A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

Of course nothing could compensate a man engaged in trade for thus locking up during years all his business concerns. To such a one, arrest with sequestration meant ruin, however clearly his innocence might be demonstrated after the prolonged proceedings of the tribunal. A curious inventory of a printing office thus seized shows the breaking up of a business and the destruction of the means of livelihood. One item is “a hundred and twenty reams of the third volume of Rodríguez, the book at present in hand,” which is highly suggestive of the loss inflicted, without redress, on other parties concerned, as author or publisher, as also of the sacrifice incurred by peremptory auction sales of such material.[1470]

The office of secrestador or depositary would seem, in the earlier period, to have been regarded as desirable, and it certainly offered opportunities for the dishonest. That these were sometimes improved is apparent from the case, in 1510, of Fernando de Mesa, a jurado of Córdova, who was secrestador of the estate of a certain Celamin. By the time the latter was condemned, Mesa had died and the sequestrated property was not forthcoming. He had placed four daughters as nuns in the convent of Santa Ines and their share of the defalcation was thirty thousand maravedís, but the convent pleaded inability to pay through poverty and Ferdinand kindly forgave it the debt.[1471]

To the honest, however, the office was in every way undesirable. It involved labor, anxiety and responsibility without payment but, when selected and approved, the appointee was obliged to serve, under penalty of excommunication and a fine of ten or twenty thousand maravedís. It was recommended that, if possible, he should not be a kinsman of the prisoner or a Converso, and he was always to be of good repute and standing.[1472] If the accused was a householder, the house was locked and the keys were given to the depositary; otherwise he was put to the expense of storage; he was obliged to sign a paper subjecting himself to the penalties imposed on him by the alguazil and pledging his person and property to make good any deficiencies occurring through error or negligence, for which he renounced his fuero and submitted himself wholly to the Inquisition.[1473] The perplexities and tribulations to which he was exposed are illustrated by those of Jaume Taxes, who served as depositario in the case of Margarita Altamira. He appealed, April 26, 1682, to the inquisitors, representing that, when the sequestration was made, he was given the key of the house, but he is now required to surrender it to the owner and to have the goods stored safely; he has no room for them in his own house and petitions to have them delivered to some one else. No attention was paid to this and, on May 14th, the owner of the house, a priest named Francisco Canudes, came forward with a complaint; on March 26th he had obtained an order for the key, but Taxes refuses to surrender it, wherefore he desires that he be forced to do so and to pay him six months’ rent.[1474] The documents fail to inform us what was the solution of the complication which the tribunal had thus created, but the affair illustrates the manner in which the Inquisition was wont to call for gratuitous services and to pay little regard to the convenience or interest of those on whom it imposed onerous duties.

LIMITATIONS

There were some limitations on the power of sequestration. It was confined to property found in possession of the accused; whatever he owned that was in the hands of third parties could not be sequestrated and had to await sentence of confiscation before it could be seized.[1475] An application of this principle led to the somewhat remarkable rule that there could be no sequestration in prosecutions of the dead, however convincing the proofs of guilt, because the possessions of the offender had passed into the hands of third parties. As early as 1537 this was prescribed by the Suprema, in a letter to the tribunal of Barcelona, and it was embodied in the Instructions of 1561.[1476]

A more important limitation confined sequestration to arrest on charges of formal heresy, and the fiscal was required in his clamosa to specify whether or not he asked for it, though as late as 1575 the Suprema was obliged to notify the tribunal of Valencia that heresy was a prerequisite of sequestration.[1477] The definition of heresy, however, was somewhat elastic and when, in 1573, a determined effort was made to eradicate the general popular belief that fornication between the unmarried was not a mortal sin, it was ordered to be prosecuted as heresy with sequestration.[1478] When formal heresy was involved, sequestration was to be decreed, whether the accused had property or not and, in 1665, the Suprema rebuked the tribunal of Barcelona for omitting it in the case of a galley-slave.[1479]

