This latter provision was derived from the imperial legislation against treason, which disabled children of traitors from holding office and succeeding to collateral estates.[492] Frederic II, in his Ravenna decree of 1232, made this applicable to the children and grandchildren of heretics, which was eagerly incorporated into the legislation of Alexander IV and Honorius IV, although Boniface VIII mitigated it slightly by exempting grandchildren in the female line.[493] As part of the canon law this of course governed the Spanish Inquisition and, if there were those who questioned the justice of punishing orthodox children for their parents’ heresy, they were triumphantly silenced by Alfonso de Castro, who pointed to Original Sin as an irrefragable proof that this was in accordance with the law of God.[494]
The application of these restrictions to reconciled penitents apparently originated with the Council of Béziers, in 1246, which ordered that penitents should not hold public office, or serve as physicians or notaries, or wear silk garments or gold and silver ornaments or other vanities—in short, that their apparel should befit those whose lives constructively were to be passed in repentance.[495] These provisions were not carried into the canon law but apparently became traditional in the Holy Office.
In the Instructions of 1484 there is nothing said as to the disabilities of descendants, but inquisitors were instructed to order penitents, after completing their penance, never to hold public office or benefices or to serve as procurators, tax-collectors, farmers of the revenue, grocers, apothecaries, physicians, surgeons, bleeders or brokers, thus prohibiting the professions which they had specially made their own. Moreover, they were not to wear gold or silver, coral, pearls or other precious stones or garments of silk or camlet or other finery or to ride on horse-back or bear arms, and all this during life, under penalty of relapse.[496]
There was evidently doubt as to the application of these restrictions to the descendants of those relaxed, but that there was an effort made in that direction is shown by their procuring, in 1486, from Innocent VIII, a brief enabling them to farm the revenues of churches.[497] In the assembly of inquisitors, in 1488, the matter excited considerable debate, resulting in instructions that each tribunal in its own district should enforce, under heavy penalties, the disability of children and grandchildren to hold any office or dignity that could be considered public, and the list of prohibited callings was enlarged by including those of merchants, notaries, scriveners, advocates, farmers of revenues and some others. The sumptuary restrictions were not extended to them, for they were not penitents, but they were forbidden to wear the insignia of any dignity, secular or ecclesiastic.[498] The omission was made good in a decree issued by Torquemada, April 22, 1494, but it was so slackly obeyed that when, in 1502, the sovereigns ordered its enforcement, they allowed a certain time for those affected to become acquainted with its provisions.[499] Ferdinand himself had had occasion to recognize the hardship of the rule for, in 1500, the mother of Pero Rúiz, a member of his royal guard, was condemned and consequently he was incapacitated from riding and bearing arms. Unwilling to lose him, Ferdinand wrote to Torquemada for letters of dispensation to be brought back by the messenger.[500]
We have seen how, in the struggle over the profits of dispensation, the sovereigns abandoned to the Inquisition the cosas arbitrarias, or sumptuary restrictions, and assumed to themselves, by the pragmáticas of 1501, control over the disability to hold office and to follow certain professions and trades, which limited so greatly the ability of the reconciled and of the children and grandchildren of the condemned to support themselves.[501] A humane exception was made however, in 1502, under which children reconciled below the age of 14 were exempted from the operation of the pragmáticas.[502] As these were municipal laws they were subject to the secular officials, who were ordered to enforce them under pain of confiscation and loss of office for negligence.
