A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

In fact, the irreconcileable claims of State and Church rendered hostility inevitable. It was impossible for the latter to understand that, when it entered politics and became a political factor, it had to be treated like other political bodies. The theocracy of the middle ages had so long enjoyed power without responsibility that its immunity became part of Latin doctrine. Elsewhere the impracticability of this had been demonstrated, but in Spain the Church has never ceased to struggle for the maintenance of medievalism, or has understood that sedition in the pulpit should not be treated differently from sedition in the tribune. It refused to recognize that self-preservation is the first law of governments as of individuals, and that they cannot allow artificial privileges to work their destruction. The theory of the Liberals was that external ecclesiastical discipline was subject to the civil authority, while internal discipline was reserved to the Church. The Church asserted that in all things it ruled itself, and that any secular interference was a laying of profane hands on the Ark. The gage of battle was virtually thrown by Veremundo Arías, Archbishop of Valencia, who, on October 20, 1820, addressed to the Córtes a long manifesto, upholding all the extreme claims of the Church, and denying the distinction between external and internal discipline. On November 10th he was arrested and, on the 24th, was put on board ship and sent to France. This was the commencement of a persecution in which many bishops suffered. Alvárez de Palma of Granada was set aside and replaced by the liberal Archpriest Vinegas. Uriz y Lafaga of Pampeluna was summoned to Madrid but, on the road, was rescued by royalists and conveyed to France. Blas Beltran of Coria was banished. The Bishop-elect of Santa Marta (Colombia) received his sentence of exile on his death-bed in Plasencia. Cienfuegos of Cádiz had to fly to save his life. Pablo de Sichar of Barcelona fled and remained absent until 1823. Rentería y Reyes of Lérida was carried under guard to Barcelona, narrowly escaped execution, and was detained in Málaga until 1823. Ramon Strauch y Vidal of Vich was imprisoned in Barcelona, then sent to Tarragona and on the road, under a pretext, was made to descend and was shot with his attendant. Others who were exiled were Jaime Creus of Tarragona, Ceruelo de la Fuente of Oviedo, Rafael de Velez of Ceuta and Castillon y Salas of Tarazona.[969] It is true that the worst of these acts were committed by mobs or irresponsible parties in the growing disorders of the times, but they remained unrebuked and unpunished.

A government which thus treated its clergy was not likely to maintain friendly relations with the Holy See. One of the earliest measures of the new government was an act of August 17, 1820, suppressing the Jesuits.[970] Pius VII met this with a letter of September 16th to Fernando, deploring the perils that threatened religion and the Church and reciting the obnoxious measures taken, for which he had ordered his nuncio to make reclamation, but without effect.[971] Relations were not improved when, April 21, 1821, a decree suppressed all payments, whether in money or other equivalent, for papal bulls for archbishops, bishops, matrimonial dispensations and other rescripts, in lieu of which the paltry annual sum of 9000 silver dollars was offered.[972] This was unwise but still more so was the sending to Rome as ambassador of Joaquin Lorenzo Villanueva, towards the close of 1822, when the intervention of the Holy Alliance was impending. At Turin he was met by a papal order forbidding him to come further and asking the ministry to appoint some one else. Evaristo San Miguel, the Secretary of State, insisted; the papal foreign secretary replied that the opinions expressed by Villanueva in the “Cartas de Don Roque Leal” and in the Córtes were such that the Holy See could never receive him. To this the answer was to send to the nuncio his passports with orders to leave Spain. The rupture with Rome was complete and, in the eyes of pious Spaniards, the government had justified the clerical definition of the Constitution as heresy.[973]

The clerical temper thus stimulated is fairly exhibited in a little pamphlet by Padre Miguel Canto, parish priest of Callosa de Segura, celebrating the downfall of Constitutionalism. He is fairly drunk with joy and consigns the Liberals to the bottomless pit for eternity with vigorous delight. That the civil power should dare to assume any control over the externals of the Church fills him with astonishment and rage, all the greater in view of the suffering which it inflicted, especially on the regulars. Canto tells us that the fabric of his church had enjoyed a revenue of four thousand pesos, and that it was reduced to such poverty that he had not wherewith to provide wafers and wine for the sacrament, or oil for the lamps.[974] Yet the resources of the Spanish Church were such that it still had ample funds for political uses. When, in October, 1823, after his release by the French, Fernando travelled from Cádiz to Madrid, he received in voluntary offerings from the chapters of Toledo, Seville, Granada, Jaen and Cuenca, 11,970,000 reales in silver, although the land was in a condition of complete exhaustion.[975]

