Several popular novels written during the latter half of the nineteenth century have undoubtedly had something to do with this impression of sinister brutality. Let us therefore deduct twenty-five per cent for the phantasy of our romantic scribes and another twenty-five for Protestant prejudice and we shall find that enough horror remains to justify those who claim that all secret tribunals are an insufferable evil and should never again be tolerated in a community of civilized people.
Henry Charles Lea has treated the subject of the Inquisition in eight ponderous volumes. I shall have to reduce these to two or three pages, and it will be quite impossible to give a concise account of one of the most complicated problems of medieval history within so short a space. For there never was an Inquisition as there is a Supreme Court or an International Court of Arbitration.
There were all sorts of Inquisitions in all sorts of countries and created for all sorts of purposes.
The best known of these was the Royal Inquisition of Spain and the Holy Inquisition of Rome. The former was a local affair which watched over the heretics in the Iberian peninsula and in the American colonies.
The latter had its ramifications all over Europe and burned Joan of Arc in the northern part of the continent as it burned Giordano Bruno in the southern.
It is true that the Inquisition, strictly speaking, never killed any one.
After sentence had been pronounced by the clerical judges, the convicted heretic was surrendered to the secular authorities. These could then do with him what they thought fit. But if they failed to pronounce the death penalty, they exposed themselves to a great deal of inconvenience and might even find themselves excommunicated or deprived of their support at the papal court. If, as sometimes happened, the prisoner escaped this fate and was not given over to the magistrates his sufferings only increased. For he then ran the risk of solitary confinement for the rest of his natural life in one of the inquisitorial prisons.
As death at the stake was preferable to the slow terror of going insane in a dark hole in a rocky castle, many prisoners confessed all sorts of crimes of which they were totally innocent that they might be found guilty of heresy and thus be put out of their misery.
It is not easy to write upon this subject without appearing to be hopelessly biased.
It seems incredible that for more than five centuries hundreds of thousands of harmless people in all parts of the world were overnight lifted from their beds at the mere whispered hearsay of some loquacious neighbors; that they were held for months or for years in filthy cells awaiting an opportunity to appear before a judge whose name and qualifications were unknown to them; that they were never informed of the nature of the accusation that was brought against them; that they were not allowed to know the names of those who had acted as witnesses against them; that they were not permitted to communicate with their relatives or consult a lawyer; that if they continued to protest their innocence, they could be tortured until all the limbs of their body were broken; that other heretics could testify against them but were not listened to if they offered to tell something favorable of the accused; and finally that they could be sent to their death without the haziest notion as to the cause of their terrible fate.