It was easier to publish edicts than to get them executed. The civil magistrates seem to have paid little attention to the pragmáticas, while the Inquisition did what it could within its allotted sphere. The Suprema issued orders to the tribunals to punish with all rigor those who disregarded the sumptuary restrictions, who were said to be numerous, in great contempt of the Holy Office. It was probably to stimulate zeal that, in 1509, it modified the penalty of relapse to a pecuniary penance, which it authorized the inquisitors to impose at discretion, bearing in mind the gravity of the case and the wealth of the offender.[503] The sums thus realized were considerable enough to tempt the cupidity of the courtiers for, May 9, 1514, we find the king making over to four of his ushers the penalties levied on the sons of Alonso Gallo of Toledo, and on April 1st he ordered Vázquez de Busto, alguazil of Toledo, to collect all the penances of this kind, to pay one-half to the receiver for the tribunal, and divide the other half between the fiscal, Martin Ximenes, and a servant of secretary Calcena.[504] The punishments decreed in the pragmáticas were also modified to fines, as we learn from a letter of June 20, 1515, dividing those incurred in Seville between Calcena and Aguirre, after setting aside one-third for the tribunal, and from another letter of January 8, 1516, bestowing on Fernando de Hoyos, portero of the Cuenca tribunal, the penalties incurred by the wives of Pedro de Vaguera and of Quiros and Jayme Boticario, for exercising the profession of apothecary.[505]
At length it was recognized that the Inquisition was the only instrumentality to be depended upon for the enforcement of the pragmáticas and Charles V, in a cédula of March 30, 1528, placed the whole business in its hands. He recited the laws of Ferdinand and Isabella, with their severe penalties for negligent officials, in spite of which he was informed that, in many places, they were disregarded, wherefore he granted to the Inquisition all necessary powers and ordered it to see to the execution of the law. Possibly there may have been some opposition by the secular authorities to this invasion of their jurisdiction, which called for a repetition of the cédula, March 2, 1543. In pursuance of this the Suprema, in cartas acordadas of 1548, 1549 and 1566, called the attention of the tribunals to the number of persons engaged in prohibited callings or wearing forbidden articles, and it urged them to be active in detecting and punishing the offenders.[506]
The construction of the laws was rigorous. There was a nice question whether, when a parent was condemned in absentia as contumacious, the children were subject to the disabilities, for the heresy was presumptive and not proven. Farinacci held that they were not, for the absentee, even though burnt in effigy, could always return and prove his innocence. Peña represents the stricter Spanish view, that the fugitive was condemned as a heretic and his children were incapacitated. The matter was threshed out in the case of the son of Antonio Pérez, who was deprived of a pension on the church of Cuenca. This was the final decision of the Rota after full argument; it served as a precedent, and the sentence of the absent contained the same enumeration of disabilities as that of one who was burnt in person.[507] Some doubts arose as to whether the pragmáticas prohibited trade in general; all such points were reserved to the king and when, in 1566, it was proposed to prosecute some merchants, the Suprema ordered the cases to be suspended until he should be consulted. It was less cautious when, in 1542, it forbade all reconciled penitents to keep schools, or even to teach children their letters. A question arose whether the prohibition to ride on horseback comprehended mules, but Simancas decides it in the affirmative, and even desires to include vehicles, as it is fitting that all such persons should walk on foot.[508] Even the limits of the canon law were disregarded in the panic occasioned by the discovery of Protestantism in 1559, for in the Seville auto of September 24th, when Juan Ponce de Leon was burnt, the disabilities of his descendants in the male line were extended to the fourth generation.[509]
An ecclesiastical career was closed to penitents and their descendants, who were forbidden to enter holy orders. There was some question raised whether those who were in orders could obtain or retain benefices, but it was decided in the negative. The practice, as stated about 1640, was that on their visitation the inquisitors dealt summarily with cases concerning the cosas arbitrarias while those which involved the holding of benefices or public office were sent to the tribunal for trial.[510] In the Edicts of Faith which they published, denunciations were invited, and all persons were required to give information as to any infractions of the laws of which they were cognizant.[511]
As everyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Inquisition was a marked man thereafter, and was liable to the suspicion that he had incurred disabilities—a suspicion apt to grow stronger with time and to affect his descendants—it became important for those who were not thus affected to have some evidence of the fact. In the earlier time the Inquisition was chary about affording this relief, but did not absolutely refuse it when the sufferer applied to the Suprema. It was not everyone however who could obtain the intervention of the Suprema; popular prejudice was strong, and no one knew what took place within the precincts of the tribunals. Blighted careers were thus numerous. Escobar, in his work on Limpieza, tells us that, at the origin of the Inquisition it punished the lightest offences with extreme severity and this, after the lapse of a century and a half, was still disastrously affecting the descendants; it was inhuman that a word inadvertently spoken through levity, or anger, or in jest should bring infamy on the delinquent and his posterity without limitation of time.[512] The memorial of 1623, by a member of the Suprema, discusses the same evil. The writer says that the Inquisition is surrounded by enemies who are daily multiplied through those afflicted by the tribunals. It is not merely those who are relaxed or reconciled or compelled to abjure de vehementi, but there are many well-affected Old Christians, punished with lighter penalties who, if they remain defamed and their posterity disabled from honors, must necessarily add to the number of enemies and it is pitiable thus to afflict them for trivial causes.[513]
The tribunals did not cease to afflict the people, but some relief was afforded by a practice, which gradually came into use, of including, in a sentence for light offences or of acquittal, a clause declaring that the party and his descendants were not subject to disabilities and that he could have a certificate to that effect. Two examples of this, occurring in Valladolid in 1638 will suffice. In the case of Agustin López, tried for blasphemy, the consulta de fe could not agree and the Suprema sentenced him to reprimand and exile, adding that the sentence should be no bar to offices of honor or in the Inquisition. So a sentence, acquitting Miguel Rúiz of a charge of sorcery, says that his imprisonment shall not be an obstacle to him and his children, and that he shall have a certificate to that effect. That Rúiz had not even been confined in the secret prison but in the public gaol shows how sensitive was the popular mind.[514] These certificates de no obstancia, as they were called, would appear, as a rule, not to be issued unless specially applied for, and yet how important they were to the individual and his posterity is manifested by a petition presented, January 17, 1818, by the Licenciate Mariano de Santander y Alvárez setting forth that, twenty years before, in 1798, his father had been arrested and prosecuted by the Valladolid tribunal because, in his trade as a bookseller, he had sold prohibited books. In the final sentence it was declared that his imprisonment and prosecution did not prejudice him or his descendants in the enjoyment of their civil rights, but the secrecy of the Inquisition, and the loss of the certificate given to the father, prevented the petitioner from furnishing the proofs necessary to his admission as an advocate in the royal chancellery, wherefore he begged for a proper testimonial. The Suprema had the statement verified and ordered a certificate to be duly issued.[515]
From this, as well as from the memorial of 1623, it appears that not merely reconciliation but even abjuration or lesser penalties inflicted disabilities, if not as to the cosas arbitrarias at least as to the attainment of an honorable career. In the closing years of the Inquisition this sometimes led to a merciful moderation of the sentence, as in that pronounced, August 27, 1817, on Francisco Mosquera Villamarino, of Santiago, “Bachiller clasico y Profesor del 6º Cuerpo de Canones en su Real Universidad,” for certain propositions. He escaped with a reprimand in the audience-chamber and without abjuration, it being expressly stated that he was treated with this benignity in order not to prejudice him in his career, though he was warned that the Inquisition would keep a watch on him.[516]
Popular prejudice, as we have seen, intensified the cruelty of the cruel laws. How inveterate was this is manifested in the case of Josef Calot who, in 1791, sought in marriage the daughter of Pablo Bordo, a merchant of Valencia. The parents refused assent and the lovers eloped. Bordo brought the matter before the royal Audiencia, showing that Calot was the great-grandson of Clara Muñoz who, at the age of 19, was reconciled for Judaism in the Barcelona auto de fe of April 2, 1724, and was sentenced to irremissible “carcel y abito,” though after two years her husband, Antonio Antonelli, obtained her release. In view of this descent the Audiencia decided that Bordo’s opposition to the marriage was reasonable and just, thus inflicting an indelible stigma on Calot and his posterity. In some way the affair reached the Suprema, which wrote to Valencia for details and, in transmitting them, the inquisitors added an expression of sympathy for Calot in the dishonor cast upon him; the punishment of his great-grandmother did not disable him from the professions, but it would be difficult to restore him to his good fame without calling in question the justice of the sentence of the Audiencia.[517] Even the Inquisition did not venture to repair an injustice caused by its assiduous training of the population in an unreasoning abhorrence of heresy.
