Rash indeed had been the action of the New-Christians, and terrible was the penalty exacted, terrible the price they were made to pay for the life they had taken. In conceiving that they could intimidate by such an act a man of Torquemada’s mettle, they displayed a lamentable want of judgment, as was speedily proved. To fill the place of the dead inquisitor, and to set about the stern business of avenging him, Torquemada instantly dispatched to Zaragoza Fr. Juan Colvera, Fr. Pedro de Monterubio, and Dr. Alonso de Alarcon. For the greater security of themselves and their prisoners, these delegates set up their tribunal in the royal alcazar of the Castle of Aljaferia, and proceeded to institute an active search for the culprits. Several were seized, amongst whom was Abadia’s servant, Vidal de Uranso. He was put to the question, and an admission of his own guilt extracted from him. He was tortured further in the endeavour to wring from him the names of his associates in the deed, and finally he was promised “grace” if he would divulge them.
At this price the unfortunate Gascon consented to speak, betraying all whom he had known to be in the plot and all whom he had known to sympathize with it. And Llorente, who saw the records of the proceedings, tells us that when Uranso claimed the promised grace, he was benignly answered that he should receive the grace of not having his hands hacked off—as must the others—before being hanged, drawn, and quartered.
Amongst those taken were Juan de Abadia, Juan de Esperandeu, and Luis de Santangel.
Esperandeu and Uranso suffered together at the Auto of June 30, 1486—the seventh held in Zaragoza that year. Esperandeu was dragged through the city on a hurdle, his hands were hacked off on the steps of the Cathedral, whereafter he was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Five other conspirators suffered in the same Auto, being abandoned to the secular arm and burnt alive. Two others, who had escaped, were burnt in effigy, and one of these was that Juan Pedro Sanchez who had been the leading spirit in the affair. And together with these living men and the grotesque effigies of straw arrayed in sanbenito and coroza they burnt the corpse of Juan de Abadia. He had cheated in part the Justice of the Holy Office. He had committed suicide in prison by eating a glass lamp.[129]
Autos succeeded one another at such a rate now in Zaragoza that no less than fourteen were held in that year 1486; 42 persons were burnt alive, 14 in effigy, and 134 were penanced in varying degrees from perpetual imprisonment to public whippings. And to the end that the publicity of these Autos might be increased and the salutary lesson inculcated by them might be as far-reaching as possible, Torquemada ordered that a fortnight before the holding of each it should be announced by public proclamation, with great solemnity and parade of mounted familiars of the Holy Office—a matter which upon this precedent became customary throughout Spain.
In his allusion to these Autos Trasmiera[130] advances one of the usual sophistries employed by the Inquisition to justify its constant claim that its proceedings were dictated by mercy.
He assures us that it was a happiness (dicha) for the culprits to die so soon, and he explains that to have allowed them to live would have shown a greater rigour of justice—“as witnesseth Cain, upon whom God placed a sign ordering that none should kill him since by the prolongation of his life, his nature being what it was, he must commit more sins, and thus more surely deserve greater degrees of punishment in his eternal damnation.”
It is a priest who puts forward this blasphemous assertion that God desires the damnation of a sinner, and suggests that by burning that sinner betimes, God is to be cheated—at least in part—of His unspeakable purpose. It serves excellently to show to what desperate shifts of argument men could be urged in the attempt to justify the practices of the Holy Office.
With precisely the same degree of authority does he assure us that all the murderers died penitent—in consequence of the affectionate prayers offered up for them by Arbués in the hour of his death.
Vidal de Uranso’s confession had yielded up to the inquisitors the names not only of participators in the murder of Arbués, but of those who were believed by the Gascon to be in sympathy with the deed. By pursuing the methods peculiarly their own to cause a prosecution to spread like an oil-stain, slowly and surely covering an ever-widening area, the inquisitors were able to cause the indictment of many whose connection with the crime was of the remotest, and of others who, moved by a very Christian pity, had afforded shelter to New-Christians fleeing in terror before the blind vengeance of the Holy Office. Among the latter many were prosecuted where there was no proof that the fugitives they had sheltered were Judaizers or unfaithful. It is believed that sheer panic had driven many perfectly innocent New-Christians to depart from a city where no New-Christian might account himself secure. But in consequence of the clause introduced by the merciless Torquemada into his “Instructions,” a man’s flight was in itself a sufficient reason for the presumption of his guilt.