If anything were wanting to show how completely the inquisitorial process turned all the chances against the accused, it is to be found in the quaint advice given by Damhouder. He counsels the prisoner, when required to plead, to prevent his judge from taking advantage of any adverse points that might occur, as, for instance, in a charge of homicide to assert his innocence, but to add that, if he were proved to have committed the crime, he then declares it to have been done in self-defence.[1779]
We have seen above how great was the part of the Inquisition in introducing and moulding the whole system of torture on the ruins of the feudal law. Even so, in the reconstruction of European jurisprudence, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ardor of the inquisitorial proceedings against witchcraft, and the panic on the subject which long pervaded Christendom, had a powerful influence in familiarizing the minds of men with the use of torture as a necessary instrument of justice, and in authorizing its employment to an extent which now is almost inconceivable.
From a very early period, torture was recognized as indispensable in all trials for sorcery and magic. In 358, an edict of Constantius decreed that no dignity of birth or station should protect those accused of such offences from its application in the severest form.[1780] How universal its employment thus became is evident from a canon of the council of Merida, in 666, declaring that priests, when sick, sometimes accused the slaves of their churches of bewitching them, and impiously tortured them against all ecclesiastical rules.[1781] It was, therefore, natural that all such crimes should be regarded as peculiarly subjecting all suspected of them to the last extremity of torture, and its use in the trials of witches and sorcerers came to be regarded as indispensable.
The necessity which all men felt that these crimes should be extirpated with merciless severity, and the impalpable nature of the testimony on which the tribunals had mostly to depend, added to this traditional belief in the fitness of torture. Witchcraft was considered as peculiarly difficult of proof, and torture consequently became an unfailing resource to the puzzled tribunal, although every legal safeguard was refused to the wretched criminal, and the widest latitude of evidence was allowed. Bodin expressly declares that in so fearful a crime no rules of procedure are to be observed.[1782] Sons were admitted to testify against their fathers, and young girls were regarded as the best of witnesses against their mothers; the disrepute of a witness was no bar to the reception of his testimony, and even children of irresponsible age were allowed to swear before they rightly knew the nature of the oath on which hung the life of a parent. Boguet, who presided over a tribunal in Franche Comté, in stating this rule relates a most pathetic case of his own in which a man named Guillaume Vuillermoz was convicted on the testimony of his son, aged twelve, and the hardened nerves of the judge were wrung at the despair of the unhappy prisoner on being confronted with his child, who persisted in his story with a callousness only to be explained by the will of God, who stifled in him all natural affection in order to bring to condign punishment this most hideous offence.[1783] Louïse prints the records of a trial in 1662, wherein Philippe Polus was condemned on the evidence of his daughter, a child in her ninth year. There seems to have been no other proof against him, and according to her own testimony the girl had been a sorceress since her fourth year.[1784] Even advocates and counsel could be forced to give evidence against their clients.[1785] Notwithstanding the ample resources thus afforded for conviction, Jacob Rickius, who, as a magistrate during an epidemic of witchcraft, at the close of the sixteenth century, had the fullest practical experience on the subject, complains that no reliance could be placed on legal witnesses to produce conviction;[1786] and Del Rio only expresses the general opinion when he avers that torture is to be more readily resorted to in witchcraft than in other crimes, in consequence of the extreme difficulty of its proof.[1787]
Even the widespread belief that Satan aided his worshippers in their extremity by rendering them insensible to pain did not serve to relax the efforts of the extirpators of witchcraft, though they could hardly avoid the conclusion that they were punishing only the innocent, and allowing the guilty to escape. Boguet, indeed, seems to recognize this practical inconsistency, and, though it is permissible to use torture even during church festivals, he advises the judge not to have recourse to it because of its inutility.[1788] How little his advice was heeded, and how little the courts deemed themselves able to dispense with torture, is shown in the charter of Hainault of 1619 where in these cases the tribunal is authorized to employ it to ascertain the truth of the charge, or to discover accomplices, or for any other purpose.[1789] In this dilemma, various means were adopted to circumvent the arch enemy, of which the one most generally resorted to was that of shaving the whole person carefully before applying the torture,[1790] a process which served as an excuse for the most indecent outrages upon female prisoners. Yet notwithstanding all the precautions of the most experienced exorcists, we find in the bloody farce of Urbain Grandier that the fiercest torments left him in capital spirits and good humor.