The penalty for disregarding the disabilities settled down to the thrifty one of a fine. As regards those imposed by the pragmáticas, the Suprema, in 1531, replied to an inquiry from the tribunal of Avila and Segovia that, although the laws prescribed confiscation for infractions, yet the practice was to penance culprits in accordance with their wealth and station and the degree of the offence. So, in respect to the cosas arbitrarias, it decreed in 1536, that although the Instructions of 1484 provided the pain of relapse, they did not require the inquisitors to condemn the infraction as such, and the practice was to impose pecuniary and spiritual penances.[518] Cases of prosecution for infraction are not very numerous in the records, chiefly owing, we may presume, to the customary sale of rehabilitations; in the tribunal of Toledo they amount only to ninety-one and of these it is noteworthy that there are only three posterior to 1586—two in 1600 and one in 1616.[519] When they occurred, the penalty was at the discretion of the tribunal, and Toledo exercised this with great moderation, in 1579, when Bernardino de Aldana, a ribbon-weaver, spontaneously denounced himself. His mother, Isabel Alvárez, had been burnt by the Cuenca tribunal, yet he had worn a velvet cap, had carried a sword and had ridden on a mule with a saddle; he was married and had done this to satisfy his wife and her kindred, and besides his brother had told him that they had been rehabilitated. His artless story seems to have moved his judges, for he escaped with a reprimand and a fine of two ducats.[520] In 1703 the tribunal of Madrid was more severe with Simon de Andrade, a reconciled penitent, who had worn the prohibited articles. He was harshly reprimanded, was fined in fifty ducats, was banished for a year and was required to surrender the cosas arbitrarias, but we are told that he was permitted to keep the garments which he had on to cover his nakedness, especially as they were of ordinary cloth.[521]
In a land where theocratic influence was so strong, it was inevitable that there should be especial favor shown to erring ecclesiastics. The Church has ever sought to conceal from the public the knowledge of weaknesses that might diminish veneration for its ministers, and scandal has been more dreaded than sin. The Inquisition established its jurisdiction over both the secular and the regular clergy, but it exercised that jurisdiction in accordance with the general policy of the Church. Every care was taken to keep clerical offences from public knowledge, except in cases of formal heresy or of administering the sacraments by those who held only the lower orders. As a rule, in place of being confined in the secret prison during trial, they were housed in some convenient convent, where their presence need excite no surprise. When convicted, they were not exposed in the public autos de fe, but their sentences were read in the audience-chamber with closed doors, though in certain cases a prescribed number of other clerics were summoned to be present as witnesses; even then they did not wear the penitential habit as did laymen.[522]
For aggravated offences, the ordinary punishment was reclusion in a designated convent for a specified term, a penalty which might be infinitely varied. Perhaps six months or a year was to be passed in a cell; the culprit was to be last in choir and refectory; he might be suspended for a term or perpetually from some or all of his functions and of the right to vote or to be voted for; spiritual penances might be superadded or, at his entrance, he might be subjected to a zurra de rueda, or circular discipline, in which all the members of the house, including the lay-brethren, took a hand. All these greater or less aggravations could be varied or accumulated to meet the exact shades of guilt. This conventual reclusion was adopted, perhaps, partly for concealment and partly as a milder form of incarceration, but the mercy was doubtful if we may trust the story told by Llorente of a Capuchin guilty of aggravated abuse of the confessional who, when condemned to five years’ reclusion in a convent of his Order, begged to have it changed to incarceration in the secret prison; he had been, he said, provincial and guardian, he knew how the brethren treated those thrust upon them as criminals, and it would cost him his life. His prayer was refused and his prevision was correct, for he died within three years.[523] I have met, however, with cases in which the recluded fraile survived longer terms; as a rule, no doubt, life was not rendered pleasant, but it depended on circumstances. The Franciscan, Francisco Ortiz, sentenced to confinement for two years in a cell in the convent of Torrelaguna, without intercourse with his brethren, refused to leave his retirement on the expiration of the term and remained there till his death, twelve years later, the object of veneration to all around him.[524] There might or might not be sympathy for the penitent and his treatment naturally corresponded.
