A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 2

by Henry Charles Lea

STRUGGLES WITH THE CURIA

Another person who, about this time, gave infinite vexation to Charles and Adrian was Diego de las Casas of Seville, the agent who bore to Rome the contested proceedings of the Córtes of Aragon and labored for their confirmation. He was well supplied with funds and naturally was a persona grata to the curia. The Inquisition speedily attacked him, in its customary unscrupulous manner, by not only prosecuting him in absentia but by seizing his brothers, Francisco and Juan, and their wives. To meet this he procured a brief committing the cases to Adrian and to Ferdinand de Arce, Bishop of Canaries, with a provision that the parties should present themselves to Adrian and Arce and keep such prison as might be designated for them, and further permitting them to select advocates for their defence. Equitable as were these provisions, the brief excited hot indignation. When laid before the royal council it was pronounced scandalous and of evil example and its execution was refused. Charles wrote in haste to Leo, April 30, 1519, that it was scandalous and would destroy the Inquisition; he instructed his agents to procure its revocation to be forwarded by the next courier and he invoked by letters the cardinals in the Spanish interest to bring what pressure they could upon the pope. His urgency was fruitless and when, in September, he sent Lope Hurtado de Mendoza to Rome, as special ambassador in the quarrel with Aragon, his instructions were to represent to the pope the impropriety of harboring in Rome fugitives from the Inquisition, especially Diego de las Casas and his colleague Juan Gutiérrez, whose parents and grandparents and kindred had been reconciled or burnt; they should be expelled, and Mendoza was to labor for the revocation of their briefs and all other exemptions and commissions in favor of Conversos. Mendoza exerted all his diplomatic ability, but, although Leo admitted, in a brief of July 13, 1520, to Adrian that the evocation of cases to Rome, both on appeal and in first instance, led to delays, impunity for offenders and encouragement of offences, still he would not abandon Diego de las Casas. The grant by Sixtus IV of appellate jurisdiction to the inquisitor-general, he admitted had been beneficial and, in hopes that Adrian would use it with integrity and justice, he evoked to himself all cases pending in the Roman courts and committed them to Adrian with full powers, but he made no promises as to the future and he especially excepted his physician, Ferdinand de Aragon and his wife, Diego de las Casas, Juan Gutiérrez and the deceased Juan de Covarrubias, whose cases had long been in dispute.

To all these, and to their kindred to the third degree and their property, Leo granted letters exempting them from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition and committing them to the Archbishop of Saragossa and certain other ecclesiastical dignitaries. Complaints soon arose as to the manner in which these commissioners exercised their powers to the dishonor of the Inquisition; Leo yielded by a brief of January 8, 1521, in which he substituted Adrian and the nuncio Vianesio de’ Albergati, with full power to inhibit their predecessors. Then, in a more formal brief of January 20th he deprecated the evil caused by the cases which were daily brought to Rome and committed them all to Adrian, saving those of the five exempts, in which the nuncio was to be conjoined with him, and at the same time he revoked the letters exempting them and their kindred and empowering them to select judges for themselves.[332] It was a practical surrender, although Leo distinguished las Casas and Gutiérrez by styling them his beloved children.

These cases will suffice to show how the traditional policy of the curia continued, of taking the money of the refugees and appellants for protecting briefs, and then abandoning them by revocations issued, without even a sense of shame, when their funds were exhausted in the protracted struggle. Yet, undeterred by this, there was a constant succession of new applicants, who had no other refuge on earth, and the valueless briefs were granted with unfailing readiness. It was a source of perpetual irritation and Charles was untiring in his efforts to counteract it, not always observing due courtesy, as when, March 25, 1525, he wrote to Clement VII, in violent language, to revoke and erase from the registers a brief granted to Luis Colon and to order his officials not to issue such letters, as they were scandalous.[333] He no longer had the excuse of his youthful tutelage under Adrian and yet his subserviency to the Inquisition was complete. This was manifested in the case of Bernardo de Orda, a servant of Cardinal Colonna, who had a suit against Doctor Saldaña about the treasurership of the church of Leon. Saldaña was a member of the Suprema and, when Orda came to Spain, it was not difficult to have him charged with heresy and arrested by the tribunal of Valladolid. He escaped to Rome and the prosecution was continued against him in absentia, whereupon Charles demeaned himself by writing to Colonna, July 30, 1528, asking him to prevent Orda from obtaining a brief of exemption, as it would be an injury to the faith, and also not to favor him in his suit with Saldaña.[334]

