As the eighteenth century advanced, the hostility of ecclesiastics and laymen towards the tribunal continued unabated, while respect for it rapidly decreased and its functions dwindled, except in the matter of censorship. A curious manifestation of the feeling entertained for it is to be found in the attitude of the parish priests with regard to the sanbenitos of the heretics hung in their churches. A report on the subject called for by the Suprema, in 1788, elicited the statement that for many years there had been no culprits of the class requiring sanbenitos. In 1756, when the walls of the parish church of Los Remedios de La Laguna were whitened, the incumbents resisted the replacement of the sanbenitos, or at least wished to hang them where they should not be seen, but the tribunal ordered them to be renovated and hung conspicuously. In the Dominican church of Las Palmas, there used to be sanbenitos, but they had disappeared and the inquisitors could not explain the cause of their removal. Eight years ago the parish church of Telde was whitened and the incumbents would not replace them; Inquisitor Padilla was informed of this, but he took no action. The only ones then to be seen in Las Palmas were in the cathedral; the building was undergoing alterations and the walls would be whitened, which the inquisitors expected would be alleged as a reason for removing them.[366] Equally suggestive of the feeling of the laity is the fact that, when the position of alguazil mayor fell vacant, it was offered in vain to representatives of the principal families, who all declined under various pretexts.[367]

The sentiment of the population was duly represented by the eloquent priest Ruiz de Padron in the debates of the Córtes of Cádiz, in 1813, and the suppression of the Inquisition was greeted by the ecclesiastics of the Canaries in a temper very different from that manifested in the Peninsula. The bishop, Manuel Verdugo, a native of Las Palmas, was an enlightened man, who had had frequent differences with the tribunal. The decree of suppression was received by him March 31st; it was his duty to take charge of the archives and to close the building, and he lost no time in communicating it to the inquisitors, José Francisco Borbujo y Riba and Antonio Fernando de Echanove. The chapter was overjoyed and, at a session on April 3d, it addressed the Córtes, characterizing the decree as manifestly the work of God and as removing from the Church of Christ a blemish which rendered religion odious. The same afternoon the sanbenitos in the cathedral were solemnly burnt in the patio. The bishop also reported to the Córtes that their manifesto, which had excited the canons of Cádiz to such extremity of opposition, had been duly read that morning, and that he had been greatly pleased to see that the acts of the Córtes had been received throughout his diocese with universal satisfaction. He lost no time in taking possession of the archives, but the inquisitors had already taken the precaution to remove, from the volume of their correspondence with the Suprema, two leaves in which they had spoken ill of him. The financial officials at the same time assumed charge of the landed property and censos, or ground-rents, of the tribunal, which we are told were large and numerous. Inquisitor Borbujo remained at his post, awaiting the reaction. The poets of the island were prompt in expressing the exuberance of their joy in verses, for which action was subsequently taken against the priest, Mariano Romero, Don Rafael Bento and Don Francisco Guerra y Bethencourt.[368]

When the Restoration swiftly followed, Inquisitor Borbujo received, on August 17, 1814, the decree re-establishing the Inquisition and called on the bishop to surrender the building, but the latter declared that he must await orders from competent authority. On September 29th there came an order for the re-installation of the tribunal and Borbujo made another effort to gain possession of the building and property, but it was not until a royal mandate of November 28th was received that he succeeded in doing so. The tribunal was thus fairly put on its feet again, but such was the abhorrence in which it was held that its edicts were torn down, its jurisdiction was everywhere contested, and its offices of alguazil and familiars could not be filled.[369]

Thus resuscitated, it diligently collected the pamphlets and periodicals and verses of the revolutionary period, and molested their authors as far as it could. In fact, under the Restoration, except the occasional prosecution of a wise-woman, its functions, as in Spain, were mainly political, liberalism being equivalent to heresy and, except when it had some political end in view, its efforts were ridiculed by both the civil and military authorities, which regarded it with no respect and encroached upon it from all sides. When the Revolution of 1820 broke out, news of Fernando VII’s oath to the Constitution and decree of March 9th suppressing the Holy Office reached Santa Cruz de Tenerife April 29th and Las Palmas some days later. Amid popular rejoicings, the Inquisition closed its doors, delivered up its archives and the inquisitors sailed for Spain. No care was taken of the archives, which were pillaged by curiosity hunters and those whose interests led them to acquire documents concerning limpieza or old law-suits. What remained were stored in a damp, unventilated place; when removed, they were carried off by cartloads, without keeping them in any order and, in 1874, Millares describes them as forming a pile of chaotic, mutilated and illegible papers in a room of the City Hall.[370]

The reader may reasonably ask what, in its labor of three centuries, the tribunal of the Canaries accomplished to justify its existence.

CHAPTER VI.
MEXICO.