When, however, the offence was formal heresy, entailing reconciliation or relaxation, the cleric was obliged to appear in an auto de fe, like any other culprit. Cases of the kind were common enough in the early period, when many Conversos had entered the Church but, after the thorough weeding out by the Inquisition, they became rare. An essential preliminary was degradation from the priesthood, which was of two kinds, verbal and formal—the former sufficing for cases of reconciliation, while relaxation required the latter. Verbal degradation effaced the orders, but not the priestly character and, in the later period, publicity was often avoided by executing the sentence in the audience-chamber, as in the Toledo cases of Jacinto Vásquez Aranso, a priest convicted of Judaism and condemned to the galleys, December 4, 1688, and of Buenaventura Frutos, cura of Mocejon, sentenced February 19, 1722.[525] Originally the ministration of a single bishop sufficed for verbal degradation, while two were required for formal, until Gregory IX, to facilitate the operations of the Inquisition, decreed that, in cases of heresy, the bishop of the culprit could perform the ceremony, in the presence of some abbots and other learned men, and finally, in 1551, the Council of Trent permitted a single bishop to officiate in all cases of formal degradation, and his vicar-general in verbal degradation.[526]
The ceremony of public formal degradation was impressive. The culprit marched in the procession bearing the mitre and sanbenito of relaxation, which were removed on the staging in order that he might be seen in his priestly vestments and tonsure. In the case of Fray Joseph Díaz Pimiento, a relapsed Judaizer, burnt at the Seville auto de fe of July 25, 1720, we are told that an immense crowd was assembled, for no degradation had been witnessed there since 1623. The auto was celebrated in the church of San Pablo but, as soon as Fray Joseph’s sentence was read, he was taken by a number of officials to a scaffold in the Plaza de San Francisco, where the Bishop of Lycopolis, the assistant of the archbishop, performed the ceremony. His tongue, the palms of his hands and finger tips were scraped and rubbed with tow, the tonsure was erased by cutting his hair and he was deprived of his orders one by one in the reverse order of their bestowal. He was then handed over to his superiors of the Mercenarian Order, who stripped him of the habit, after which the mitre and sanbenito with painted flames were replaced on him and he was taken to the juzgado, or secular court, and delivered to the deputy Assistente of the city to be formally sentenced and conducted to the brasero.[527]
THE condemnation of a human being to a death by fire, as the penalty of spiritual error, is so abhorrent to the moral sense and so oppugnant to the teachings of Christ, that modern apologists have naturally sought to relieve the Church from responsibility for such atrocity. On the surface a tolerably plausible argument can be made. The ministers of religion, the spiritual courts, the Inquisition itself rendered no judgements of blood. Any ecclesiastic who might be concerned in them incurred “irregularity” requiring a dispensation before he could validly perform his functions or obtain preferment. The execution of heretics was a matter purely of secular law and burning them alive is not prescribed in canon or decretal. The earliest recorded example of concremation is that administered by Robert the Pious of France to the Cathari of Orleans in 1017, and its embodiment in positive law has not been found earlier than in the decrees against Waldenses by Pedro II of Aragon in the Council of Gerona in 1197. In 1231 Frederic II included it in the Sicilian Constitutions and, in 1238, by his Cremona decree, extended it throughout the empire, while Alfonso the Wise of Castile, in 1255, adopted it for Christians who turned Jews or Moors.[528] It thus became part of the public law of Christendom, not so much from the initiative of rulers, as from a recognition of what had become a custom through the spontaneous ferocity of popular fanaticism.
The Inquisition, through whose agency heretics were consigned to the stake, did not itself condemn them to it, but merely pronounced them to be heretics of whose conversion no hope was entertained; it cut them off from the Church, which had nothing further to do with them, and abandoned or “relaxed” them to the secular arm for due punishment. It assumed that it condemned the crime and the civil judge the criminal and, in relaxing him, it adjured the judge to spare his life and not to spill his blood. This latter was a device invented by Innocent III, before the Inquisition existed, to preserve from irregularity the spiritual courts in degrading clerics guilty of forgery and handing them over to the secular authorities for execution.[529]
This shifting of responsibility to the civil power was not through any sense that the laws punishing heresy with burning were cruel or unjust, for the Church taught this to be an act so eminently pious that it accorded an indulgence to any one who would contribute wood to the pile, thus assuming the responsibility and expending the Treasure of the Merits of Christ in stimulating popular ferocity. That this indulgence was well known in Spain appears in the evidence in the trial of Jan of Antwerp for Lutheranism at Toledo in 1561.[530] In fact, when Luther argued that the burning of heretics was contrary to the will of the Spirit, Leo X included this among his heresies condemned in the bull Exsurge Domine.[531] Consequently the secular power had no choice as to what it should do with heretics delivered to it; its act was purely ministerial, and if it listened to the hypocritical plea for mercy, it was liable to prosecution as a fautor of heresy and to deprivation of its functions.[532] The Church enforced this by embodying in the canon law a provision that princes and their officials must punish duly and promptly all heretics delivered to them by inquisitors, under pain of excommunication, which became heresy if endured for a year; and inquisitors were required to proceed against them, but were cautioned to speak only of executing the laws, without alluding to the death-penalty, in order to escape irregularity.[533]