STRUGGLES WITH THE CURIA

Meanwhile the popes continued to propitiate Charles’s growing power by granting, with as much facility as ever, what was nominally exclusive appellate jurisdiction to the inquisitor-general. In 1523, Adrian VI, as we have seen, confirmed in favor of Manrique the bulls of Sixtus IV and Alexander VI. Clement VII went even farther for, in a bull of January 6, 1524, he not only evoked all pending cases and committed them to Manrique but decreed that any commissions which he might thereafter issue should be invalid without the express assent of Charles, while all appeals were to be made to the inquisitor-general and not to the Holy See, and this he repeated, June 16, 1525. Still appeals continued to be made to Rome and briefs to be granted requiring repeated confirmations of the bulls of 1524 and 1525 with inclusion of the letters obtained in the interval, of which we have examples in 1532 and 1534.[335] Charles was thus justified in enforcing Ferdinand’s pragmática of 1509, as when, in 1537, he ordered the corregidor of Murcia to prevent the publication of certain letters understood to have been procured from the pope against the Inquisition; if presented they were to be sent to the Council of Castile for its action, and parties endeavoring to use them were to be arrested and dealt with as might be deemed most advantageous to the Holy Office.[336]

The position of Charles, as the master of Italy and the protagonist of the Church in its struggle with Lutheranism, had thus enabled him to obtain for the Inquisition virtual, though not acknowledged, independence of Rome. There is a very striking illustration of this, in 1531, when Clement VII intervened in favor of Fray Francisco Ortiz, a celebrated Observantine preacher, prosecuted for audaciously criticizing the Inquisition from the pulpit. He had lain in prison for more than two years, obstinately refusing to retract, when the interposition of Clement was sought. He did not evoke the case but, in terms of remarkable deference, July 1, 1531, he suggested to Manrique that, if nothing else was alleged against Ortiz, he might be held as sufficiently punished by his long imprisonment and might be restored to liberty, in view of his blameless life and the profit to souls to be expected from his preaching. This Clement asked as a favor, moved only by Christian charity and zeal for the salvation of souls.[337] To this carefully guarded request the Inquisition turned a deaf ear. If the trial of Ortiz came to an end in February, 1532, it was because he voluntarily submitted himself completely and his sentence was by no means light, including public penance, which was rarely inflicted on an ecclesiastic.[338] Paul III was more decided when his intervention was asked by Charles V, who, in spite of his bitter protests against papal interference, found himself obliged to appeal in behalf of his favorite preacher, Fray Alonso Virues. The Seville tribunal had prosecuted the latter on a charge of Lutheranism, had kept him imprisoned for four years and had sentenced him to reclusion in a convent for two years and suspension from preaching for two more. Charles, who had vainly sought to protect him during his trial, supported an appeal to the pope and obtained a brief of May 29, 1538, which not only annulled the sentence but forbade his future molestation.[339]

When, in 1542, Paul III reorganized the moribund papal Inquisition by forming a congregation of cardinals as inquisitors-general for all Christendom, there was a not unnatural apprehension that this, even if not so intended, might interfere with the independence of the Spanish Holy Office. To representations of this he responded by a brief of April 1, 1548, in which he characterized such fears as baseless; he declared that it was not designed to interfere with the authority of inquisitors in Spain and he formally revoked anything to their prejudice that might be found in the decree establishing the Congregation.[340] This brief remained to the end the charter to which the Spanish Inquisition appealed in its frequent collisions with the Roman Congregation and, but for such a declaration, it would probably have been subordinated.[341]

This in no way affected the continual applications to Rome for relief, nor the effort of the Inquisition to suppress them. It was a singular departure from the settled policy of the government in this matter which led the Suprema, in 1548, to utter a bitter complaint to Charles V, setting forth the facility with which citations and inhibitions and commissions were granted in Rome and the daily royal cédulas despatched to prevent them, and yet when recently a Converso presented to the Royal Council a petition stating that he did not dare to notify the inquisitor-general of letters concerning a case which had been decided, the Council issued an order permitting any notary to serve the papers and testify to the service, with penalties for impeding it.[342] The popes were more consistent in their inconsistency. We have seen how Paul III, in 1549 and Julius III in 1551, confirmed the 1484 bull of Sixtus IV insisting on the validity of papal letters in both the interior and judicial forum and threatening the curses of the bull in Cæna Domini on all who should impede them, yet in 1550 a case in which papal letters were obtained led to vigorous remonstrance and Julius, by a brief of December 15, 1551, confirmed those of Clement VII and Paul III, besides evoking all pending cases and committing them to Inquisitor-general Valdés.[343]