The Inquisition at length grew restive under the limitation of sequestration to formal heresy, for, as heretics grew fewer, it exempted a vast proportion of the cases which formed the current business of the tribunals, consisting of blasphemy, sorcery, bigamy, solicitation, marriage of clerics, propositions scandalous, audacious or ill-sounding, the possession of prohibited books, and, in fact, as we are told, all offences which did not in law import confiscation.[1480] In these cases the warrant of arrest, during the sixteenth century, instructed the alguazil to arrange so that the prisoner could leave his property in the hands of any one whom he should select, to be used for the maintenance of himself and his family, and an inventory was to be made to prevent misappropriation.[1481] In time the Inquisition outgrew this consideration for the innocent sufferers, which reduced it to sharing with them in the use of what was apt to disappear in the course of the protracted trials. To remedy this and without, so far as appears, any warrant of law, the expedient was devised of substituting for the word sequestration the euphemistic term of embargo, and ordering the property of all prisoners not liable to confiscation to be embargoed. The words had the same meaning and, in the earlier time, were used as identical, often copulatively as “embargo y secresto”—a mere pleonasm of legal phraseology, the context showing that sequestration was meant.[1482] The slight shade of difference was that in embargo the prisoner selected the depositary who was to hold the property and pay from it the expenses of his maintenance in prison during his trial.[1483] Thus sequestration, under the flimsy veil of calling it embargo, became a matter of course in all arrests and the fiscal was instructed, when the calificacion was of formal heresy, to ask for sequestration, in other cases for embargo and, when frailes were the culprits, for embargo of their peculium and papers. So universal was this that, in 1665, the Suprema required the Barcelona tribunal to furnish reasons for not embargoing the property in any case of arrest for minor offences.[1484] So it continued to the end. In 1815 we find numerous cases of embargo in arrests on charges of bigamy, solicitation, irreverence, propositions and the like, while the Dominican Fray Tomas García, for celebrating mass without priests’ orders, had his peculium embargoed.[1485]

ILLUSTRATIVE CASE

In this illegal extension of sequestration there is something peculiarly heartless. When the offence charged inferred confiscation, there was some excuse for making sure that the property would not be secreted or dissipated, but in minor cases to subject the offender and his family to the hardship, and perhaps ruin, caused by seizing his property and holding it during the leisurely progress of his trial, merely in order to secure to the tribunal the reimbursement of his maintenance in prison, shows how thoroughly hardened the Holy Office had become to human suffering and how its selfish greed stifled all the promptings of humanity.

A practical illustration of the process of arrest and sequestration is furnished by the case of Ana de Torres, a woman of twenty-two, recently married to Gaspar Agustin, a confectioner of Ciudad Real. Testimony of Judaism had been gathered against her and, on May 9, 1680, the Toledo tribunal ordered its familiar, Don Alvaro Muñoz de Figueroa, a Knight of Santiago, to arrest her, sequestrate her property and send her to Toledo with bed and clothing and 100 ducats. On May 17th Muñoz reported that, after ascertaining her address, he had gone to her house at nine o’clock that night, with a notary, familiar and servants, had carried her off to his own, turning out the husband and placing two guards, so that the sequestration could be made the next day. From what he could see, all the contents of the house was not worth 100 ducats and he was told that they belonged to the husband, for she had come to Ciudad Real in September with nothing but her person. Moreover she was five or six months gone with child. He asked for instructions, which were given in apparent disregard of the husband’s rights, for he was told to make the sequestration and send her with her bed and clothes and whatever he could get for her things. On May 24th he reported that he had started her on her journey with 400 reales (about 36 ducats) which was all that he had realized on the sale of the effects. Successive relays of familiars carried her gratuitously and the next day the receiver of Toledo acknowledged the receipt of the 400 reales to pay for her food. Then, on July 6th, the alcaide reported that she was suffering from an inflammation of the throat which, in her condition, threatened serious complications. The medico was called in, who prescribed bleeding and gargles and removal from the confined air of the prison. She was taken to the house of the alcaide, where she was duly bled and, on July 18th, was sufficiently recovered to ask for an audience. In due time, on September 13th, the alcaide reported her confinement and that he had provided a midwife, when he was ordered to take care that she had everything necessary for her recovery and comfort. On September 29th the child was baptized and the mother brought back to the prison, when she was placed in a cell with two other women and, in October, orders were drawn for 146 reales to pay for the clothes and swaddling-bands of the infant and for 14 reales to the chapel of the cathedral for its baptism.[1486]