As elsewhere, so in Spain. The Inquisition abandoned the unrepentant or relapsed heretic to the secular arm, which was bound to sentence and execute him. In the hurried informality of the early period, it seems to have been indifferent whether the magistrate pronounced a sentence or not. A contemporary account of the Toledo auto of August 14, 1486, describes the reading of the sentences of the inquisitors and the condemned being carried at once to the Vega for execution, where they were burnt till not a bone remained, without any allusion to the formality of intervention by the secular power.[534] When, however, the form of a condemnation by the alcalde was observed, as at Córdova in 1484, he uttered it by virtue of the sentence of the inquisitors, which rendered unnecessary anything more than condemning the culprit to be burnt alive, wherefore he ordered the alguazil mayor to carry it into effect.[535] In the inquisitorial sentences of the period the adjuration for mercy is generally lacking. In that of Mencia Alonso, condemned at Guadalupe, November 21, 1485, not only is it absent but the duties of the secular officials are treated as purely ministerial, for it ends “As a limb of the devil and accursed and excommunicate, she shall be taken to the place of burning so that by the secular justice of this town, or by other laymen, justice shall be executed upon her according to the custom of these kingdoms.”[536]
That the function of the magistrate was not judicial is manifested in the refusal to communicate the trial to him. When those of Brescia, in 1486, refused to execute the sentences of the inquisitor without seeing the trials, Innocent VIII ordered the inquisitor to excommunicate them if they delayed more than six days, no matter what the local laws might be, for heresy was a purely ecclesiastical crime.[537] In accordance with this is the assertion of the Repertorium de Pravitate Hæreticorum, printed at Valencia in 1494, that the magistrate has no right to have the process shown to him that he may judge as to the justice of the sentence; inquisitors are not to concede any such right, for his sole duty is to execute it without delay, and if he hesitates he is subject to deprivation of office and condemnation as a heretic.[538] This principle was fully admitted by secular jurists themselves. Torreblanca, who was attached to the royal Chancellery of Granada, states that the duty of the civil magistrate is purely executive and he has no right to examine into the merits of a case or to act in a judicial capacity.[539]
In fact, the secular power could be dispensed with altogether. The Venetian Signory was not always as prompt as it should be in suppressing heresy so, to avoid delays and embarrassing questions, the papal nuncio there, with his fiscal, auditor and other officials, had faculties to condemn to mutilation and death all heretics without incurring irregularity or other ecclesiastical penalties, notwithstanding all canons and decretals to the contrary. Such provisions were issued in 1547 by Paul III and in 1550 by Julius III and were doubtless customary.[540] Peña reduces this to a general principle for, without referring to special papal faculties, he asserts that the intervention of the secular judge is unessential and that, if he is not accessible, the tribunal can condemn the heretic to death; if accessible he must execute the sentence if he wishes to escape the heavy penalties of fautorship and impeding the Inquisition.[541]
There was little danger of such reluctance on the part of secular officials in Spain, where the oath exacted of them by the Inquisition obliged them to execute whatever sentences the tribunal might require.[542] In fact, the only indication I have met with, of possible hesitation involving punishment, occurs in a mandate, September 5, 1725, to the Toledo tribunal, directing that, in autos de fe, the first sentences read should be those of relaxation—thus reversing the usual order—so that the convicts might be delivered at once to the royal judge, without permitting delay in the execution of the sentences, under any pretext, since the tribunal had complete jurisdiction to compel him, by censures and other penalties, to its exact performance.[543]
The Inquisition regarded the sentence of the magistrate as a mere perfunctory formality. The doctors had pointed out conclusively that heresy was a crime over which he had no jurisdiction, and if he were to assert it he would render illusory the sentence of the bishop or inquisitor.[544] Consequently, in preparation for an auto de fe, the tribunal, in advance, gave to the secular authorities a list of the condemnations so that the sentences might be drawn up and the wood, the stake and the garrotes be prepared for immediate execution.[545] It is true that thrift induced a certain amount of equivocation when, in 1579, the royal alguaziles of Saragossa claimed payment from the confiscations for their services and for the cost of the wood, and Philip II emphatically rejected the demand as unexampled, adding that the inquisitors could not order such payment without irregularity, and that the executions were in virtue of the sentences of the secular judges and not of the inquisitors.[546] This, however, was the merest quibble. In autos generales, the magistrates were asked to be present to receive the convicts and “execute on them the penalties imposed by the canon law of the kingdom.” In autos particulares, held in churches which must not be polluted by judgements of blood, the Suprema pointed out, in a consulta of April 7, 1690, that the secular judges could wait at a designated place, when it sufficed that a notary informed them in writing that “N. has been declared a heretic by sentence of the Holy Office,” simultaneously delivering the convict, when they must accept this assertion, and without delay execute the sentence, unless they wish the Holy Office to prosecute them as fautors of heretics and impeders of its free jurisdiction. At the same time the judges are to continue as usual to pronounce the formal sentence.[547]
Still, the estilo of the Inquisition required the ghastly comedy of asking mercy. In the official formula of the sentence the clause announcing relaxation to the civil magistrate proceeds “whom we ask and charge most affectionately to treat him benignantly and mercifully.” In sentences of the absent and dead, where the effigy alone was abandoned to the secular arm, there is no prayer for mercy, as there was no effusion of blood to create irregularity.[548] In the rigid formalism of inquisitorial procedure, after the Suprema had established its minute control, it is safe to assume that this official formula was universally followed.
