A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

That the prisons should be unsanitary was a matter of course at the period and the death-rate must have been large, especially during the pestilences, which are of constant recurrence in the annals of the time. Statistics are of course unattainable, but the records frequently refer to the death of prisoners during trial. In Valladolid, the report of 1630 to the Suprema includes the names of twelve deceased prisoners, with the existing state of their cases and, in the great Madrid auto de fe of 1680, all the dead who were burnt in effigy, to the number of eight, had died in the prisons.[1496]

TERROR INSPIRED

Confinement in the secret prison was regarded as one of the gravest misfortunes that could befall a man, in consequence of the indelible stain that it inflicted on him and his descendants. The Consults Magna of 1696 dwells eloquently on the horror inspired by such imprisonment and the injustice of subjecting to it, at the whim of an inquisitor, those whose offences had no relation to the faith. In support of this it adduces the case of a woman of Seville, in 1682, who had some words with the wife of a secretary of the tribunal; the alguazil was sent to arrest her and, in her frenzied desire to avoid imprisonment, she threw herself from an upper window and broke both her legs. The Consulta adds that those who were guilty only of an insult to a familiar were not infrequently thrust into the deepest dungeons of the secret prisons.[1497] The terror thus caused was rated as one of the most efficient powers possessed by the Inquisition. When, in 1622, Gregory XV granted to the bishops concurrent jurisdiction over the crime of solicitation, the remonstrances addressed to him from Spain represented this dread as a deterrent much more powerful than anything that the bishops could bring to bear. In the royal instructions to the Duke of Alburquerque, then ambassador at Rome, it is argued that the fear of the infamy wrought by the prisons of the Inquisition restrains the hardiest culprits.[1498] Power such as this was liable to constant abuse, even after the Suprema had deprived the tribunals of initiative and, when the attention of Carlos IV was called to it, in 1798, by the case of Ramon de Salas, a professor at Salamanca, he proposed to require special royal permission before consignment to the secret prison, but Llorente tells us that court intrigues prevented the enactment of this wholesome reform.[1499]

The cruelty which kept all prisoners in chains was not peculiar to the Inquisition, for we have seen that it was a common practice in the secular gaols. An Italian visiting Madrid, in 1592, describes three prisons there; that of the court, of the city and of the priests, and says that all prisoners, no matter how slight their offences, were fettered. It was evidently a novelty to him which he sought to explain by the insecurity of the buildings.[1500] None of the Instructions refer to chains, but a chance allusion of Pablo García shows that their use was assumed as a matter of course, and this occasionally presents itself in the trials as when, in 1565, Pierre de Bonneville asks their removal to enable him to change his drawers and, in 1647, Alonso Velázquez, who had escaped and was recaptured, describes how he rid himself of them.[1501]

While thus the Inquisition is not to be taxed with special cruelty in following the universal custom, it had its own methods of inflicting intolerable hardship in special cases. When a heretic proved to be impenitent, a mordaza, or gag, was applied to him. What was the exact form of this instrument of torture it would be impossible to say, but the allusions to it show that it was regarded as a severe infliction. When thus worn in prison it was not a mere precaution against the prisoner spreading his heresies, for an order of the Suprema prescribes that no one be allowed to speak with him except the confessor sent to him in the night before his execution, while even then the mordaza was not to be removed.[1502] There was another device of pure cruelty—the pié de amigo—an iron fork or crotch, fitted to the chin and secured by a band around the neck or the waist, to keep the head up and rigidly fixed. The customary use of this was on culprits scourged through the streets or paraded in vergüenza, but it was sometimes employed to heighten the sufferings of prisoners, either through mere malignity or to induce confession. When the celebrated Doctor Agustin Cazalla was burnt in Valladolid, in 1559, envoys from the tribunal sent to him the afternoon before the auto de fe found him in a dark cell, loaded with chains and wearing a pié de amigo, although he had freely confessed, recanted and begged for mercy.[1503] In 1599, in the case of Jacques Pinzon, a French Calvinist, in Toledo, who made a disturbance in the prison, fifty lashes were administered and a pié de amigo was ordered, April 20th. At an audience granted him six months later, October 19th, he is described as still wearing it, as well as two pairs of fetters and, in this case, the pié de amigo extended from the neck to the right hand.[1504]

ESCAPE

In spite of fetters, escape from the secret prison was by no means rare, but it was not often finally successful, for the organization of the Inquisition generally enabled it to recapture the fugitive. A description of the culprit was at once distributed, with a mandate ordering the civil authorities to summon every one to assist and the familiars and commissioners to scour the roads, under pain of excommunication and five hundred ducats.[1505] Thus an army was promptly on foot, every suspicious stranger was scrutinized, and the fugitive was usually soon arrested and returned. In the jurisprudence of the period, breaking gaol was held to be a confession of guilt and some authorities held that this applied to the prisoners of the Inquisition, but Simancas and Rojas agree in regarding this as excessive severity. If the fugitive was recaptured, the ordinary practice was to give him one or two hundred lashes; his trial was resumed and carried forward to the end. If he was not recaptured he was prosecuted for contumacy in absentia.[1506] Numerous cases attest the accuracy of this although, when the culprit was a person of condition, the scourging was replaced by stricter imprisonment and increased severity in the sentence.[1507] For those who eluded recapture, the prosecution for contumacy had but one ending—the absentee was held to be a self-confessed and impenitent heretic, fit only for the stake. Thus, in 1586, Jean de Salines, a Frenchman, on trial for Lutheranism in Valencia, succeeded in escaping with a number of fellow-prisoners. He was not recaptured; the necessary edicts of summons were issued in due order and, as a contumacious heretic, he was burnt in effigy, January 23, 1590 although, at the time of his evasion his case had already been voted on, with the insignificant sentence of abjuration de levi and six months’ seclusion.[1508]

The cruellest feature of inquisitorial prison discipline was the rigid denial of all intercourse with the outer world. In the secular gaols, the state always had the right of imprisoning sin comunicacion, where there were special reasons for such rigor, but in the secret prisons of the Holy Office this was the universal rule, enforced with the utmost solicitude as an essential part of its highly prized secrecy. We have seen that, from the moment of arrest until delivery to the gaoler, the prisoner was not allowed to exchange a word with any one but the officials, and this was continued with the same strictness when he was within the walls, so far as concerned the outer world, to which he was as one already in the tomb. He could learn nothing of those whom he held dear, nor could they conjecture his fate until, after perhaps the lapse of years, he appeared in an auto de fe as one destined to the stake or to the galleys or to perpetual prison. It would be impossible to compute the sum of human misery thus wantonly inflicted by the Inquisition during its centuries of existence—misery for which the only excuse was that communication with friends might aid in his defence. According to inquisitorial theory, the presumption of guilt was so absolute that all measures were justified which would hinder fraudulent defence.