Even before this, however, the Suprema had commenced action. The Jesuits had been profoundly stirred by the condemnation of Ulloa and the suspension in the churches of the sanbenito of a member of their Order. It was doubtless owing to their influence that the Suprema, March 10, 1738, ordered all the papers in the case of the Molinists to be sent to Spain and the sanbenitos of Ulloa to be removed from the churches of Lima and Santiago. This last command was unwillingly obeyed and, in reporting its execution, January 10, 1739, the tribunal remonstrated bitterly as to the disastrous results to the authority of the Inquisition and to the faith. The papers were duly forwarded, but were detained in Panamá until 1746, when they were despatched by way of Brazil. It was not, however, until 1762 that the Suprema delivered its judgement. It called attention to the many irregularities and inexcusable delays in the case of Solis, but did not modify the judgement. In that of Velazco, it revoked the sentence as unjust, absolved his memory and fame, ordered his property to be restored to his heirs, less the expenses of maintenance, and that a certificate rehabilitating them be given and the sanbenitos be removed from the churches. The review of the trial of Ulloa was long and minute, pointing out its innumerable irregularities and denials of justice; there was no proof that he ever held the doctrines imputed to him and no effort to ascertain the truth; a false and imperfect report of the case, moreover, had been made to the Suprema.[697]
There were six other disciples of Ulloa who were treated in the same inexcusable fashion. Two or three of them had appeared before the Santiago commissioner, in 1710 and 1718. Nothing more was done with them until the affair was revived for the auto of 1736, when they were arrested and brought to Lima and tried. It is scarce worth while to detail the cases. It suffices to say that two of them died in consequence, and that in at least two of the cases the Suprema, in 1762, set aside the sentences as unjustifiable. The auto of 1736 had not escaped severe criticism in Lima, which the tribunal repressed by trying two of the critics and fining them in five hundred pesos each. A third was a Jesuit, Padre Gabriel de Orduña, whom Calderon and Unda apparently were afraid to handle. The evidence was sent to the Suprema, which replied that Ibañez should summon him and warn him to treat the Holy Office with due respect. This became known in Lima to the mortification of the inquisitors who suspended the case.[698]
In the chief matter for which the tribunal was founded—the protection of the colony from the presumable missionary efforts of the Protestants—it found little to do. No case of proselytism has been found among the records thus far and those of voluntary Protestant residents are few and far between. The archbishop, as we have seen, had disposed of Jan Miller in 1548, and in the first auto de fe, in 1573, there appeared Joan Bautista and Mateo Salado. In 1581 there was a courageous martyr in the person of Jan Bernal, a Flemish tailor who had been arrested and forwarded by the Commissioner of Panamá. At first he professed conversion and begged mercy, but he regained his fortitude and declared that it was better to burn in this world than the next. To this he adhered in spite of strenuous efforts to convert him. He was tortured in caput alienum without success and was sentenced to relaxation. He was pertinacious to the last and must therefore undoubtedly have been burnt alive. In the auto of November 30, 1587, there appeared Miguel del Pilar, a Fleming, whose constancy was punished by relaxation and burning.[699] Then a long interval occurs until 1625, when a man called Adrian Rodríguez of Leyden was induced to profess conversion and was reconciled with eight years of galleys and a sanbenito for life. A century elapses when, in 1730, there was an autillo for Robert Shaw, a Nova Scotian, who deserted from Clipperton’s expedition and penetrated to Cuzco, where he was arrested as a heretic and sent to Lima. He professed readiness for conversion and was confided for instruction to Dr. Thomas Correy but soon ran away, carrying with him 160 pesos and some jewels. He took service with a butcher in Puno, was discovered and taken back to Lima, where he escaped with some spiritual penances. About ten years later, James Haden of Boston was prosecuted as a heretic and was converted.[700] The extreme sensitiveness which would not permit Spanish soil to be polluted by a Protestant foot is seen in the case of Pierre Fos, a French Protestant of Protestant descent, who was cook to Viceroy Superunda. He attended mass and passed for a Catholic, but betrayed himself and was arrested in 1758. He confessed at once and said he would become a Catholic if he could obtain his parents’ consent; then, after three days of prison, he announced his conversion to save his soul. Instructors were given to him and his trial dragged on through all its cumbrous forms until his sentence was read in an auto of May 18, 1763. It condemned him to abjure de vehementi, to be paraded in virgüenza through the streets, to confiscation of half his property, reclusion for instruction during two years, after which he was to be shipped to Spain, consigned to the commissioner at Cádiz. The last papers in the case are the receipt for his person by the captain of the good ship los Placeres, Callao, April 2, 1765, and the receipt from the receiver, April 22d, for the documents concerning his property. It was doubtless his pretended Catholicism that justified this severity.[701]
