A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

This is confirmed by Inquisitor-general Valdés who states that when, in 1546, he assumed the archbishopric of Seville, he found the clergy and the dignitaries of his cathedral thoroughly demoralized. They had no shame in their children and grandchildren; their women lived with them openly, as though married, and accompanied them to church, and many of them kept public gaming tables in their houses, which were resorts of disorderly characters. If we may believe him, he resolutely undertook a reform and effected it at great labor and expense, owing to appeals and suits in Rome and in Granada and in the Royal Council and before apostolic judges. Then Francisco de Erasso, a favorite of Charles V, obtained a canonry and joined those who desired to return to their former dissolute life, against which, in 1556, he appeals to Philip II for protection.[1101] The lower ranks of the clergy were no better, if we may believe the synod of Orihuela, in 1600, which asserts that their concubinage was the cause of the animosity of the people against them,[1102] and we have seen, when treating of Solicitation, how frequent was the advantage taken of the opportunities of the confessional.

There were few prelates as conscientious as Valdés represents himself. Alfonso de Castro attributes the existence of heresy to their negligence; they were so slothful that they paid no attention to their duties; those who did otherwise were so rare that they were like jewels among pebbles.[1103] The Venitian envoy, Giovanni Soranzo is less cautious in his utterance, for he describes them as living luxuriously and squandering their revenues on splendid establishments; few of them were without children, in whom they took no shame and for whose advancement they employed every means.[1104] At the other end of the scale were the clerks in the lower orders, immersed in secular affairs, who took the tonsure in order to enjoy the protection from justice afforded by the Church. These were the despair of those responsible for public order. Fernando de Aragon, Viceroy of Valencia, complains, August 21, 1544, of the impossibility of enforcing justice owing to the zeal with which the church authorities protected the tonsure, whether right or wrong. The officials of the archbishops, he says, have been debased and ignorant men; whose sole aim has been to save criminals from the punishment of their crimes. He is encouraged to hope for better things from the appointment as archbishop of San Tomas de Vilanova, and the latter follows, September 8th, with allusions to his own sufferings in consequence of his efforts to remedy this condition, which is an offence to justice and to God and a great damage to the people.[1105]

FANATICAL INTOLERANCE

A Church composed of such elements was not fitted to exercise for good the enormous influence which it enjoyed over public affairs, not only in shaping the policy of the kingdom but in directing the national tendencies. The theory was still the medieval one—that the ecclesiastical power is the sun and the royal power the moon, which derives its light from the sun.[1106] To its influence, as represented by Torquemada, was due the expulsion of the Jews; by Ximenes, the enforced conversion of the Moors; by Espinosa, the rebellion of Granada; by Juan de Ribera and his fellows, the expulsion of the Moriscos. In the royal councils, which formed a bureaucracy, prelates held leading and often dominant positions, and their subordinates were largely drawn from clerical ranks. In 1602 a proposition to increase the schools of artillery was referred to a junta presided over by the royal confessor, which reported that the expense could not be afforded; the schools came to be under the charge of Jesuits and frailes and speedily dwindled to nothing.[1107] The position of royal confessor was one of the highest political importance. Under Charles V he participated in all deliberations and had a preponderating influence.[1108] Under Philip II, his confessor Fray Diego de Chaves, played a leading part in the tragedy of Antonio Pérez. Fray Caspar de Toledo, confessor of Philip III boasted that, whenever he told the king that a thing must be done under pain of mortal sin or that it was sinful, he was obeyed without discussion.[1109] The Regent María Ana of Austria was completely under the domination of her confessor Nithard, and the letters to him of Clement XI, on European politics, indicate that be was the real ruler.[1110] The substitution of Froilan Díaz for Fray Pedro Matilla, as confessor of Carlos II, was the only step necessary to effect a revolution in the government and, when Díaz fled to Rome, he was reclaimed as a fugitive chief minister of state. We have seen under Philip V the power wielded by his confessors Daubenton and Robinet, and the part played by Rábago under Fernando VI. What thus ruled the court was perpetually at work in every parish and every family, where the pulpit and the confessional exercised an incalculable influence. What the Spaniard became was what the Church wished him to be. Clericalism thus, for good or for evil, was a leading factor in controlling the destinies of Spain, in exhausting its resources, in moulding the character of its people, and the Inquisition was its crowning work.