The ostensible object of the Spanish conquests in the New World was the propagation of the faith. This was the sole motive alleged by Alexander VI, in the celebrated bull of 1493, conferring on the Spanish sovereigns domination over the territories discovered by Columbus; it was asserted in the codicil to Queen Isabella’s will, urging her husband and children to keep it ever in view, and it was put forward in all the commissions and instructions issued to the adventurers who converted the shores of the Caribbean into scenes of oppression and carnage.[371] If Philip II was solicitous to preserve the purity of the faith in his own dominions, he was no less anxious to spread it beyond the seas; he prescribed this as one of the chief duties of his officers, describing it as the principal object of Spanish rule, to which all questions of profit and advantage were to be regarded as subordinate.[372]

It must be admitted, however, that the effort to spread the gospel lagged behind those directed to the acquisition of the precious metals. It is true that, on the second voyage of Columbus, in 1493, the sovereigns sent Fray Buil, with a dozen clerics and full papal faculties, but he busied himself more in quarrelling with the admiral than in converting the heathen.[373] The first regular missionaries of whom we have knowledge were two Franciscans who, in 1500, accompanied Bobadilla to the West Indies and, in a letter of October 12th of that year, reported to the Observantine Vicar-general, Olivier Maillard, that they found the natives eager for conversion and that they had baptized three thousand in the first port which they reached in Hispañola.[374] They were followed, in 1502, by a few more Franciscans under Fray Alonso del Espinal, a worthy man, according to Las Casas, but who could think of nothing but the Summa Angelica of his brother Franciscan, Angelo da Chivasso.[375] The first earnest effort to instruct the natives was made by Fray Pedro de Córdova, who came in 1510 with two Dominicans and was soon followed by ten or twelve more; during the succeeding years he and the Franciscans founded some missionary stations on the coast of Tierra Firme, but they were broken up by the Indians in 1523.[376] As, however, we are told that none of the missionaries took the trouble to learn the Indian languages, their evangelizing success may be doubted.[377]

The efforts to organize a church establishment proceeded but slowly at first. Hispañola was divided into two bishoprics, San Domingo and la Vega. For the former, at a date not definitely stated, the Franciscan, García de Padilla, was appointed, but he died before setting out to take possession. For the latter, Pero Suárez Deza, nephew of Inquisitor-general Deza, was chosen and we are told that he governed his see for some years[378] but, as he figures in the Lucero troubles of Córdova, in 1506, as the “archbishop-elect of the Indies” the period of his episcopate is not easily definable. However this may be, the first bishop who appears in the episcopal lists of Hispañola is Alessandro Geraldino, with the date of 1520.[379] Cortés, who had asked to have bishoprics organized in his new conquests, speedily changed his mind and requested Charles V to send out only friars. The priests of the Indians, he said, were so rigidly held to modesty and chastity that, if the people were to witness the pomp and disorderly lives of the Spanish clergy, they would regard Christianity as a farce and their conversion would be impracticable. Charles heeded the warning and, during the rest of his reign, he appointed as bishops only members of the religious Orders, while the secular clergy were but sparingly allowed to emigrate and those who succeeded in going earned as a body a most unenviable reputation.[380] The Church thus started grew rapidly and, towards the close of the century, Padre Mendieta informs us that New Spain (comprising Mexico and Central America) had ten bishoprics, besides the metropolitan see of the capital, four hundred convents and as many clerical districts, and that each of these eight hundred had numerous churches in its charge.[381]

It seems strange that the Spanish monarchs, combining earnest desire for the propagation of the faith with intense zeal for its purity, should have so long postponed the extension of the Holy Office over their new dominions, while thus active in building up the Church. The Indian neophytes, it is true, were not in need of its ministrations, but the colonists might well be a subject of concern. Manasseh ben Israel (circa 1644) tells us that, after the expulsion in 1492, many Jews and Judaizing New Christians sought an asylum in the New World and that Antonio Montesinos, a Spanish Jew who had long lived there, reported that he found the Jewish rites carefully preserved, especially in certain valleys of South America.[382] It is true that there were repeated efforts to prohibit New Christians and those who had been penanced by the Inquisition, with their descendants, from emigrating to the Indies, but this was a provision difficult to enforce, and relief from it was a financial expedient tempting to the chronically empty treasury of Spain. In the great composition of Seville, in 1509, there was a provision that, for twenty thousand ducats, the disability should be in so far removed that such persons could go to the colonies and trade there for two years, on each voyage. After Ferdinand’s death, this was confirmed by Charles V, but he soon afterwards, September 24, 1518, ordered the Casa de Contratacion of Seville not to permit them to embark. They complained loudly of this violation of faith and, on January 23, 1519, he ordered the Inquisition of Seville to examine the agreement and, if it was found to contain such a clause, the prohibition should be withdrawn. Six months later, on July 16th, it was renewed, exciting fresh remonstrances that they were compelled to pay the money while the privilege was denied. The matter was then referred to the Suprema, which decided that the complaints were justified, whereupon Charles, on December 13th, ordered the inquisitors of Seville to permit them to go, provided the whole amount of the composition, eighty thousand ducats, had been fully paid.[383] Thus, in one way or another, the enterprising New Christians sought successfully to share in the lucrative exploitation of the colonies, and it illustrates the ineffectiveness of Spanish administration that, in 1537, it felt obliged to call in papal assistance to supplement its deficiencies. Accordingly Paul III, in his bull Altitudo divini consilii, forbade all apostates from going to the Indies and commanded the colonial bishops to expel any who might come.[384] Prince Philip followed this by a decree of August 14, 1543, ordering all viceroys, governors and courts to investigate what Moorish slaves or freemen, recently converted, or sons of Jews resided in the Indies and to banish all whom they might discover, sending them to Spain in the first ships, for in no case were they to be allowed to remain.[385]