DEVELOPMENT OF REVOLT

It is not difficult to believe that the pulpit and the confessional were energetically used to inflame and organize the disaffection that rapidly succeeded to the enthusiasm for the Constitution. The new administration was no more efficient than the old. Ministries, hampered with the underhand intrigues of the king, perpetually guarding against eager rivals, and speedily engrossed with suppressing the armed resistance springing up on every hand, had little opportunity of rectifying the abuses which had made Fernando unpopular. To the people at large the only visible result of the revolution was that the Liberals in turn were persecuting the Serviles. The nobles, moreover were alienated by the suppression of Mayorazgos and Vinculaciones, or entails and perpetual charges on lands, a reform which had long been urged by statesmen such as Jovellanos.[976] Willing and receptive listeners to clerical invective were abundant, and movements to overthrow the Government speedily began taking shape. Before the year 1820 was out, in Galicia there was organized a Junta Apostólica and in Burgos there was a crazy conspiracy of some frailes and a general.[977] Soon wandering bands of insurgents sprang up, among whom members of the clergy were conspicuous, as though it was a holy war. Suppressed in one place, they appeared in another, waging a guerrilla warfare like that against Napoleon. The land was torn with faction, and Liberals and Royalists seemed to emulate each other in contributing to its ruin. Early in July, 1822, the royal guards, with the secret connivance of the king, endeavored to gain possession of Madrid; after a sanguinary conflict in the streets they were defeated, when Fernando, from a balcony of his palace, stimulated the nationals in pursuit of the flying wretches. Civil broils are apt to be pitiless, but in Spain they assumed a ferocity not often witnessed elsewhere. If the Royalists in Catalonia massacred in cold blood the garrison of the Seo de Urgel, a Liberal noyade in Coruña despatched fifty-one political prisoners, many of them ecclesiastics and persons of distinction.[978]

The revolt was constantly assuming proportions more alarming, especially in Catalonia, where it had the almost unanimous support of the peasantry. The insurrectionary bands coalesced into a force of five thousand men styling itself the Army of the Faith which, on June 21, 1822, captured the Seo de Urgel and made it their stronghold. There, on August 15th, was organized a royalist Regency, composed of Creus, the exiled Archbishop of Tarragona, the Baron of Eroles, a soldier of some reputation, and the Marquis of Mataflorida. The Counter-revolution thus adopted a public and official character; the Regency assumed to speak for the king, held in durance by the Jacobins—in fact, as early as June 1st he had authorized Mataflorida to organize it, and was in constant communication with it, through one of the officials of the court. It obtained quasi-recognition abroad; it negotiated a loan of 8,000,000 with the Parisian capitalist Ouvrard and, with the support of Pius VII, it opened negotiations with Austria and Russia, offering surrenders of territory in exchange for aid.[979]

Spain was rapidly drifting into anarchy. The Government was too weak to suppress disorder, whether committed by friends or foes. Compromise between the factions was not to be hoped for, and even patriots could see that the only path to order lay through intervention from abroad. That this was impending became more and more evident. The example of Spain had been followed by Naples and Portugal, and then by Piedmont, in forcing on their sovereigns constitutions like that of 1812; the Holy Alliance took the alarm; the Congresses of Troppau in 1820 and of Laybach in 1821 ordered armed intervention, and the new institutions of Naples and Piedmont were readily overthrown. In May, 1821, communications from Russia to Spain, and a Russian circular to the courts of Europe, openly expressed dissatisfaction at the success of armed rebellion, with scarcely veiled threats of action in case the Córtes should prove disobedient to the monarch; and the conflict with the royal guard, in July 1822, gave the foreign ministers in Madrid a pretext for warnings which were diplomatically veiled threats of intervention.[980] Preparations for it were already on foot in France. An epidemic of yellow fever in Barcelona served as an excuse for establishing a cordon sanitaire on the border, gradually strengthened until it became an army of observation and in reality a support for the Catalan insurgents, as Mina found when he conducted a successful campaign which in the beginning of 1823 forced the Regency to take refuge in France.[981]

INTERVENTION OF THE HOLY ALLIANCE

The Congress of Verona met in the autumn of 1822. The Urgel Regency sent there the Count de España as its representative to urge that Spain should be restored to the condition prior to March 9, 1820; the Government sent no envoy, relying on the friendly aid of England, represented by the Duke of Wellington. Without his knowledge the Allied Powers signed, on November 22d, a secret treaty, in which they declared against the sovereignty of the people, representative government and the freedom of the press, and in favor of the clergy as an instrument for enforcing the passive obedience of the subject; and each signatory pledged itself to a subsidy of twenty millions of francs annually to France, to which was assigned the duty of suppressing these destructive principles in Spain and Portugal, and of restoring the Peninsula to the conditions prior to 1820.[982] Even yet intervention was not certain, for France was not eager for the task, and there were some negotiations looking to modifications of the Constitution, but the Liberals would not listen to such suggestions. Châteaubriand, however, that curious compound of idealism, bombast and vanity, who, as French foreign minister and representative at Verona, takes to himself all the credit for the enterprise, is especially careful to point out that its real object was the restoration of France to the hegemony of the Continent, after the abasement of the Restoration by foreign bayonets—an object which he assumes was fully accomplished.[983]

Early in January, 1823, four notes from the Allies were presented collectively, offering, in more or less offensive fashion, the alternative of a return to absolutism or invasion.[984] These portentous communications were received with the utmost nonchalance. On the night of their reception, Secretary of State San Miguel carried them to the Grand Orient and drew up his replies, in which Fernando is said to have cunningly stimulated defiance to banded Europe. Whatever might be the decision of France, San Miguel said, Spain would tranquilly follow the path of duty and justice; its rule of conduct would be firm adhesion to the Constitution of 1812 and refusal to recognize the right of intervention on any side.[985]