A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

A still more significant case was that of Jean de la Barre, a Fleming, long settled in Madrid, where he was deputy alcalde of the royal palace of the Pardo. He was a man of somewhat excessive devoutness. He had a mass celebrated daily in the royal chapel by a chaplain of his own, until the regular chaplain, a Dr. Robles, who was also commissioner of the Inquisition, forbade it and forced him to the church of the Trinitarians. He endeavored to form a cofradia for celebrating masses, but Robles demanded to be the head of it and to handle the funds without accountability, when la Barre abandoned the project, although he had spent five hundred ducats on a silver lamp for the chapel. They naturally quarrelled and, when Robles sought a reconciliation, his overtures were rejected. He revenged himself, in January, 1656, by denouncing la Barre for various heretical speeches, for neglecting mass and confession and, what was perhaps more serious than all, for saying that inquisitors were robbers who seized rich men to strip them of their property. La Barre had discharged several workmen for theft and idleness, and they were readily induced to appear as corroborating witnesses. He easily identified his accusers and in defence presented twenty-five witnesses in his favor, among them five Trinitarian frailes and some officials of high rank, who testified emphatically to his unusual devotion; his rosary was never out of his hands, he heard mass daily and spent three reales a day for it. They also told of the mortal enmity and threats of Robles and the discharged workmen and showed the reasons. There could be no clearer case of a foul conspiracy to ruin an innocent man, but he was sentenced to reprimand and exile and was threatened with a hundred lashes if he dared to speak of his treatment. That his case was suspended and he was not required to abjure even de levi show that there was no suspicion of heresy proved and that the sentence, with its consequences of infamy on him and his posterity, was a mere wanton exercise of arbitrary power, while the false witnesses were not troubled, for there are no marginal notes on the record showing that extracts were taken from the evidence for their prosecution.[1685]

FALSE-WITNESS

It was still admitted that the legal punishment was the talio, but that it should only be inflicted when the perjurer had encompassed the conviction of his victim, thus weighing the crime, not by its criminality but by its result.[1686] How lightly, indeed, false swearing was regarded per se is indicated by a curious case occurring in Valladolid, in 1630. A student named Luis Sánchez denounced certain Portuguese of Zamora of endeavoring to convert him. The receiver and an alguazil were sent thither, but could find no trace of the accused nor even of the street in which they were described as residing. Sánchez was sent for, was made to ratify his deposition, and was then accused of the fraud and mockery of the tribunal. He admitted it and explained that he had been thrown into gaol in a suit over a mare and had devised this expedient for getting out, in hopes of escaping to the asylum of a church. His trial went through all the regular stages; the vote of the consulta de fe was sent to the Suprema, which contented itself with sentencing him to a reprimand, six years’ exile from Valladolid and a fine of two hundred ducats, with the charitable alternative that, if he was too poor, he should swear to pay it if he should ever be able.[1687] While thus the Inquisition was benignantly disposed towards perjury, the secular law did not relax its severity. In Aragon the Córtes of Monzon, in 1564, decreed the talio in criminal cases for accusing false witnesses and for those produced by the defence, in addition to the penalties prescribed by the fueros—scourging and perpetual banishment—besides making good all expenses incurred by the other party. In Castile, a pragmática of Philip II, in 1566, confirmed by Philip III, in 1603, when the case was not capital, substituted, for the talio, scourging and the galleys for life.[1688] The tenderness of the Inquisition for such offences was not derived from any softening of the law of the land.

With the development of limpieza there sprang up a new and fruitful source of perjury. Those who were endeavoring to prove immaculate descent had no scruple in filling any genealogical gaps by purchasing witnesses to supply deficiencies, and those who, through envy or malice, desired the defeat of an aspirant, found ready means of putting forward witnesses to swear as to public repute, or that they had seen sanbenitos of ancestors. As early as 1560, and again in 1574, the Suprema found it necessary to issue instructions to meet these cases.[1689] Bigamy trials also brought to light a contingent of perjurers, mostly employed by the guilty party desiring remarriage, to swear that he or she was single.[1690]