All this affords ample proof that the avoidance of irregularity was the only motive that actuated the Inquisition in this matter, but if further evidence is required it is furnished by the fact that still greater scruple existed in the exercise of the temporal jurisdiction acquired by the Spanish Holy Office over all matters concerning its officials, because such cases were not provided for in the commissions of the inquisitors-general, from which were delegated the powers of the tribunals. In 1514 the question arose when Micer Castillo, assessor in the Saragossa tribunal, was murdered, and two of his assassins, Joan Uguet and Pere Gasco, were tried and convicted. The inquisitors dared not deliver them to the secular arm for execution, and various devices were discussed, but the matter was settled by procuring from Leo X his motu proprio Cum sicut accepimus, January 28, 1515, in which he granted faculties to the inquisitors to arrest, try and deliver for punishment to the secular authorities, any one who had struck, mutilated or slain an official of the Inquisition, even if it entailed effusion of blood or mutilation or death, without incurring any note of irregularity.[549] Under this the tribunals acted when such cases arose, notably in Granada, about 1545, when seven persons were thus relaxed—six Moriscos and an Old Christian—who, while in prison, killed the alcaide and his assistant and who were hanged before burning.[550]
In time the cardinals of the Roman Inquisition were beset with similar scruples and, to relieve their consciences, Pius V, October 9, 1567, granted a decree empowering them to participate in sentences of blood without incurring irregularity.[551] This applied only to Italy, but it was otherwise with the terrible bull Si de protegendis, April 1, 1569, commanding the delivery to the secular arm, for the punishment due to high treason, of any one maltreating or even threatening an official of the Inquisition or destroying or altering its records. This was ordered to be published throughout the world; the Spanish Inquisition claimed the benefit of it, and had a Castilian version of it published every year. It made no illusion to irregularity, tacitly assuming that none was incurred and it was often cited in Spain to that effect.[552] Still, when in 1579, the Toledo tribunal desired the death-penalty for Francisco de la Bastida, for personating an official of the Inquisition, and there was no secular law to that effect, a special brief was obtained from Gregory XIII empowering it to find him guilty of death and deliver him to the secular arm for execution without incurring irregularity.[553]
There seems to have arisen a fresh sense of insecurity about 1605. The brief of Leo X was well-nigh forgotten; some tribunals had copies of it, but most of them had not, and the bull Si de protegendis did not specifically meet cases that arose. Application was therefore made to Paul V to extend to Spain the 1567 decree of Pius V, which he granted by a brief of November 29, 1605, repeated in 1607. In this he bestowed the fullest powers, not only on inquisitors but on all their officials, in all cases whether of faith or not, coming within their competence, to participate in sentences of torture, mutilation, or death without incurring irregularity.[554] This would appear ample enough to remove all possible scruples and yet subsequently contingencies occasionally arose which excited debate, or called for papal intervention to quiet sensitive consciences.[555]
In the work of exterminating heresy, the rules which governed the Spanish Inquisition were more merciless than those framed by its predecessor. At first, in the medieval tribunals, it was only the pertinacious and impenitent heretic who was consigned to the stake; he who recanted and professed conversion, even at the last moment, was admitted to reconciliation. Then gradually, as it was found that these enforced conversions were frequently insincere, relapse was regarded as proof of impenitence and pertinacity and was subjected irremissibly to the death-penalty, and this included those who had abjured for vehement suspicion. The treatment is exemplified in the case of Fray Bonato, the head of a little body of Spiritual Franciscans in Catalonia. He was pertinacious until the flames had roasted him one side, when his resolution gave way; he professed conversion and was rescued, but some years later he was found to be still cherishing his heresies and, in 1335, he was burnt alive.[556]