A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 3

by Henry Charles Lea

There was evidently doubt as to the application of these restrictions to the descendants of those relaxed, but that there was an effort made in that direction is shown by their procuring, in 1486, from Innocent VIII, a brief enabling them to farm the revenues of churches.[497] In the assembly of inquisitors, in 1488, the matter excited considerable debate, resulting in instructions that each tribunal in its own district should enforce, under heavy penalties, the disability of children and grandchildren to hold any office or dignity that could be considered public, and the list of prohibited callings was enlarged by including those of merchants, notaries, scriveners, advocates, farmers of revenues and some others. The sumptuary restrictions were not extended to them, for they were not penitents, but they were forbidden to wear the insignia of any dignity, secular or ecclesiastic.[498] The omission was made good in a decree issued by Torquemada, April 22, 1494, but it was so slackly obeyed that when, in 1502, the sovereigns ordered its enforcement, they allowed a certain time for those affected to become acquainted with its provisions.[499] Ferdinand himself had had occasion to recognize the hardship of the rule for, in 1500, the mother of Pero Rúiz, a member of his royal guard, was condemned and consequently he was incapacitated from riding and bearing arms. Unwilling to lose him, Ferdinand wrote to Torquemada for letters of dispensation to be brought back by the messenger.[500]

We have seen how, in the struggle over the profits of dispensation, the sovereigns abandoned to the Inquisition the cosas arbitrarias, or sumptuary restrictions, and assumed to themselves, by the pragmáticas of 1501, control over the disability to hold office and to follow certain professions and trades, which limited so greatly the ability of the reconciled and of the children and grandchildren of the condemned to support themselves.[501] A humane exception was made however, in 1502, under which children reconciled below the age of 14 were exempted from the operation of the pragmáticas.[502] As these were municipal laws they were subject to the secular officials, who were ordered to enforce them under pain of confiscation and loss of office for negligence.

DISABILITIES

It was easier to publish edicts than to get them executed. The civil magistrates seem to have paid little attention to the pragmáticas, while the Inquisition did what it could within its allotted sphere. The Suprema issued orders to the tribunals to punish with all rigor those who disregarded the sumptuary restrictions, who were said to be numerous, in great contempt of the Holy Office. It was probably to stimulate zeal that, in 1509, it modified the penalty of relapse to a pecuniary penance, which it authorized the inquisitors to impose at discretion, bearing in mind the gravity of the case and the wealth of the offender.[503] The sums thus realized were considerable enough to tempt the cupidity of the courtiers for, May 9, 1514, we find the king making over to four of his ushers the penalties levied on the sons of Alonso Gallo of Toledo, and on April 1st he ordered Vázquez de Busto, alguazil of Toledo, to collect all the penances of this kind, to pay one-half to the receiver for the tribunal, and divide the other half between the fiscal, Martin Ximenes, and a servant of secretary Calcena.[504] The punishments decreed in the pragmáticas were also modified to fines, as we learn from a letter of June 20, 1515, dividing those incurred in Seville between Calcena and Aguirre, after setting aside one-third for the tribunal, and from another letter of January 8, 1516, bestowing on Fernando de Hoyos, portero of the Cuenca tribunal, the penalties incurred by the wives of Pedro de Vaguera and of Quiros and Jayme Boticario, for exercising the profession of apothecary.[505]

At length it was recognized that the Inquisition was the only instrumentality to be depended upon for the enforcement of the pragmáticas and Charles V, in a cédula of March 30, 1528, placed the whole business in its hands. He recited the laws of Ferdinand and Isabella, with their severe penalties for negligent officials, in spite of which he was informed that, in many places, they were disregarded, wherefore he granted to the Inquisition all necessary powers and ordered it to see to the execution of the law. Possibly there may have been some opposition by the secular authorities to this invasion of their jurisdiction, which called for a repetition of the cédula, March 2, 1543. In pursuance of this the Suprema, in cartas acordadas of 1548, 1549 and 1566, called the attention of the tribunals to the number of persons engaged in prohibited callings or wearing forbidden articles, and it urged them to be active in detecting and punishing the offenders.[506]

The construction of the laws was rigorous. There was a nice question whether, when a parent was condemned in absentia as contumacious, the children were subject to the disabilities, for the heresy was presumptive and not proven. Farinacci held that they were not, for the absentee, even though burnt in effigy, could always return and prove his innocence. Peña represents the stricter Spanish view, that the fugitive was condemned as a heretic and his children were incapacitated. The matter was threshed out in the case of the son of Antonio Pérez, who was deprived of a pension on the church of Cuenca. This was the final decision of the Rota after full argument; it served as a precedent, and the sentence of the absent contained the same enumeration of disabilities as that of one who was burnt in person.[507] Some doubts arose as to whether the pragmáticas prohibited trade in general; all such points were reserved to the king and when, in 1566, it was proposed to prosecute some merchants, the Suprema ordered the cases to be suspended until he should be consulted. It was less cautious when, in 1542, it forbade all reconciled penitents to keep schools, or even to teach children their letters. A question arose whether the prohibition to ride on horseback comprehended mules, but Simancas decides it in the affirmative, and even desires to include vehicles, as it is fitting that all such persons should walk on foot.[508] Even the limits of the canon law were disregarded in the panic occasioned by the discovery of Protestantism in 1559, for in the Seville auto of September 24th, when Juan Ponce de Leon was burnt, the disabilities of his descendants in the male line were extended to the fourth generation.[509]

An ecclesiastical career was closed to penitents and their descendants, who were forbidden to enter holy orders. There was some question raised whether those who were in orders could obtain or retain benefices, but it was decided in the negative. The practice, as stated about 1640, was that on their visitation the inquisitors dealt summarily with cases concerning the cosas arbitrarias while those which involved the holding of benefices or public office were sent to the tribunal for trial.[510] In the Edicts of Faith which they published, denunciations were invited, and all persons were required to give information as to any infractions of the laws of which they were cognizant.[511]

DISABILITIES

As everyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Inquisition was a marked man thereafter, and was liable to the suspicion that he had incurred disabilities—a suspicion apt to grow stronger with time and to affect his descendants—it became important for those who were not thus affected to have some evidence of the fact. In the earlier time the Inquisition was chary about affording this relief, but did not absolutely refuse it when the sufferer applied to the Suprema. It was not everyone however who could obtain the intervention of the Suprema; popular prejudice was strong, and no one knew what took place within the precincts of the tribunals. Blighted careers were thus numerous. Escobar, in his work on Limpieza, tells us that, at the origin of the Inquisition it punished the lightest offences with extreme severity and this, after the lapse of a century and a half, was still disastrously affecting the descendants; it was inhuman that a word inadvertently spoken through levity, or anger, or in jest should bring infamy on the delinquent and his posterity without limitation of time.[512] The memorial of 1623, by a member of the Suprema, discusses the same evil. The writer says that the Inquisition is surrounded by enemies who are daily multiplied through those afflicted by the tribunals. It is not merely those who are relaxed or reconciled or compelled to abjure de vehementi, but there are many well-affected Old Christians, punished with lighter penalties who, if they remain defamed and their posterity disabled from honors, must necessarily add to the number of enemies and it is pitiable thus to afflict them for trivial causes.[513]