Under such influences, the toleration which had been so marked a feature of the medieval period gradually gave place to a fanaticism finding its expression in the Inquisition and inflamed into greater fierceness by the existence and reaction of that institution. There can be no question as to the sincere devoutness of Charles V, according to the unanimous testimony of the Venetian envoys, who describe his punctual discharge of all religious observances and who state that the surest avenue to his favor was the manifestation of earnest zeal for religion.[1111] Shortly before his death, he expressed deep regret that he had not executed Luther at Worms, in spite of his pledged safe-conduct, for he ought to have forfeited his word in order to avenge the offence to God. In his will, executed in 1554 at Brussels, he charged Philip II in the most earnest manner to favor in all ways the Inquisition, because of the many and great offences to God which it prevents or punishes and, in the codicil of September 9, 1558, dictated on his death-bed, his first thought is to repeat the injunction and to urge his son, by the obedience due to a father, to prosecute heresy, rigorously, unsparingly and relentlessly.[1112] Philip II needed no such exhortations. From his earliest youth he had breathed an atmosphere surcharged by the conflict with heresy; he had been taught that a sovereign’s highest duty to God and man was to enforce unity of faith, not only as a paramount religious obligation, but because it was an axiom of the statesmanship of the time that, in no other way, could the peace of a kingdom be preserved. There is no reason to doubt his perfect sincerity when, in 1568, the Archduke Charles came to Spain, as the representative of the German princes, to urge an accommodation with the Netherlands, and Philip, besides his formal reply, gave the archduke secret instructions to tell the emperor that no human influence, or considerations of state, or all that the whole world could say or do, would make him vary a hair’s breadth from the course which he had adopted and intended to pursue in this matter of religion, throughout all his dominions; that he would listen to no advice with regard to it, and would take ill any that might be offered. At the same time he wrote to Chantonnay, his ambassador at Vienna, that what he was doing in the Netherlands was for their advantage and the preservation of the Catholic faith, and that he would make no change in his policy, if it involved risking all his possessions and if the whole world should fall upon his head. So, in 1574, the instructions to the commissioners sent to Breda to confer with the deputies of William the Silent, were to declare emphatically that he would suffer no one to live under his throne who was not completely a Catholic.[1113] Philip was merely translating into practice the teachings of the Church and won its unstinted admiration. Cardinal Pallavicini contrasts the vacillating persecution in France with his sanguinary rigor, which was not only grateful to heaven but propitious to his kingdom, thus saved by salutary blood-letting.[1114]

FANATICAL INTOLERANCE

It was natural that Philip, in his will, executed March 7, 1594, should reiterate to his son and successor the injunctions which he had received from his father. The Inquisition was to be the object of special favor, even greater than in the past, for the times were perilous and full of so many errors in the faith.[1115] Philip III had not energy enough to be an active persecutor and if, under the guidance of Lerma, he expelled the Moriscos, under the same tutelage he made peace with England in 1605 and a truce with Holland in 1609, to the disgust of the pious who could not understand any dealings with heretics. Yet he was a most religious prince, who spent hours every day in his devotions and in examining his conscience, and who set a shining example by the frequency with which he sought confession and communion.[1116]

It was a matter of course that he should, in his will, leave to his successor the customary instructions to foster the Inquisition. As to Philip IV, we have seen abundant instances of his subservience to it, during his half-century of reign, and of his readiness to subordinate to it all other interests. He showed his consistency in this when, at the dictation of the Suprema, he incurred a war with England through his refusal to sign a treaty forbidding the persecution of Englishmen in Spain on account of their religion[1117] and, in his will, executed in 1665, he laid the customary injunctions on his successor to aid and favor the Inquisition, adding an exhortation to honor and defend the clergy in all their exemptions and immunities, and earnestly to labor for the reformation of the religious Orders.[1118]

Carlos II was a nonentity who need not be considered and, with the Bourbons, we enter on the dawn of a new era, in which fanaticism no longer dominates the policy of the State. It is true that Philip V, when abdicating, in 1724, enjoined on his son Luis the preservation of the faith through the instrumentality of the Inquisition as fervently as any of his predecessors and that, during the first third of the century, there was a fierce recrudescence of inquisitorial activity, but we have seen how the spirit of the age gradually made itself felt and, although the duty of exterminating heresy was still admitted in theory, in practice its enforcement was greatly mitigated.

It is difficult for us, in the indifferentism of the twentieth century, to realize or to understand the violence of the passions excited by questions of faith, dissociated from all temporal interests, and their influence on a people so emotional as the Spaniards and so apt, as they tell us themselves, to be swayed by imagination rather than by reason. We have seen (Vol. III, p. 284) the whole kingdom of Portugal thrown into excitement by the theft of a pyx with a consecrated host and that only the opportune discovery of the culprit saved all the New Christians from expulsion. It might seem to us a very trivial affair that, on the eve of Good Friday, 1640, there was posted, in the chapter-house of Granada, a placard ridiculing the Christian religion, praising the Mosaic Law, and blaspheming the purity of the Virgin, but it produced the greatest excitement throughout Spain. Special services were held in all the churches to appease the insulted deity and to discover the malefactor. He was detected, in the person of a hermit of the Santa Imagen del Triunfo, who was arrested, and Inquisitor Rodezno deemed it advisable to break the inviolable secrecy of the Inquisition in order to calm the public agitation, by letting the people know that the culprit had been discovered and convicted. Learned doctors improved the occasion by printing dissertations in which it was proved that he must be burnt alive, if no death more atrocious could be invented to suit the crime.[1119] The fanatical hatred of heresy per se, thus sedulously inculcated and engrained in the moral fibre of every Spaniard is seen in the statutes of Limpieza, which closed the avenues to distinction to the descendants of Conversos and of those who had been penanced by the Inquisition, so that even arrest and imprisonment for a trivial offence inflicted, according to popular prejudice, an indelible stigma on a family. We have seen to what insane extent this was carried and what evil it wrought in the social organization, but more prolific in evil was the habit of thought by which it was engendered and which it intensified.