The response to his appeal was the bull of February 1495, commanding the inquisitors under pain of excommunication to desist from their course, and never to resort to it again save under royal sanction. The power to proceed against inquisitors in case of fraud or irregularity in this matter was vested in the famous Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros.[262]
This man, who has been called the Richelieu of Spain, had risen from very humble beginnings, as a barefoot friar-mendicant, to the very splendid eminence of Primate of Spain—in which office he had just succeeded Cardinal Mendoza, who died in that year (1495).
In the following year Torquemada made his exit from the Court, where for a decade he had been a figure of an importance second only to that of the Sovereigns themselves.
Crippled by gout, he withdrew to his monastery at Avila.[263] There he now dwelt in retirement, an emaciated old man in his seventy-sixth year, debilitated and racked with bodily infirmities, but with all his vigour and energy of mind unimpaired, his severity as uncompromising as of old, his conscience entirely at peace in the conviction that he had given of his best—indeed, his all—to the service of his God.
But even now his retirement can have been little more than physical. His attention continued focussed upon the Inquisition and engrossed by it. To the last do we find him actively directing the procedure of that tribunal of the Faith.
In the spring of 1498 he summoned the principal inquisitors of the kingdom to the monastery of St. Thomas of Avila, to the end that with himself they might concert the promulgation of further decrees to check abuses which had crept into the administration of the justice of the Holy Office, proving inadequate his enactments of 1484, 1485, and 1488.
These, the fourth “Instructions” of Torquemada, were published on May 25, 1498. They contain a good deal that seems calculated to soften the rigour of the earlier decrees, yet much of this is more or less illusory.
Let us very briefly consider the sixteen articles of which they consist.
The first three provide: (I) that of the two inquisitors appointed to each court one shall be a jurist and the other a theologian, and that they shall not proceed other than jointly to decree prison, torture, or publication of witnesses; (II) that the inquisitors shall not permit their officers to bear weapons in those places where the bearing of weapons is forbidden; (III) that no one shall be arrested save upon sufficient proof of his guilt, and that all cases be disposed of with dispatch and not delayed in the hope of discovering increased justification to sentence.