Fig. 52.—Portrait of Galileo.
His daughter at Arcetri was in despair; and anxiety and fastings and penances self-inflicted on his account, dangerously reduced her health.
At Rome he was not imprisoned, but he was told to keep indoors, and show himself as little as possible. He was allowed, however, to stay at the house of the Tuscan Ambassador instead of in gaol.
By April he was removed to the chambers of the Inquisition, and examined several times. Here, however, the anxiety was too much, and his health began to give way seriously; so, before long, he was allowed to return to the Ambassador's house; and, after application had been made, was allowed to drive in the public garden in a half-closed carriage. Thus in every way the Inquisition dealt with him as leniently as they could. He was now their prisoner, and they might have cast him into their dungeons, as many another had been cast. By whatever they were influenced—perhaps the Pope's old friendship, perhaps his advanced age and infirmities—he was not so cruelly used.
Still, they had their rules; he must be made to recant and abjure his heresy; and, if necessary, torture must be applied. This he knew well enough, and his daughter knew it, and her distress may be imagined. Moreover, it is not as if they had really been heretics, as if they hated or despised the Church of Rome. On the contrary, they loved and honoured the Church. They were sincere and devout worshippers, and only on a few scientific matters did Galileo presume to differ from his ecclesiastical superiors: his disagreement with them occasioned him real sorrow; and his dearest hope was that they could be brought to his way of thinking and embrace the truth.
Every time he was sent for by the Inquisition he was in danger of torture unless he recanted. All his friends urged him repeatedly to submit. They said resistance was hopeless and fatal. Within the memory of men still young, Giordano Bruno had been burnt alive for a similar heresy. This had happened while Galileo was at Padua. Venice was full of it. And since that, only eight years ago indeed, Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Salpetria, had been sentenced to the same fate: "to be handed over to the secular arm to be dealt with as mercifully as possible without the shedding of blood." So ran the hideous formula condemning a man to the stake. After his sentence, this unfortunate man died in the dungeons in which he had been incarcerated six years—died what is called a "natural" death; but the sentence was carried out, notwithstanding, on his lifeless body and his writings. His writings for which he had been willing to die!
These were the tender mercies of the Inquisition; and this was the kind of meaning lurking behind many of their well-sounding and merciful phrases. For instance, what they call "rigorous examination," we call "torture." Let us, however, remember in our horror at this mode of compelling a prisoner to say anything they wished, that they were a legally constituted tribunal; that they acted with well established rules, and not in passion; and that torture was a recognized mode of extracting evidence, not only in ecclesiastical but in civil courts, at that date.
All this, however, was but poor solace to the pitiable old philosopher, thus ruthlessly haled up and down, questioned and threatened, threatened and questioned, receiving agonizing letters from his daughter week by week, and trying to keep up a little spirit to reply as happily and hopefully as he could.
This condition of things could not go on. From February to June the suspense lasted. On the 20th of June he was summoned again, and told he would be wanted all next day for a rigorous examination. Early in the morning of the 21st he repaired thither, and the doors were shut. Out of those chambers of horror he did not reappear till the 24th. What went on all those three days no one knows. He himself was bound to secrecy. No outsider was present. The records of the Inquisition are jealously guarded. That he was technically tortured is certain; that he actually underwent the torment of the rack is doubtful. Much learning has been expended upon the question, especially in Germany. Several eminent scholars have held the fact of actual torture to be indisputable (geometrically certain, one says), and they confirm it by the hernia from which he afterwards suffered, this being a well-known and frequent consequence.