They were paraded in public in the Auto of May 6, 1487, as suspects—leviter—of Judaizing; they were penanced to stand in full view of the people, candle in hand and wearing the sanbenito, during Mass, and they were thereafter disqualified from holding any office or benefice or pursuing any honourable profession during the good pleasure of the inquisitors.
As it was, they escaped lightly. That they were suspected leviter of Judaizing, shows us how easily that suspicion might be incurred. It was purely constructive in this instance—an inference to be drawn from the fact that they had befriended a Judaizer who was under sentence.
The other case is far more horrible. It shows in operation Torquemada’s decree regarding the children of heretics, and reveals in the fullest measure its appalling inhumanity.
Another who had fled to Toulouse, fearing implication in the affair of the murder of Arbués, was one Gaspar de Santa Cruz. It happened that he died there, after having been sentenced as contumacious and burnt in effigy at Zaragoza. It came to the ears of the inquisitors that he had been assisted in his flight by his son; and not content with the heavy punishment of infamy that must fall automatically upon that son for sins that were not his own, not content with having reduced him to destitution by confiscating his inheritance and by disqualifying him from office, benefice, or honourable employment, they now seized his person and indicted him for hindering.
Arrayed in a yellow sanbenito, this son, who had discharged by his father the sacrosanct duty which nature and humanity impose, was exhibited to scorn in an Auto, and further penanced by being compelled to come before the court of the Holy Office and testify to his father’s contumacious flight. Nor did that ghoulish tribunal count itself satisfied even then. It was further imposed upon him that he must repair to Toulouse, exhume his father’s remains, and publicly burn them, returning to Zaragoza with a properly attested report of the performance, when he should receive absolution of the censures incurred.
Santa Cruz carried out that barbarous command, as the only means of saving his liberty and perhaps his life. For it is certain that had he refused, it would have been argued that he had rejected the offered means of reconciliation with the Church he had so grievously offended, and he would have been prosecuted as impenitent; whilst had he availed himself of the only alternative and fled, he must have been sentenced as contumacious and would have gone to the stake if he were ever taken.
From the hour of his death Pedro Arbués de Epila was looked upon as a saint and martyr, the notion being carefully fostered by the members of his order in the minds of the faithful.
And, as is usual in such cases, miraculous manifestations of his sanctity are alleged to have begun in the very hour of his death. Trasmiera tells us that the bells rang of themselves when he died, and he opines that this serves to approve their use in a time when Luther and others were condemning them as vain.