[1791] Damhouder relates at much length a curious case which occurred under his own eyes while member of the council of Bruges, when he assisted at the torture of a reputed witch who had exercised her power only in good works. During three examinations, she bore the severest torture without shrinking, sometimes sleeping and sometimes defiantly snapping her fingers at the judges. At length, during the process of shaving, a slip of parchment covered with cabalistic characters was found concealed in her person, and on its removal she was speedily brought to acknowledge her pact with the Evil One.[1792] The tender-hearted Rickius was so convinced of this source of uncertainty that he was accustomed to administer the cold-water ordeal to all the miserable old women brought before him on such charges, but he is careful to inform us that this was only preparatory proof, to enable him with a safer conscience to torture those who were so ill-advised as to float instead of sinking.[1793] Grillandus tells us that he had met with cases in which the insensibility to the severest tortures was so complete that only magic arts could explain it; the patient seemed to be supported in the air, or to be in a profound stupor, and he mentions some of the formulas which were employed for the purpose. In one case at Rome a notorious thief suspected of a large robbery came to him voluntarily and said he wanted to purge himself of the rumors against him. He was tortured repeatedly in various ways; when the operation began he muttered something and fell into a stupor in which he was absolutely insensible. After exhausting his ingenuity, Grillandus had to discharge him. In another case the formula “Quemadmodum lac beatæ,” etc., produced the same effect.[1794]
From the time when the Cappadocians of old were said to harden their children with torture in order that they might profitably follow the profession of false witnesses, there existed so general a belief among experienced men that criminals of all kinds had secrets with which to deaden sensibility to torture that it is not improbable that the unfortunates occasionally were able to strengthen their endurance with some anæsthetic. Boguet complains that in modern times torture had become almost useless not only with sorcerers but with criminals in general, and Damhouder asserts that professional malefactors were in the habit of torturing each other in order to be hardened when brought to justice, in consequence of which he advises the judge to inquire into the antecedents of prisoners, in order to proportion the severity of the torture to the necessities of the case.[1795]
When the concentrated energies of these ingenious and determined law dispensers failed to extort by such means a confession from the wretched clowns and gossips thus placed at their mercy, they were even yet not wholly at fault. The primitive teachings of the Inquisition of the thirteenth century were not yet obsolete; they were instructed to treat the prisoner kindly, and to introduce into his dungeon some prepossessing agent who should make friends with him and induce him to confess what was wanted of him, promising to influence the judge to pardon, when at that moment the judge is to enter the cell and to promise grace, with the mental reservation that his grace should be shown to the community and not to the prisoner.[1796] Or, still following the ancient traditions, spies were to be confined with him, who should profess to be likewise sorcerers and thus lead him to incriminate himself, or else the unhappy wretch was to be told that his associate prisoners had borne testimony against him, in order to induce him to revenge himself by turning witness against them.[1797] Boguet, indeed, does not consider it correct to mislead the accused with promises of pardon, and though it was generally approved by legists, he decides against it.[1798] Simancas also considers such artifices to be illegal, and that a confession thus procured could be retracted.[1799] Del Rio, on the other hand, while loftily condemning the outspoken trickery recommended by Sprenger and Bodin, proceeds to draw a careful distinction between dolum bonum and dolum malum. He forbids absolute lying, but advises equivocation and ambiguous promises, and then, if the prisoner is deceived, he has only himself to thank for it.[1800] In fact, these men conceived that they were engaged in a direct and personal struggle with the Evil One, and that Satan could only be overcome with his own arts.
When the law thus pitilessly turned all the chances against the victim, it is easy to understand that few escaped. In the existing condition of popular frenzy on the subject, there was no one but could feel that he might at any moment be brought under accusation by personal enemies or by unfortunates compelled on the rack to declare the names of all whom they might have seen congregated at the witches’ sabbat. We can thus readily comprehend the feelings of those who, living under such uncertainties, coolly and deliberately made up their minds in advance that, if chance should expose them to suspicion, they would at once admit everything that the inquisitors might desire of them, preferring a speedy death to one more lingering and scarcely less certain.[1801] The evil fostered with such careful exaggeration grew to so great proportions that Father Tanner speaks of the multitude of witches who were daily convicted through torture;[1802] and that this was no mere form of speech is evident when one judge, in a treatise on the subject, boasted of his zeal and experience in having dispatched within his single district nine hundred wretches in the space of fifteen years, and another trustworthy authority relates with pride that in the diocese of Como alone as many as a thousand had been burnt in a twelvemonth, while the annual average was over a hundred.[1803]