The inexplicable inconsistency in the adjudgement of penalties, when gauged by any rational standard, can best be understood by the contrast in a few cases. The tenderness displayed towards the abuse of the confessional has already been alluded to. The same is seen in some of the sentences for crimes of a still more serious character. Thus in the auto of July 12, 1733, Sebastiana de Figueroa, a mestiza aged 60, for sorceries including adoration of the demon and causing sickness and deaths, offences for which in a secular tribunal she would have been executed without mercy, yet escaped with abjuration de vehementi, half confiscation, two hundred lashes (which were remitted) and four years of exile to a designated place.[736] In the auto of 1736, María Josepha Canga, a free negress, who had made her husband insane with sorceries and herbs, so as to have freedom for adultery, merely abjured de levi, with four years’ service in the hospital of San Bartolomé. In the same auto, Juan González de Ribera, a mestizo, had gone to the Indians, adopted their ways, professed their religion and, worst of all, had induced several Spaniards to do the same, in addition to which he had taken three wives. He was thus a dogmatizer and was condemned as a bigamist, idolater, sorcerer and diviner, and yet he merely abjured de vehementi and had three years hard labor on an island off Callao.[737]
With this ill-judged mercy may be contrasted the case of François Moyen, a Frenchman of varied talents and wide culture, skilled as an artist and musician, whose evil fortune threw him upon the tender mercies of Amusquíbar. Born in 1720, he led a somewhat adventurous life; that he was a believing Catholic is seen in a vow of pilgrimage to Compostela, made during danger in a voyage—a vow which he duly performed in 1739, during a residence in Lisbon. In 1746 he sailed from there to Rio de Janeiro, with the Count de las Torres, who had important business in Chile. At Buenos Ayres they parted, the count hastening across the Pampas, while Moyen tarried there for awhile, his vivacity and his accomplishments rendering him a general favorite. During his stay he again manifested his devoutness by performing the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius. About the middle of 1748, at the request of the count, who had gone to Lima, he started to rejoin him by way of Potosí, in company of a band of traders. With light-hearted carelessness, he talked freely, in the confidence of the road and the bivouac; as a Frenchman of the Gallican school and accustomed to the freedom of speech in Paris, he said much that he had better have left unsaid, with a singular imprudence in view of his acquaintance with the methods of the Portuguese Inquisition, his criticism of which formed one of the counts in his indictment.
He became an object of suspicion to his companions, especially to a Gallego named José Antonio Soto. Potosí was reached March 27, 1749, where a considerable stay was made, during which Moyen expended four pesos in masses. Two days after arrival, Soto denounced him to the commissioner José de Ligaraza Beaumont y Navarra, who secretly summoned the other travellers and muleteers, and gathered testimony swelling the sumaria to some two hundred pages. It was loose and thoughtless talk capable in the hands of the inquisitorial theologians of deductions most damaging—predestination in its most absolute form, polygamy justifiable, marriage not a sacrament; masses, prayers and indulgences were useless to souls in purgatory; limbo and purgatory were doubtful; the pope was not the head of the Church and had no power to bind or to loose; councils were superior to popes; it was wrong to condemn people for lack of knowledge of the son of a carpenter, and much more of the same kind. The ingenuity of the calificadores, in fact, injected heresy into the simplest remarks. When he reproved a muleteer for abusing a mule and said that it was a creature of God, this was held to prove that he was a Manichean. One brilliant night, looking at the stars, he observed that their multitude was superfluous, thus assuming that God had erred in creation, which was heretical blasphemy, constituting him an heretical blasphemer. A criticism of the luxury of the clergy, with a reference to the poverty of the Apostles, showed him to be a Wickliffite.
Commissioner Ligaraza assembled a consulta, which voted for the arrest of so dangerous a heretic. It was executed May 14th and he was imprisoned in chains. At first he was kept incomunicado, but subsequently visitors were admitted who provoked him to risky discussions and then gave evidence against him, in which, among other matters, a debate on the Eucharist told heavily against him. He became an epileptic and suffered frightfully from his chains and the cold climate. The commissioner had no funds for his maintenance; he endeavored to support himself by painting, but this was insufficient and his only solace, his violin, was taken and sold, reducing him to such despair that he attempted suicide. The commissioner was in no haste and did not report the arrest until June 9th nor transmit the evidence until December. On May 9, 11 and 12, 1750, the tribunal extracted from it forty-four heretical propositions and ordered Moyen’s transfer to Lima.
This journey, which commenced July 12th, consumed two years. Moyen’s health had been wrecked in his confinement and his epileptic fits recurred almost daily. Several times he nearly died; at Chuquito he received the viaticum. It was not until April, 1751, that Cuzco was reached, when he chanced to interest a lawyer named Tomas de Lecaros, who entered security for him and carried him to Arequipa, in vain search for improvement. There he met an English hatter named William—a good Catholic who attended mass daily—who counselled hypocrisy and silence about religious matters in a land where there was an Inquisition. Moyen chanced to mention this in his examinations; the Englishman was arrested and ruined.
