A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

The redeeming features of these latter details afford a welcome relief to the sordid eagerness of the Inquisition in grasping everything within its reach in order to escape the costs of persecution, regardless of the misery which it inflicted. In the present case we learn nothing as to the husband, presumably innocent, thus turned out of his house and stripped of his furniture. This was no concern of the Holy Office.

CHAPTER IV.
THE SECRET PRISON.

THE cárceles secretas, or secret prison, was the official designation of the place of confinement during trial of those accused of heresy. It formed part of the building of the Inquisition, so that the prisoner could at any moment be brought into the audience-chamber without being exposed to public view—such a case as Carranza’s, where confinement was in a different place and the inquisitors went there, being wholly exceptional. The secret prison was exclusively one of detention, the casa de penitencia, or punitive prison, being wholly different, and the contrast between the two—the laxity of the imprisonment as a punishment of the guilty and its rigor towards those whose guilt was yet uncertain—is not the least of the anomalies of the Holy Office.

As a general rule it may be said that imprisonment followed arrest and that admission to bail was an exceptional favor in the early time, virtually withdrawn afterwards. In 1530 we have an example in the case of Antonio de Parejo, a priest whose offences did not amount to formal heresy, who was released by the Toledo tribunal from the secret prison and given the city as a prison on bail in 100,000 maravedís, furnished by his brother Vizcaino, who renounced his fuero; Parejo moreover took a solemn oath not to leave Toledo on his own feet or on those of others, and that a certain Matheo Pérez could always tell where he was to be found.[1487] Various regulations, in 1535 and 1537, allow bail in cases where arrests had been made on slender evidence but, in 1560, Valdés ordered that no exceptions should be made when the charge was of heresy.[1488]

For those held on less serious charges there was less rigorous treatment. The inquisitorial jurisdiction extended over a wide range of offences, more or less trivial, and the tribunals did not care to be burdened with the expense of prisoners who were not likely to seek safety in flight or to warn their accomplices. For these there were various grades of confinement, under the practice known as aplacería, of assigning the city as a prison, or the offender’s house, or the less rigorous prison for officials under trial, known as the cárcel de familiares. Thus, about 1640, a writer says that, in cases of blasphemy, the accused can be assigned the city as a prison or, if the offence has been especially shameless and scandalous and reiterated, it may be proper to confine him in the cárcel de familiares or, if flight is anticipated, even in the secret prison, although this is a rigor not now practised. He adds that, when astrologers spontaneously denounce themselves, they are not thrown into the secret prison but into the cárcel de familiares or are given their own houses or the city as a prison.[1489] Friars often, unless the charges were particularly grave, were assigned for detention to the convent of their Order, in accordance with the general policy of guarding the honor of the Church. When the prisons of the tribunals were crowded, convents were also sometimes used as subsidiary prisons, as they were provided with cells for detention.

LESS HARSH THAN OTHER GAOLS

In some tribunals we also hear of cárceles medias, cárceles comunes and cárceles públicas, for offences not of faith. These appear to be similar to the cárcel de familiares and, in all of them, confinement was held not to inflict the indelible stain of the secret prison. As a rule, the prisoner in these was not debarred from communication with his friends, although he might be confined sin comunicacion. In fact, the whole matter lay at the discretion of the tribunal. We have seen how, in the passionate conflicts of jurisdiction, inquisitors sometimes wreaked vengeance on their opponents by inflicting on them the infamy of confinement in the secret prison. So, on the other hand, culprits charged with heresy, when the proofs seemed slender, were sometimes placed in the cárceles medias and then, as the trial advanced and the evidence grew more compromising, were transferred to the secret prison. Thus, in 1678, Angela Pérez, on trial for Judaism by the tribunal of Toledo, was moved, June 22nd from the medias to the secretas; the same occurred at Valladolid, in 1697, in several cases of Judaism, and, as late as 1818 there is an example at Seville, where Ana María Barbero, tried for superstitions and blasphemies, was similarly shifted when the case reached the stage of formal accusation.[1490]

In compassionating the hardships of the secret prison, the horrors of the gaols of the period must not be lost to sight and, in the comparison, we shall see that those of the Inquisition were less vile than those of other jurisdictions. It is true that the ancient laws of Castile proclaimed that prisons were meant not for punishment but for detention while awaiting trial, and that Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1489, ordered a weekly inspection by the judges, who should listen to all complaints made by prisoners, a provision repeated by Charles V, in 1525.[1491] Yet the petition of the Córtes of Madrid, in 1534, shows how little attention these enlightened enactments received and the condition of the gaols can be conjectured from that of Valencia, where, about 1630, Pedro Bonet, secretary of the Inquisition, was confined, while a competencia was fought over him, and when he was surrendered to the tribunal he was in such a state that he died within three days.[1492] It is certain that the Inquisition regarded its secret prison as more humane than the royal gaol, even in modern times, for in 1816, when Don Agustin Pirala was tried by both jurisdictions, for certain irreligious and “anti-political” propositions, the tribunal of Madrid, in procuring his transfer to its cells, asserted that this was to relieve him from the inevitable hardships of the royal gaol in which he was confined.[1493]

This may well be true, for the secret prison had the reputation of being less harsh than those of the spiritual jurisdictions. In 1629, Fray Diego de Medina, when brought before the tribunal of Valladolid for uttering some radical heresies, explained that, in his convent de la Victoria, he was kept in the stocks in the convent prison, and he had made the heretical assertions in order to be transferred to the milder treatment of the Inquisition, whereupon he was dismissed with a reprimand. We might regard this as an isolated case were it not for a similar one, about 1675, where a cleric, confined in the episcopal prison, pretended Judaism with the object of being removed to the Inquisition. In this instance the tribunal rebuked him and remanded him to the tender mercies of his bishop.[1494]

Whether the secret prisons were better or worse than the royal and ecclesiastical gaols, they were dismal and unwholesome places of confinement. Of course as structures they varied greatly. Few, if any, of the buildings of the Inquisition were constructed for its use. In Saragossa the royal castle of the Aljafería, in Barcelona the royal palace, in Valencia the archiepiscopal palace, in Seville the castle of Triana, in Córdova the Alcázar were occupied and utilized, and elsewhere such buildings as seemed suitable were taken. Those which had served as castles had dungeons already provided; in the others, cells were constructed. Under the circumstances there could be no common plan and no general standard of convenience or healthfulness. It is to be hoped that not many were like that of Palermo, where there were great subterranean caverns in which the inquisitors constructed cells for their prisoners, but probably not much better was part of the secret prison of Toledo, of which we get a glimpse in 1592. Mari Rodríguez, after lying there for nine months, with a year-old baby, asked an audience and begged to be removed from her cell, for it was entirely dark and she and her companions suffered greatly and they were sick, to which the inquisitor coldly replied that what she needed was to discharge her conscience and save her soul and, for the rest, she should have justice.[1495]