As far as can be ascertained the total record of the Portuguese Inquisition, up to 1794, is 1175 relaxed in person, 633 in effigy and 29,590 penanced. The proportion of New Christians among these is impossible of ascertainment, but towards the last it diminished considerably, and, as in Spain, the jurisdiction included superstitious sorcery, blasphemy, bigamy, etc.
Under the ministry of the Marquis of Pombal, Dom José, April 8, 1768, deprived the Inquisition of censorship and, by successive edicts of May 2, 1768, June 16, 1773 and December, 1774, all distinctions between Old and New Christians were removed. An order of February 10, 1774, abolished the Inquisition of Goa, but the death of Dom José, in 1777, and the succession of Maria I drove Pombal from power, and it was revived in 1779, to be finally suppressed in 1812 (Vicente d’Abreu, pp. 6-7, 267-72, 274). In Portugal it was extinguished by the revolution of 1820.
In 1774 a new Regimento was issued by the inquisitor-general, Cardinal da Cunha, in the preface of which the Jesuits are accused of having perverted the forms of procedure, causing all the evils with which it had afflicted the land. The new code removed many of the abuses of the old and King José, in the decree approving it, repeated the accusation of the Jesuits, holding them responsible for the ferocious and sanguinary corruptions, incompatible with the principles of natural reason and religion, which had rendered the Inquisition a horror to all Europe and had created within the monarchy an independent and autocratic body of ecclesiastics.—Regimento do Santo Officio da Inquisição, pp. 3 sqq. 31, 37, 39, 42, 55, 62-3, 71, 89, 144-5, 149, 154-5. (Lisboa, 1774).
English versions of both Regimentos—that of 1640 and that of 1774—are given by da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça in the Narrative of his Persecutions (London, 1811). He lay for three years, 1802 to 1805, in the prison of the Lisbon tribunal and, if his account is to be relied upon, the reforms of Pombal had already become obsolete.
[846] Archivo hist. nacional, Inq. de Valencia, Leg. 100.
In 1783 Inquisitor-general Beltran instructed the tribunals that no one was to be arrested for Judaism without first submitting to him all the papers. At the same time he called for reports of all cases of Judaism there pending, to which Valencia replied that it had none.—Ibidem, Cartas del Consejo, Leg. 16, n. 5, fol. 59; Leg. 4, n. 2, fol. 136.
[847] Novís. Recop., Lib. XII, T. i, ley 4.
[848] Archivo de Simancas, Inq., Leg. 1473.
[849] Proceso contra Diego Rodríguez Silva (MS. penes me).
[850] Archivo hist. nacional, Inq. de Valencia, Leg. 11, n. 3, fol. 183.—Bibl. nacional, MSS., V, 377, cap. XXII.