Notwithstanding these accessions and of the fact that in most cases there were several accomplices, the number in the records is surprisingly few. Partly this is explicable by the extreme difficulty of detection, owing to the suppression of witnesses’ names and the impediments thrown in the way of the defence, and partly by the indifference of the tribunals, which do not seem to have regarded it as their duty to prosecute perjurers—at least those for the prosecution. When, in 1640, Agustin Gómez de la Peña, cura of Perdigon, was tried in Valladolid for carrying unconsecrated forms in the procession of Corpus Christi, and the case was suspended on the ground that the testimony was perjured, the Suprema, in approving the vote, felt it necessary to order that the fiscal should prosecute the accuser and his witnesses, showing that this was by no means a matter of course.[1691] Be this as it may, in Toledo a record, extending from 1575 to 1610, and embracing 1172 trials, only contains eight cases of false-witness, and a further record of the same tribunal, from 1648 to 1794, has not a single one in its aggregate of 1205 cases.[1692] In Valladolid, out of 667 trials occurring between 1622 and 1662, there are but seven cases of false witness.[1693] In Madrid, the records, from 1703 to 1751, present but a single trial for false-witness, and this arose out of a marriage case.[1694]

Unfortunately these slender returns do not prove that perjury was uncommon. Philip V, among his other attempted reforms, in a decree of July 26, 1705, called attention to the facility afforded to the execrable wickedness of false denunciations and false-witness, imposing on many innocent persons the difficult task of protecting honor, property and life, to the perversion and scandal of justice. These enormous and pernicious abuses he attributed to the non-enforcement of the penalties prescribed by the laws, because the moderate punishments, so rarely inflicted, encouraged rather than repressed the audacity of the evil-minded. He therefore ordered the Suprema to see that the legal penalties were rigorously imposed, and the Suprema obediently transmitted this to the tribunals with instructions to conform to it strictly.[1695]

FALSE-WITNESS

This seems to have had some effect, but not much. In a collection of all the autos held in Spain, from 1721 to 1727, out of 962 sentences, there are but seventeen for false-witness and these represent only about half that number of cases, for in one there were five accomplices and, in two others, three each. The punishments remain as of old, scourging, galleys and exile, and there is no difference made between offenders in marriage-cases and those involving the death-penalty by accusations of Judaism. One of these latter excited considerable interest at the time. Three penitents from Cadiz, undergoing punishments for Judaism, accused fourteen persons of practising Jewish rites, but they had not studied their parts well, their stories did not accord and, on being arrested, they confessed. Their intended victims were honored with a special auto de fe in Seville, November 30, 1722, to which they were conveyed by familiars in the handsomest coaches of the city; in the church of San Pablo they were seated near to the inquisitors, the evidence was publicly read, their innocence was proclaimed, and they were carried home in the coaches. This was followed, June 6, 1723, by the auto in which the perjurers were sentenced to two hundred lashes apiece and the two of them, who were men, to seven years in the galleys. Somewhat similar was a case in Santiago, in 1724, when five culprits were concerned, of whom the leader, Pedro García Rodríguez, was punished with two hundred lashes and five years of galleys, while his accomplices had the lashes and eight years of exile.[1696]

The moderation shown towards perjury increased in the latest period. In 1817, the deacon Manuel González Ribadeneyra was prosecuted for it by the tribunal of Santiago but, when the sumaria was submitted to the Suprema, it sent a commission to the Benedictine Abbot of Monforte to warn the offender that in future he must conform his depositions to the truth, as becomes a minister in holy Orders, for otherwise he would not be treated with the benignity which now imposed on him only eight days of spiritual exercises in the monastery. Apparently even this was expected to excite resistance, for a further provision threatened him, in case of refusal, with prosecution according to law.[1697]

Theoretically there was laudable care as to the sufficiency of evidence for condemnation. The ancient Glossator on the Decretum says that two witnesses are sufficient to convict a pope, but the authorities, both of the Old and the New Inquisition, hold that, although this is good in ordinary law, yet, in a crime entailing such consequences as heresy, especially as the defence is crippled by the suppression of the witnesses’ names, there should be much hesitation in convicting a man on the evidence of only two witnesses.[1698] Still, two were reckoned sufficient, unless they were accomplices, when three were required and these supported by other indications.[1699] Yet as one witness was sufficient to justify torture, these scruples did not save the accused but only exposed him to the risk of convicting himself if his endurance did not exhaust the resources of the torture-chamber. In fact, in the secrecy of the tribunal, the discretion of the judges was the only rule, and they could construe the laws of evidence as they saw fit, as when a visitation of Barcelona led the Suprema, in 1568, to rebuke the inquisitors because, on the evidence of a single witness they prosecuted Guillen Contada, tortured him twice and, without convicting him, abandoned him to the secular arm for burning; nor was he the only victim of the kind, for they did the same with Juan del Payen.[1700] How much of this occurred elsewhere the world will never know.