It is a curious illustration of the Spanish theories concerning heresy and its cognizance by the Inquisition that even heretics, whose presence was involuntary as prisoners of war, were held to come within its jurisdiction, and the Lima tribunal had much more to do with such subjects than with those who ventured intentionally within its grasp. In 1578 it wrote to Juan Constantino, its commissioner at Panamá, that it understood that the English corsairs who appeared there were heretics and that it would proceed as such against any who were captured. They robbed the commissioner and left him in his shirt, they broke the chalice and patena and cast into the sea the altar and missal. The commissioner on his part denounced the General of the armada del Mar de Norte for keeping in his service two or three Englishmen as trumpeters and an artilleryman, whom he ought to have delivered to the Inquisition of Seville.[702] Sometimes the secular authorities maintained a cumulative jurisdiction with a result grotesquely horrible. Thus, in 1581 there were four English prisoners surrendered to the tribunal which tortured them severely for intention and sentenced John Oxenham, “captain of the robbers at Ballano,” to reconciliation, confiscation and the galleys for life; Thomas Xervel (Harvey?), master of the ship, to reconciliation, ten years of galleys and subsequent perpetual prison; John Butler, pilot of the ship, to abjure de vehementi and six years of galleys; the fourth, Henry Butler, a young brother of the last, was not tried. It sounds like a ghastly jest to learn that the alcaldes had already sentenced the first three to be hanged and the last one to perpetual galleys; they were all returned to the secular court and the sentences were duly executed. As they had evidently all been converted, the tribunal at least had the pious satisfaction of saving their souls.[703] About 1585 there is a brief entry of a dozen or so of Englishmen captured at Guayaquil and taken to Lima. The Viceroy Count del Villar asked them whether they were baptized and on learning that they were thus answerable to the Inquisition, he handed them over to the tribunal. What were their sentences and whether the secular court reclaimed them does not appear.[704]
The next adventurers who suffered appeared in the auto of November 30, 1587. John Drake, a cousin of Sir Francis, passed the Straits of Magellan and was lost on the Pacific coast. Thirteen of the crew saved themselves and fell among cannibal Indians with whom they lived for about a year. Drake and two others fled in a canoe down the River Plate to Buenos Ayres, one of them being lost in the Paraguay. Drake and his comrade Richard Ferrel were seized, sent across the continent to Arica and thence to Lima, where they were tried by the tribunal. They professed conversion; Drake was sentenced to reconciliation and seclusion for three years in a monastery with prohibition to leave the country. Ferrel must have been somewhat more stubborn, for he was tortured and condemned to reconciliation, four years of galleys and perpetual prison.[705]
The auto of April 5, 1592, was graced with two groups of English prisoners. Four of these had been captured on the island of Puná and had lain in prison for five years. The secular authorities seem to have abandoned jurisdiction by this time and left them wholly to the Inquisition. Walter and Edward Tillert, brothers, were relaxed as persistent heretics, but weakened at the last moment and were strangled before burning. Henry Axli (Oxley?) was pertinacious to the end and was burnt alive. The fourth, Andrew Marle (Morley?), a youth of eighteen, professed conversion and was reconciled, with two years reclusion among the Jesuits for instruction.[706]
The other group consisted of three “pirates,” from the expedition of Thomas Cavendish, who sailed from Plymouth July 21, 1586. He reached the Straits of Magellan January 3, 1587, emerged March 15th and on April 9th anchored in the roadstead of Quintero, a little north of Valparaiso. At Santiago a force had been raised in anticipation of their coming, and when the English, in need of wood and water, had landed a party, they surrounded twelve men, who had straggled to a ravine, and carried them to Santiago. There nine of them were summarily hanged, to the great benefit of their souls, for they professed conversion. The other three were shipped to Lima, and delivered to the Inquisition where their trials lasted for three years. Of these William Stephens said his parents were both Catholics, and his mother had died in gaol for possessing beads and images; he had observed the religion of his country but was in heart a Catholic; he was reconciled with four years prison and sanbenito. Thomas Lucas had a Protestant father and Catholic mother; he had always been a Protestant but was now a Catholic; he was reconciled, with four years of galleys, six years of prison and sanbenito, and was never to leave Lima. William Hilles was but 17 years old; he had been a Protestant but was now a Catholic; he was reconciled, with six years of galleys and perpetual prison and sanbenito.[707] Cavendish, it may be added, captured a treasure-ship, imitated Drake in circumnavigating the globe and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
