CHAPTER III

.

PROTESTANTISM IN SPAIN.

Philip's Arrival in Spain.--The Reformed Doctrines.--Their Suppression.--Autos da Fé.--Prosecution of Carranza.--Extinction of Heresy.--Fanaticism of the Spaniards.

1559.

The voyage of King Philip was a short and prosperous one. On the twenty-ninth of August, 1559, he arrived off the port of Laredo. But while he was in sight of land, the weather, which had been so propitious, suddenly changed. A furious tempest arose, which scattered his little navy. Nine of the vessels foundered, and though the monarch had the good fortune, under the care of an experienced pilot, to make his escape in a boat, and reach the shore in safety, he had the mortification to see the ship which had borne him go down with the rest, and with her the inestimable cargo he had brought from the Low Countries. It consisted of curious furniture, tapestries, gems, pieces of sculpture, and paintings,--the rich productions of Flemish and Italian art, which his father, the emperor, had been employed many years of his life in collecting. Truly was it said of Charles, that "he had sacked the land only to feed the ocean."[432] To add to the calamity, more than a thousand persons perished in this shipwreck.[433]

The king, without delay, took the road to Valladolid; but on arriving at that capital, whether depressed by his late disaster, or from his habitual dislike of such empty parade, he declined the honors, with which the loyal inhabitants would have greeted the return of their sovereign to his dominions. Here he was cordially welcomed by his sister, the Regent Joanna, who, long since weary of the cares of sovereignty, resigned the sceptre into his hands, with a better will than that with which most persons would have received it. Here, too, he had the satisfaction of embracing his son Carlos, the heir to his empire. The length of Philip's absence may have allowed him to see some favorable change in the person of the young prince, though, if report be true, there was little change for the better in his disposition, which, headstrong and imperious, had already begun to make men tremble for the future destinies of their country.

Philip had not been many days in Valladolid when his presence was celebrated by one of those exhibitions, which, unhappily for Spain, maybe called national. This was an _auto da fé_, not, however, as formerly, of Jews and Moors, but of Spanish Protestants. The Reformation had been silently, but not slowly, advancing in the Peninsula; and intelligence of this, as we have already seen, was one cause of Philip's abrupt departure from the Netherlands. The brief but disastrous attempt at a religious revolution in Spain is an event of too much importance to be passed over in silence by the historian.

[Sidenote: THE REFORMED DOCTRINES.]

Notwithstanding the remote position of Spain, under the imperial sceptre of Charles she was brought too closely into contact with the other states of Europe not to feel the shock of the great religious reform which was shaking those states to their foundations. Her most intimate relations, indeed, were with those very countries in which the seeds of the Reformation were first planted. It was no uncommon thing for Spaniards, in the sixteenth century, to be indebted for some portion of their instruction to German universities. Men of learning, who accompanied the emperor, became familiar with the religious doctrines so widely circulated in Germany and Flanders. The troops gathered the same doctrines from the Lutheran soldiers, who occasionally served with them under the imperial banners. These opinions, crude for the most part as they were, they brought back to their own country; and a curiosity was roused which prepared the mind for the reception of the great truths which were quickening the other nations of Europe. Men of higher education, on their return to Spain, found the means of disseminating these truths. Secret societies were established; meetings were held; and, with the same secrecy as in the days of the early Christians, the Gospel was preached and explained to the growing congregation of the faithful. The greatest difficulty was the want of books. The enterprise of a few self-devoted proselytes at length overcame this difficulty.

A Castilian version of the Bible had been printed in Germany. Various Protestant publications, whether originating in the Castilian or translated into that language, appeared in the same country. A copy, now and then, in the possession of some private individual, had found its way, without detection, across the Pyrenees. These instances were rare, when a Spaniard named Juan Hernandez, resident in Geneva, where he followed the business of a corrector of the press, undertook, from no other motive but zeal for the truth, to introduce a larger supply of the forbidden fruit into his native land.

With great adroitness, he evaded the vigilance of the custom-house officers, and the more vigilant spies of the Inquisition, and in the end succeeded in landing two large casks filled with prohibited works, which were quickly distributed among the members of the infant church. Other intrepid converts followed the example of Hernandez, and with similar success; so that, with the aid of books and spiritual teachers, the number of the faithful multiplied daily throughout the country.[434] Among this number was a much larger proportion, it was observed, of persons of rank and education than is usually found in like cases; owing doubtless to the circumstance that it was this class of persons who had most frequented the countries where the Lutheran doctrines were taught. Thus the Reformed Church grew and prospered, not indeed as it had prospered in the freer atmospheres of Germany and Britain, but as well as it could possibly do under the blighting influence of the Inquisition; like some tender plant, which, nurtured in the shade, waits only for a more genial season for its full expansion. That season was not in reserve for it in Spain.