On the return to Cuzco; a halt was made at Urcos, eight leagues distant. Amusquíbar, on September 14, 1751, called for his appearance within two months; the commissioner of Cuzco sent his notary, when Moyen drew a dagger and attempted resistance but was overpowered. Some three months later Fray Juan de San Miguel wrote to the tribunal that Moyen was hardened in his heresies and scattered them freely around Cuzco. That place was left, January 29, 1752, fortunately prior to the reception of an order from Amusquíbar to forward him in chains. March 26th he was delivered to the tribunal, broken and prematurely old with the sufferings of these three preliminary years of his trial.
Proceedings dragged on with the customary delays. The accusation, presented October 13th, represented him as a formal and pertinacious heretic and a follower of the sects of Luther, Calvin, Jansen, Quesnel, Manichee and Mahomet, besides being strongly suspect of Judaism. Discussion over these articles lasted until May 18, 1753, when he professed profound repentance for having discussed religious matters and begged for mercy. During the prolonged delays which ensued his sufferings in the prison were severe—in themselves an excessive punishment for reckless speech. Besides his continual epileptic fits, his feet were eaten up by chigoes; his chains chafed his ankles into sores, which threatened gangrene of one leg, and when, to avert this, on November 13th, the alcaide was directed to remove one of the shackles, the other was left on. In spite of this he made several attempts to escape—once by endeavoring to set fire to the door of his cell with the candle allowed to him at night, whereupon he was deprived of it. Again he succeeded in reaching the house of the Count of las Torres, only to be remanded, and on a third effort his plans were betrayed by a prisoner in an adjoining cell.
Two years were consumed in sending the evidence to Potosí for ratification and awaiting its return, although at first it had been ratified ad perpetuam. It was not received until April, 1755, and then its publication was delayed until September 3d. After this followed the customary examinations on the evidence, which were prolonged until March 14, 1758—a delay largely caused by Moyen’s constant epileptic attacks. His counsel did not present the defence until November 8, 1759, and then the consulta de fe was not assembled until January 15, 1761. It considered the case until February 14th, when the definitive vote was taken, under a protest that torture was not ordered in view of the weakened condition of the accused. The sentence finally was published in the auto of the following April 5th. It condemned him to abjure de vehementi, to ten years’ forced labor in an African presidio (Oran, Ceuta or Melilla), or in the penitential prison of Seville, as the inquisitor-general might prefer, and to two hundred lashes, which were commuted to vergüenza in consideration of his infirmities. The humiliating parade of the vergüenza through the streets of Lima was duly performed the next day; on the 11th he was shipped in irons by the galleon San Juan Bautista, reaching Cádiz in November; in December he was sent to Seville to which the African presidio was commuted. No consideration seems to have been given to the sufferings of the thirteen years of imprisonment since his arrest, nor to the wreck of a joyous and promising life for a few inconsiderate utterances.
Amusquíbar sought to justify the excessive delays of the trial by the quarrels in which he was involved, by his own sickness and that of the accused, but the Suprema did not accept these excuses and replied that the ten years intervening between the receipt of the prisoner and the sentence was an excessive delay and grave omission of the tribunal.[738] There was in all this no special malignity; it was simply the habitual application of the system with callous indifference as to the results to the accused.
Not the least important function of the Inquisition was the censorship of the press. Although in Spain this was reserved to the Suprema, and the tribunals could only refer to it books which they regarded as suspect, distance rendered independent action necessary in the colonies. From an early period the Lima tribunal examined books and prohibited such as it saw fit. The importation of printed matter was also, as in Spain, subject to its supervision. The original instructions, borne by Cerezuela, enjoined special watchfulness by the commissioners at the seaports, to prevent the introduction of all works that were on the Index. To insure this, at first no books were admitted except through Callao, and the commissioner at Panamá was required to keep a close watch on everything destined for that point. Nothing could be shipped from there without his licence, nor could any package be opened except in his presence. The same vigilance was exercised at Callao, and all books were sent to Fray Juan de Almaraz, Prior of San Agustin, for examination. As the settlement and commerce of Buenos Ayres developed, similar precautions were observed there. There was always a haunting dread of the efforts attributed to the Protestants to smuggle heretic books into the land. In 1605 there was a scare of this kind, based on rumors that ships from Lisbon manned by Flemings were bringing such works in casks purporting to contain wine or salt, and special orders were issued to the commissioner to be doubly watchful.[739] As in Spain, this system was a serious impediment to trade, and led not infrequently to collisions with the secular authorities. It required that all ships on arrival should be visited by the commissioner before any passenger or merchandise was landed, and that the latter, when brought on shore, should be opened in his presence and be minutely inspected.