It is beyond words a monstrous and inequitable enactment. Yet, like all else, they can justify it. If there is one thing in which the inquisitors were truly admirable, it is in the deftness with which they could justify and reconcile with their conscience the most inhuman practice. They would answer questions as to the lawfulness of this proceeding by urging that they did it with the greatest reluctance, but that their duty demanded it to the end that the living should beware how they failed in fidelity to the Faith, lest punishment should overtake them in their descendants after they themselves had passed beyond the reach of human justice. Thus would they represent the act as salutary and to the advantage of the Faith. And since there is at least a scintilla of truth in this, who shall say that they did not tranquillize their consciences and delude themselves that the confiscations were a mere incident which nowise swayed their judgment?
That proceedings against persons deceased were by no means rare is shown by the frequent records of corpses burnt—one of the purposes for which they were exhumed; the other being that they must cease to defile consecrated ground.
Article XXI
The Sovereigns desiring that inquisition be made alike in the domains of the nobles as in the lands under the Crown, inquisitors shall proceed to effect these, and shall require the lords of such domains to make oath to comply with all that the law ordains, and to lend all assistance to the inquisitors. Should they decline to do so, they shall be proceeded against as by law established.
Article XXII
Should heretics who are delivered to the secular arm leave children who are minors and unmarried, the inquisitors shall provide and ordain that they be cared for and reared by some persons who will instruct them in our Holy Faith. The inquisitors shall prepare a memorial of such orphans and the circumstances of each, to the end that of the royal bounty alms may be provided to the extent necessary, this being the wish of the Sovereigns when the children are good Christians, especially in the case of girls, who should receive a dower sufficient to enable them to marry or enter a convent.
Llorente tells us that although he went through very many records of old proceedings of the Inquisition, in no single instance did he discover a record of any such provision in favour of the child of a condemned heretic.[91]
Harsh as were the decrees of the Inquisition in all things, in nothing were they so harsh as in the enactments concerning the children of heretics. However innocent themselves of the heresy for which their parents or grandparents might have suffered, not only must they go destitute, but further they must be prevented from ever extricating themselves appreciably from that condition, being inhibited—to the second generation—from holding any office under the Crown, or any ecclesiastical benefice, and from following any honourable or lucrative profession. And, as if that were not in itself sufficient, they were further condemned to wear the outward signs of infamy, to go dressed in serge, without weapons or ornaments, and never ride on horseback, under pain of worse befalling them. One of the inevitable results of this barbarous decree was the extinction of many good Spanish families of Jewish blood in the last decade of the fifteenth century.
This the inquisitors understood to be the literal application to practical life of the gentle and merciful precepts of the sweet Christ in Whose name they acted.
Eymeric and his commentator Pegna make clear, between them, the inquisitorial point of view. The author of the “Directorium” tells us that commiseration for the children of heretics who are reduced to mendicity must not be allowed to soften this severity, since by all laws, human and divine, it is prescribed that the children must suffer for the sins of the fathers.[92]