It may seem strange that the spread of the Reformed religion should so long have escaped the detection of the agents of the Holy Office. Yet it is certain that the first notice which the Spanish inquisitors received of the fact was from their brethren abroad. Some ecclesiastics in the train of Philip, suspecting the heresy of several of their own countrymen in the Netherlands, had them seized and sent to Spain, to be examined by the Inquisition. On a closer investigation, it was found that a correspondence had long been maintained between these persons and their countrymen, of a similar persuasion with themselves, at home. Thus the existence, though not the extent, of the Spanish Reformation was made known.[435]

No sooner was the alarm sounded, than Paul the Fourth, quick to follow up the scent of heresy in any quarter of his pontifical dominions, issued a brief, in February, 1558, addressed to the Spanish inquisitor-general. In this brief, his holiness enjoins it on the head of the tribunal to spare no efforts to detect and exterminate the growing evil; and he empowers that functionary to arraign and bring to condign punishment all suspected of heresy, of whatever rank or profession,--whether bishops or archbishops, nobles, kings, or emperors. Paul the Fourth was fond of contemplating himself as seated in the chair of the Innocents and the Gregories, and like them setting his pontifical foot on the necks of princes. His natural arrogance was probably not diminished by the concessions which Philip the Second had thought proper to make to him at the close of the Roman war.

Philip, far from taking umbrage at the swelling tone of this apostolical mandate, followed it up, in the same year, by a monstrous edict, borrowed from one in the Netherlands, which condemned all who bought, sold, or read prohibited works to be burned alive.

In the following January, Paul, to give greater efficacy to this edict, published another bull, in which he commanded all confessors, under pain of excommunication, to enjoin on their penitents to inform against all persons, however nearly allied to them, who might be guilty of such practices. To quicken the zeal of the informer, Philip, on his part, revived a law fallen somewhat into disuse, by which the accuser was to receive one fourth of the confiscated property of the convicted party. And finally, a third bull from Paul allowed the inquisitors to withhold a pardon from the recanting heretic, if any doubt existed of his sincerity; thus placing the life as well as fortune of the unhappy prisoner entirely at the mercy of judges who had an obvious interest in finding him guilty. In this way the pope and the king continued to play into each other's hands, and while his holiness artfully spread the toils, the king devised the means for driving the quarry into them.[436]

Fortunately for these plans, the Inquisition was at this time under the direction of a man peculiarly fitted to execute them. This was Fernando Valdés, cardinal-archbishop of Seville, a person of a hard, inexorable nature, and possessed of as large a measure of fanaticism as ever fell to a grand-inquisitor since the days of Torquemada. Valdés readily availed himself of the terrible machinery placed under his control. Careful not to alarm the suspected parties, his approaches were slow and stealthy. He was the chief of a tribunal which sat in darkness, and which dealt by invisible agents. He worked long and silently under ground before firing the mine which was to bury his enemies in a general ruin.

[Sidenote: SUPPRESSION OF THE REFORM.]

His spies were everywhere abroad, mingling with the suspected, and insinuating themselves into their confidence. At length, by the treachery of some, and by working on the nervous apprehensions or the religions scruples of others, he succeeded in detecting the lurking-places of the new heresy, and the extent of ground which it covered. This was much larger than had been imagined, although the Reformation in Spain seemed less formidable from the number of its proselytes than from their character and position. Many of them were ecclesiastics, especially intrusted with maintaining the purity of the faith. The quarters in which the heretical doctrines most prevailed were Aragon, which held an easy communication with the Huguenots of France, and the ancient cities of Seville and Valladolid, indebted less to any local advantages than to the influence of a few eminent men, who had early embraced the faith of the Reformers.

At length, the preliminary information having been obtained, the proscribed having been marked out, the plan of attack settled, an order was given for the simultaneous arrest of all persons suspected of heresy, throughout the kingdom. It fell like a thunderbolt on the unhappy victims, who had gone on with their secret associations, little suspecting the ruin that hung over them. No resistance was attempted. Men and women, churchmen and laymen, persons of all ranks and professions, were hurried from their homes, and lodged in the secret chambers of the Inquisition. Yet these could not furnish accommodations for the number, and many were removed to the ordinary prisons, and even to convents and private dwellings. In Seville alone eight hundred were arrested on the first day. Fears were entertained of an attempt at rescue, and an additional guard was stationed over the places of confinement. The inquisitors were in the condition of a fisherman whose cast has been so successful that the draught of fishes seems likely to prove too heavy for his net.[437]

