At Whitsuntide of that year a sermon of the Faith was preached by the inquisitor Costana, whereafter an edict was publicly read and nailed to the Cathedral door, summoning all who had fled to surrender themselves to the Holy Office within ninety days, under pain of being sentenced as contumaciously absent. Among those cited there were, we learn, several clerics, including three Jeronymite friars.
Finally, on the second Sunday in June—the 11th of that month—we have the last Auto within the period of grace. In this the penitents of four parishes, numbering some 750 persons, were conducted to reconciliation under precisely the same conditions as had already been observed in the two previous Autos.
CHAPTER XVII
AUTOS DE FÉ
The Inquisition of Toledo had now to deal with heretics who must be considered impenitent, since they had not availed themselves of the benign leniency of the Church and spontaneously sought the reconciliation offered. From this moment the proceedings assume a far more sinister character.
The first Auto under these altered conditions was held on August 16, 1486. Among the accused brought up for sentence were twenty men and five women, whose offences doomed them to be abandoned to the secular arm, and one of these was no less a personage than the Regidor—or Governor—of Toledo, a Knight-Commander of the Order of Santiago.
They were brought forth from the prison of the Inquisition at a little before six o’clock on that summer morning, arrayed in the yellow sanbenito and coroza. Each sanbenito bore an inscription announcing the name of the wearer and the nature of his offences against the Faith, and they were smeared in addition with grotesque red images of dragons and devils. A rope was round the neck of each prisoner, and his hands were pinioned with the other end of it. In his hands, thus bound, he carried the unlighted candle of green wax.
Thus they were led in procession through the streets, the procession being headed as usual by a posse of familiars of the Confraternity of St. Peter the Martyr—the Soldiers of the Faith—and preceded now by the green cross of the Inquisition, which was shrouded in a mourning veil of black crape.
The green cross did not merely symbolize, by its colour, constancy and eternity, but it was fashioned as if of freshly-cut boughs, to represent living wood, the emblem of the true faith in contradistinction to the withered branches that are to be flung into the fire.[140]
Following the Soldiers of the Faith, under a canopy of scarlet and gold, borne by four acolytes and preceded by a bell-ringer, came the priest who was to celebrate the Mass, in the crimson chasuble prescribed by the liturgy for these dread solemnities. He bore the Host, and as he advanced the multitude sank down upon their knees, beating their breasts to the clang of the bell.
Behind the canopy walked another posse of familiars, and after these again followed the doomed prisoners, each attended by two Dominican brothers in their white cassocks and black cloaks, fervently exhorting those who had not yet confessed to do so even at this late hour.