They are sentenced all to be abandoned to the secular arm of the Corregidor Don Alvaro de Sant’ Estiban, who, advised some days before, is in attendance with his lieutenants and alguaziles.
The usual exhortation being duly pronounced, they are seized by the men of the Corregidor and led away out of the city to the burning-place. The inquisitors order their notaries to accompany the doomed men, that they may record their final confessions at the stake.
In Yucé’s dossier are included not only his own confession—made at the last moment—but also Benito Garcia’s, Juan de Ocaña’s, and Juan Franco’s, all recorded by the notary Gonçales. Further, this dossier contains a letter written on the morrow of the event by the same notary of the Holy Office to the authorities of La Guardia, accompanying a relation of the crime and the sentences pronounced, for publication in La Guardia, where the offences were committed.
From this we learn that Benito, in spite of his protestations that he would die a Jew betide what might, accepted at the stake the spiritual comforts of the Church, and thus earned the mercy of being strangled before the faggots were fired.[217]
Similarly Juan de Ocaña and Juan Franco accepted the ministrations of the attendant friars and returned to the Church from which they had secretly seceded. But the Jews—the stalwart old man of over eighty and his son—held staunchly to their faith, and refused to avoid by apostasy any part of the agony prepared them. Wherefore, in a spite that seems almost satanic, their flesh was torn with red-hot pincers before they were consumed over slow fires.
“They refused,” writes the reverend notary, “to call upon God or the Virgin Mary or to make so much as a sign of the Cross. Do not pray for them,” he concludes, impatiently it seems to us, “for they are buried in Hell.”
Finally, the notary begs the authorities of La Guardia not to permit that the place where Juan Franco said that the Holy Child was buried should be ploughed over, but to see that it is left intact. Their Highnesses and the Cardinal of Spain, he adds, may desire to visit it, and he prays that God “may reveal to us the bones of the infant.” It is expedient to mark the spot, he concludes, because, in view of the merits of such a place, he hopes that it may please God that the earth of it will work miracles.
The sentence is sent, it should be added, with order that it shall be read from the pulpit of La Guardia on the following Sunday, and this under pain of excommunication.
In Avila the popular feeling against the Jews as a consequence of this affair was so bitter that their lives were not safe, and it is on record that one was stoned to death in the streets. It became necessary for the Aljama of that city to petition the Sovereigns for protection, and M. Fidel Fita quotes a royal letter commanding such protection to be extended, with threats of rigour against any who should molest them.[218]