"Nevertheless I acknowledge my sentence to be just, because it was pronounced by the vicar of Christ; I have received and regarded it as such, because to the quality of vicar of Jesus Christ the person who pronounced it joins the character of an upright and prudent judge. I pardon, at the hour of my death, as I have always done, all offences, of whatever nature, which have been committed against me; I also pardon those who have shown themselves against me in my trial; also those who have taken the smallest part in it. I have never felt any resentment against them; on the contrary, I have always recommended them to God; I do so at this moment, loving them with all my heart, and I promise that if I go to that place where I hope to be by the mercy of our Lord, that I will not ask any thing against them, but pray to God for all."
The corpse of the archbishop was deposited, on the 3rd of May, in the choir of the convent of the Minerva, between two cardinals of the family of Medicis. The Pope caused an inscription to be engraved on his tomb, in which he calls him a man illustrious by his doctrine and his sermons. From this it appears probable that he did not consider his works full of heresies; but, perhaps, it was occasioned by the protestation of Carranza before his death. Solemn obsequies were performed at Rome; and those celebrated at Toledo, some time after, were still more magnificent.
Although the holy office had obtained an unjust victory, the inquisitors were vexed that Carranza had not been degraded from his dignity. The suspension for five years appeared to them a singularly slight punishment, and they feared that the Pope would grant him a dispensation from it, which he, in fact, did, eight days after the sentence.
Their rage is displayed in several letters written from Rome on the three first days after the judgment, and which were found among the papers of the trial at Madrid. Among many things which are disgraceful to the writers, is the advice given to the king, not to permit Carranza to return to Spain, and, above all, not to suffer him to govern his see even after the lapse of the suspension; their envy and animosity making them suppose, that it would be a disgrace to the diocese of Toledo to be governed by a man who had been prosecuted by the Inquisition: they said that it would be better for the king to request the Pope to induce Carranza to give up his diocese and accept a pension, that some person might be placed in his see more worthy to occupy it; but God in his infinite wisdom destroyed, by the death of the archbishop, the cause, the motive, and the matter for new intrigues. In the writings of the process I saw with sorrow, that, far from relinquishing their pursuits, the inquisitors had prepared a fresh persecution for him.
CHAPTER XXXV.
TRIAL OF ANTONIO PEREZ, MINISTER AND FIRST SECRETARY OF STATE TO PHILIP II.
ANTONIO PEREZ was another illustrious victim to the Inquisition and the evil disposition of Philip II. The misfortunes of Perez commenced when Philip put to death Juan Escobedo, secretary to Don John of Austria; he succeeded in making his escape to Aragon, where he hoped to live in tranquillity under a government which only allowed the sovereign to have an accusing fiscal in the tribunals. It is not necessary to relate all that Perez suffered at Madrid during twelve years before he made his escape; these details may be found in a work published by this minister, under the title of Relations, in the recital which Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor inserted in the Seminario erudito, and in a volume in octavo which appeared in 1788, entitled The Trial of Antonio Perez.
Antonio Perez having retired to Aragon in 1590, Philip issued an order for his arrest, which took place at Calatayud. Perez having protested against this measure, and claimed the privilege of the manifestados, he was conducted to Saragossa, and confined in the prison of the kingdom, or of liberty. The prisoners were there free from the immediate authority of the king, and only depended on an intermediate judge called the chief justice of Aragon. It was also called the prison of the Fuero or Constitutional, because the constitution of the king alone was named the Fuero d'Aragon; it was sometimes named the prison of the manifestados; no persons were received into it except those who presented themselves, or claimed the benefit of the constitution, in order to avoid the royal prison, and declared that they submitted to the laws of the kingdom, and invoked the support of its privileges: those of a prisoner in the case of Perez consisted in not being put to the torture; in being set at liberty, after taking an oath to present himself to reply to the charges, and being allowed even if condemned to death by any other judge, to appeal to the tribunal of the chief justice of Aragon[68], who examined if the execution of the sentence was contrary to any Fuero of the kingdom. This tribunal resembles that of France called the Court of Cassation.
Philip II., after many earnest but useless endeavours to induce the permanent deputation of the kingdom to transfer Perez to Madrid, sent the commencement of the trial into Aragon, and gave the necessary powers to his fiscal at Saragossa, to accuse him of having made false reports to the king, which had induced him to put Juan Escobedo to death; of having forged letters from the cabinet, and revealed state secrets. After many incidents, Perez reduced the king to the necessity of renouncing the prosecution, by a public act on the 18th of August, in order to avoid the disgrace of seeing him acquitted.
His majesty, however, reserved to himself the right of making use of his privileges; and to prevent Perez from obtaining his liberty, he caused another trial to be commenced, under the form of an inquest[69], before the regent of the royal audience of Aragon. To give occasion for this trial, it was decided that the domestics of the king were exempted from the privileges of the Fueros, and that Antonio Perez was the king's servant, in the office of Secretary of State. Perez asserted that the Secretary of State was a servant of the public, and had never been confounded with the king's domestics; that supposing he had been of that class, the law could only extend to the Secretary of State for Aragon; that the constitution only alluded to those royal domestics who were natives of Aragon; that no one could be tried twice for the same crime before two different tribunals; that he had been tried at Madrid in 1582; that he then submitted to much ill-treatment, rather than justify himself by divulging the private letters of the king, which he had in his possession; lastly, that though the papers useful in his defence had been obtained from his wife by fraudulent means, yet he had still documents enough to justify himself entirely.
Perez had, in fact, retained several notes in the king's own hand-writing, which were sufficient to exculpate him: he sent copies of them to the Marquis d'Almenara and other persons attached to the king, and told them that having been informed that his majesty was vexed that his letters had been exposed in the trial, he wished to spare him the pain of seeing other original documents presented, which contained very important secrets relating to different people; but if the disposition to persecute him continued, he would produce them, because he was no longer capable of making useless sacrifices to the prejudice of his wife and seven children.