The arrest of one party gradually led to the detection of others. Dragged from his solitary dungeon before the secret tribunal of the Inquisition, alone, without counsel to aid or one friendly face to cheer him, without knowing the name of his accuser, without being allowed to confront the witnesses who were there to swear away his life, without even a sight of his own process, except such garbled extracts as the wily judges thought fit to communicate, is it strange that the unhappy victim, in his perplexity and distress, should have been drawn into disclosures fatal to his associates and himself? If these disclosures were not to the mind of his judges, they had only to try the efficacy of the torture,--the rack, the cord, and the pulley,--until, when every joint had been wrenched from its socket, the barbarous tribunal was compelled to suspend, not terminate, the application, from the inability of the sufferer to endure it. Such were the dismal scenes enacted in the name of religion, and by the ministers of religion, as well as of the Inquisition,--scenes to which few of those who had once witnessed them, and escaped with life, dared ever to allude. For to reveal the secrets of the Inquisition was death.[438]

At the expiration of eighteen months from the period of the first arrests, many of the trials had been concluded, the doom of the prisoners was sealed, and it was thought time that the prisons should disgorge their superfluous inmates. Valladolid was selected as the theatre of the first _auto da fé_, both from the importance of the capital and the presence of the court, which would thus sanction and give greater dignity to the celebration. This event took place in May, 1559. The Regent Joanna, the young prince of the Asturias, Don Carlos, and the principal grandees of the court, were there to witness the spectacle. By rendering the heir of the crown thus early familiar with the tender mercies of the Holy Office, it may have been intended to conciliate his favor to that institution. If such was the object, according to the report it signally failed, since the woeful spectacle left no other impressions on the mind of the prince than those of indignation and disgust.

The example of Valladolid was soon followed by _autos da fé_ in Granada, Toledo, Seville, Barcelona,--in short, in the twelve capitals in which tribunals of the Holy Office were established. A second celebration at Valladolid was reserved for the eighth of October in the same year, when it would be graced by the presence of the sovereign himself. Indeed, as several of the processes had been concluded some months before this period, there is reason to believe that the sacrifice of more than one of the victims had been postponed, in order to give greater effect to the spectacle.[439]

The _auto da fé_--"act of faith"--was the most imposing, as it was the most awful, of the solemnities authorized by the Roman Catholic Church. It was intended, somewhat profanely, as has been intimated, to combine the pomp of the Roman triumph with the terrors of the day of judgment.[440] It may remind one quite as much of those bloody festivals prepared for the entertainment of the Cæsars in the Colisæum. The religions import of the _auto da fé_ was intimated by the circumstance of its being celebrated on a Sunday, or some other holiday of the Church. An indulgence for forty days was granted by his holiness to all who should be present at the spectacle; as if the appetite for witnessing the scenes of human suffering required to be stimulated by a bounty; that too in Spain, where the amusements were, and still are, of the most sanguinary character.

The scene for this second _auto da fé_ at Valladolid was the great square in front of the church of St. Francis. At one end a platform was raised, covered with rich carpeting, on which were ranged the seats of the inquisitors, emblazoned with the arms of the Holy Office. Near to this was the royal gallery, a private entrance to which secured the inmates from molestation by the crowd. Opposite to this gallery a large scaffold was erected, so as to be visible from all parts of the arena, and was appropriated to the unhappy martyrs who were to suffer in the _auto_.

At six in the morning all the bells in the capital began to toll, and a solemn procession was seen to move from the dismal fortress of the Inquisition. In the van marched a body of troops, to secure a free passage for the procession. Then came the condemned, each attended by two familiars of the Holy Office, and those who were to suffer at the stake by two friars, in addition, exhorting the heretic to abjure his errors. Those admitted to penitence wore a sable dress; while the unfortunate martyr was enveloped in a loose sack of yellow cloth,--the _san benito_,--with his head surmounted by a cap of pasteboard of a conical form, which, together with the cloak, was embroidered with figures of flames and of devils fanning and feeding them; all emblematical of the destiny of the heretic's soul in the world to come, as well as of his body in the present. Then came the magistrates of the city, the judges of the courts, the ecclesiastical orders, and the nobles of the land on horseback. These were followed by the members of the dread tribunal, and the fiscal, bearing a standard of crimson damask, on one side of which were displayed the arms of the Inquisition, and on the other the insignia of its founders, Sixtus the Fifth and Ferdinand the Catholic. Next came a numerous train of familiars, well mounted, among whom were many gentry of the province, proud to act as the body-guard of the Holy Office. The rear was brought up by an immense concourse of the common people, stimulated on the present occasion, no doubt, by the loyal desire to see their new sovereign, as well as by the ambition to share in the triumphs of the _auto da fé_. The number thus drawn together from the capital and the country, far exceeding what was usual on such occasions, is estimated by one present at full two hundred thousand.[441]

[Sidenote: AUTOS DA FE.]

