[200] Voltaire[dd] remarks (Essai sur les Mœurs, Chap. cxl) that “An Asiatic, arriving at Madrid on the day of an auto da fé, would doubt whether it were a festival, religious celebration, sacrifice, or massacre; it is all of them. They reproach Montezuma with sacrificing human captives to the gods. What would he have said had he witnessed an auto da fé?”
[201] The government, at least, cannot be charged with remissness in promoting this. We find two ordinances in the royal collection of pragmáticas,[ff] dated in September, 1501 (there must be some error in the date of one of them), inhibiting, under pain of confiscation of property, such as had been “reconciled,” and their children by the mother’s side, and grandchildren by the father’s, from holding any office in the privy council, courts of justice, or in the municipalities, or any other place of trust or honour. They were also excluded from the vocation of notaries, surgeons, and apothecaries. This was visiting the sins of the fathers, to an extent unparalleled in modern legislation. The sovereigns might find a precedent in a law of Sulla.
[202] The Aragonese made a manly though ineffectual resistance, from the first, to the introduction of the Inquisition among them by Ferdinand. In Castile, its enormous abuses provoked the spirited interposition of the legislature at the commencement of the following reign. But it was then too late.
[203] By an article of the primitive instructions, the inquisitors were required to set apart a small portion of the confiscated estates for the education and Christian nurture of minors, children of the condemned. Llorente[k] says that, in the immense numbers of processes which he had occasion to consult, he met with no instance of their attention to the fate of these unfortunate orphans!
[204] Torquemada waged war upon freedom of thought in every form. In 1490 he caused several Hebrew Bibles to be publicly burned and some time after, more than six thousand volumes of oriental learning, on the imputation of Judaism, sorcery, or heresy, at the autos da fé of Salamanca, the very nursery of science. This may remind one of the similar sentence passed by Lope de Barrientos, another Dominican, about fifty years before, upon the books of the marquis of Villena. Fortunately for the dawning literature of Spain, Isabella did not, as was done by her successors, commit the censorship of the press to the judges of the Holy Office, notwithstanding such occasional assumption of power by the grand inquisitor.
[205] The prodigious desolation of the land may be inferred from the estimates, although somewhat discordant, of deserted houses in Andalusia. Garibay[gg] puts these at three thousand, Pulgar[hh] at four, L. Marineo[bb] as high as five thousand.
[206] [This may be roughly translated “The man that rules the region, rules also its religion.”]
[207] [The reader will find full treatment of Protestant excesses in the histories of Germany, Switzerland, and England. The persecution of Catholics in England is discussed, in vol. XIX, pp. 148-155, 159-161, 199-200, 354-355, 406-408, 444-453, including an account of tortures used in England during Elizabeth’s reign, and a comparison of her cruelties with those of “Bloody Mary.” As part of religious history, one should also note the persecutions inflicted on dissenters by the Church of England, in Scotland and Ireland, as discussed in the histories of those countries.]
[208] [The reader will find in vol. XXIII page 177, a statement that a man was “swam for a wizard” in England in 1825. He should consult this same volume, pages 171-177, for an account of the witchcraft persecutions in the United States, at Salem, in 1692, and pages 177-178 for an account of the mutilation and execution of Quakers in Massachusetts.]