More disastrous was the expedition under Richard Hawkins, which sailed from Plymouth in July, 1593, with three vessels, of which one was wrecked and one returned. Hawkins cast anchor at Valparaiso, April 24, 1594, where he captured four little vessels and ransomed a larger one. When he sailed, the corregidor manned one of the abandoned barks and despatched it to Callao with news of the corsairs. It made the voyage in fifteen days, enabling the Viceroy, Hurtado de Mendoza, to fit out a squadron under his nephew Beltran de Castro, who encountered Hawkins, July 2, in the Bay of Atacames, near Quito. After a desperate fight, Hawkins surrendered under promise of treatment as prisoners of war, and the extraordinary rejoicings with which the news of the victory were received in Lima are a measure of the terror excited by these dauntless sea-rovers. The terms of capitulation were scandalously violated; of the seventy-five prisoners taken, sixty-two were sent to the galleys at Cartagena, and thirteen were brought to Lima, where the Inquisition claimed them, on information that they were heretics, and they entered the secret prison, December 4, 1594. Possibly it may have been the irregularity attaching to the infraction of the terms of surrender that hastened the trials, for eight of the prisoners appeared in the auto of December 17, 1595, together with seven other Englishmen, captured at la Yaguana and forwarded from Santo Domingo. There were no martyrs among them. All professed conversion and were reconciled with various terms of reclusion except one, William Leigh, who was sentenced to six years of galleys and perpetual irremissible prison.[708]
Richard Hawkins, whose trial ended July 17, 1595, was too sick to appear in the auto and was transferred to the Jesuit college. His chivalrous bearing won for him general good will, and on his recovery he was placed at the disposition of the viceroy who was earnestly desirous that the terms of surrender should be observed. There was correspondence on the subject. The Suprema wrote, October 5, 1595, to suspend the sequestrations of the Englishmen, and in future not to sequestrate in such cases, for soldiers ought not to be deprived of the spoils won from their enemies. The tribunal, it said, was not to interfere in the cases of those sent to the galleys at Cartagena, but, as to Hawkins and his comrades, they were to be delivered to the viceroy, without proceeding further in their cases and, when they were fully instructed in the faith, it was to do justice, proceeding in their cases with much care and consideration. These instructions were of course too late, and in reply the tribunal asked whether their sanbenitos should be removed from the churches and whether, in case they relapsed, they should be subject to relaxation. The conclusion reached was that the sanbenitos were to be removed, the reclusion revoked, the sequestrations restored and that they were not subject to the penalties of relapse for reincidence. The succeeding viceroy, Velasco, desired to send them all to Spain, but this was opposed by the tribunal because their penances had not been completed; Hawkins ought also to be kept on account of his knowledge of the navigation of those seas. The last information concerning them occurs in a letter of the Royal Audiencia, May 21, 1607, showing that they had passed out of the hands of the tribunal. It says that the Viceroys Cañete and Velasco had sent to Spain all those captured in 1594 except Richard Hawkins, Captain John Ellis, Hugh Carnix (Charnock?) and Richard Davis, who were kept because they were experienced seamen and Davis was useful in the position assigned to him. Now permission has been given to them to sail in the outgoing fleet, consigned to the Contratacion of Seville.[709] We know that Hawkins eventually reached England and was knighted.
In time there came a recognition of the rights of prisoners of war, even though they were heretics and were claimed by the Inquisition. In the auto of December 21, 1625, there appeared Pieter Jan of Delft, who had been captured and condemned to death as a pirate, though the sentence was not executed. He refused to be converted and was sent to the galleys, but was subsequently liberated under a royal cédula as a prisoner of war. Fanaticism, however, was difficult to extinguish. When, about 1650, the Dutch endeavored to establish themselves at Valdivia, Viceroy Mancera sent a well-equipped fleet and army to drive them out. The captain of the first vessel that reached there, on learning that the Dutch commander had died and been buried, caused the corpse to be dug up and burnt. From the absence in the subsequent records of cases of prisoners of war, however, it is safe to assume that by this time the barbarity of giving them the alternative of conversion or the stake had been abandoned. There was, it is true, an intervention of the tribunal in the case of the Dutch ship St. Louis, captured at Coquimbo in 1725, but it was not unreasonable. The fiscal Calderon, learning that among the prisoners there were French Huguenots and Dutch heretics and Jews, and that the Viceroy Castelfuerte thought of utilizing the sailors on his own ships, represented to the tribunal the grave dangers of such a course, when the Inquisitor Gutiérrez de Cevallos, induced the viceroy to abandon the plan and to bring to Lima about a hundred who had been left sick at Coquimbo.[710] As none of them appeared in the succeeding auto it is inferable that they were not subjected to prosecution for heresy.