational colleges the divisions of the school take the form of junior boys, middle grade and seniors, and as communication of the youths of one grade with those of any other grade are most strictly forbidden, mainly on the ground of morality, a considerable system of espionage is from the outset part of the institution's plans. In foreign schools the spies of any particular grade are officially known by the other boys, just as monitors are known in ordinary schools. The functions of the foreign school-spy go, however, very much farther than those of the monitor, and so busy is he in the performance of his duties, that espionage enters into the minds and habits of foreign youths from their earliest years. When the late Cardinal Vaughan—a typical Englishman if membership of a territorial family of half-a-score of generations counts for anything—was laying plans for the founding of a Catholic school in England, he visited many of the principal colleges in France with the object of obtaining ideas for his proposed foundation. Everywhere he was depressed at the absence of individual liberty and the ever-present prevalence of espionage. Nor was he consoled very much, on once asking the distinguished head of such an establishment what provision was made for training youths in the proper use of individual freedom, to hear that the school authorities saw to it that no freedom whatever was allowed except under the eyes of the official supervisors. Neither does the system fail in its application among the members of any governing confraternity itself in which the lay-brothers are spied upon by the functionaries in minor orders, and these in their turn by clerics in higher orders, the superior exercising espionage upon the entire community while the sport begins again in inverse order, and the chief finds out that his reports dealing with the subordinate end of the line are fully supplemented by spies who report with equal completeness on his own end of the game. Contemplative Orders, as they are called, are not, it may be said, confined to the Roman Catholic Church, and we presume monastic espionage is as prevalent among the non-Catholic monks as among the Catholic.
XVII
AMERICAN SECRET SERVICE
It is customary for Americans to declare that they possess no system of espionage in their country, and as a rule this is true of American life under normal conditions. Putting aside the questions of purely detective work and criminal investigation, and in these spheres of police activity America is probably served as well as any other country in the world, we may safely say that there is too much individual or social freedom in the United States to warrant the permanent existence of anything like organised espionage. Nevertheless, politics plays a rôle in every state of the Union, the complexity and strenuousness of which are not known in any other country in the world, and wherever the political game is pursued with resoluteness and vigour, we may depend upon it that all factions possess what Americans themselves very aptly describe as "inside information" regarding what is taking place in other opposing camps; all the more so, indeed, as success in political campaigns in America means possession and employment of a kind of patronage which is invariably expressed in terms of dollars and cents. Such information can only come by way of emissaries planted in the midst of political enemies, and there is attached to every political organisation a selected body of men who make it their business, for due consideration, to work in other camps on behalf of particular factions. This kind of political espionage is, it may be said, quite as common in England, or Canada, or Australia, or France, or Germany as in the United States, for as it has been said: "So long as there are governments so long will there be political spies, and so long as there are attempts being made to overturn governments by force, so long will political espionage remain a necessity." As in England, or Scotland and Ireland, so in America there is little in the way of systematised espionage, even among the vast community of German-Americans who might be supposed to revert to type, as the Darwinians put it. Over there, as in these Islands, espionage is only organised for expediency's sake and according to the exigencies of any particular scandal, social or commercial, which may require the intervention of the agent of stealth and observation.
Yet, how many Americans are themselves aware that Charles the First sent his agent Randolph to America in order to report on the condition of the Colonies which were even then discussing the question of severing themselves from the British bond? Louis the Sixteenth also sent Baron de Kalb to inquire into the revolutionary spirit which, as a result of the importation of French encyclopædism, preceded the Declaration of Independence, and upon the Baron's favourable report, gave the Revolutionaries that aid which led in the end to their triumph. Of Hale we have spoken at fuller length, but have yet to tell how General Washington had his own secret agents within the British lines, from whom he received constant intelligence as to what was taking place in Howe's and Clinton's camp. Major Tallmadge, whom we have mentioned in the story of André, was the agent through whom the information was transmitted. At first it was written in sympathetic ink, then a new invention and imported by General Lafayette, which only disclosed its message when the paper on which it was written had been dipped in another fluid. Once the invisible ink was made visible by the application of the chemical reagent which developed it, the manuscript appeared as if it had been written in the ordinary way. Washington was, however, a particularly cautious man. He suspected that the British might very well possess this same sympathetic ink, and conveyed a message to Tallmadge that the latter's spy "should avoid making use of the stain (ink) upon a blank sheet of paper which is the usual way of its coming to me. This circumstance alone is sufficient to excite suspicion. A much better way is to write a letter in the Tory-style with some mixture of family matters, and between the lines in the remaining part of the sheet communicate with the stain the intended intelligence. Such a letter would pass through the hands of the enemy unsuspected, and even if the agents should be unfaithful or negligent, no discovery would be made to his prejudice, as these people are not to know what is concealed writing in the letter and the intelligent part of it would be an evidence in his favour."