As the multitude defiled into the square, the inquisitors took their place on the seats prepared for their reception. The condemned were conducted to the scaffold, and the royal station was occupied by Philip, with the different members of his household. At his side sat his sister, the late regent, his son, Don Carlos, his nephew, Alexander Farnese, several foreign ambassadors, and the principal grandees and higher ecclesiastics in attendance on the court. It was an august assembly of the greatest and the proudest in the land. But the most indifferent spectator, who had a spark of humanity in his bosom, might have turned with feelings of admiration from this array of worldly power, to the poor martyr, who, with no support but what he drew from within, was prepared to defy this power, and to lay down his life in vindication of the rights of conscience. Some there may have been, in that large concourse, who shared in these sentiments. But their number was small indeed in comparison with those who looked on the wretched victim as the enemy of God, and his approaching sacrifice as the most glorious triumph of the Cross.

The ceremonies began with a sermon, "the sermon of the faith," by the bishop of Zamora. The subject of it may well be guessed, from the occasion. It was no doubt plentifully larded with texts of Scripture, and, unless the preacher departed from the fashion of the time, with passages from the heathen writers, however much out of place they may seem in an orthodox discourse.

When the bishop had concluded, the grand-inquisitor administered an oath to the assembled multitude, who on their knees solemnly swore to defend the Inquisition, to maintain the purity of the faith, and to inform against any one who should swerve from it. As Philip repeated an oath of similar import, he suited the action to the word, and, rising from his seat, drew his sword from its scabbard, as if to announce himself the determined champion of the Holy Office. In the earlier _autos_ of the Moorish and Jewish infidels, so humiliating an oath had never been exacted from the sovereign.

After this, the secretary of the tribunal read aloud an instrument reciting the grounds for the conviction of the prisoners, and the respective sentences pronounced against them. Those who were to be admitted to penitence, each, as his sentence was proclaimed, knelt down, and, with his hands on the missal, solemnly abjured his errors, and was absolved by the grand-inquisitor. The absolution, however, was not so entire as to relieve the offender from the penalty of his transgressions in this world. Some were doomed to perpetual imprisonment in the cells of the Inquisition, others to lighter penances. All were doomed to the confiscation of their property,--a point of too great moment to the welfare of the tribunal ever to be omitted. Besides this, in many cases the offender, and, by a glaring perversion of justice, his immediate descendants, were rendered for ever ineligible to public office of any kind, and their names branded with perpetual infamy. Thus blighted in fortune and in character, they were said, in the soft language of the Inquisition, to be _reconciled_.

As these unfortunate persons were remanded, under a strong guard, to their prisons, all eyes were turned on the little company of martyrs, who, clothed in the ignominious garb of the _san benito_, stood waiting the sentence of the judges,--with cords round their necks, and in their hands a cross, or sometimes an inverted torch, typical of their own speedy dissolution. The interest of the spectators was still further excited, in the present instance, by the fact that several of these victims were not only illustrious for their rank, but yet more so for their talents and virtues. In their haggard looks, their emaciated forms, and too often, alas! their distorted limbs, it was easy to read the story of their sufferings in their long imprisonment, for some of them had been confined in the dark cells of the Inquisition much more than a year. Yet their countenances, though haggard, far from showing any sign of weakness or fear, were lighted up with a glow of holy enthusiasm, as of men prepared to seal their testimony with their blood.

When that part of the process showing the grounds of their conviction had been read, the grand-inquisitor consigned them to the hands of the corregidor of the city, beseeching him to deal with the prisoners _in all kindness and mercy_;[442] a honeyed, but most hypocritical phrase, since no choice was left to the civil magistrate, but to execute the terrible sentence of the law against heretics, the preparations for which had been made by him a week before.[443]

The whole number of convicts amounted to thirty, of whom sixteen were _reconciled_, and the remainder _relaxed_ to the secular arm,--in other words, turned over to the civil magistrate for execution. There were few of those thus condemned who, when brought to the stake, did not so far shrink from the dreadful doom that awaited them as to consent to purchase a commutation of it by confession before they died; in which case they were strangled by the _garrote_, before their bodies were thrown into the flames.

Of the present number there were only two whose constancy triumphed to the last over the dread of suffering, and who refused to purchase any mitigation of it by a compromise with conscience. The names of these martyrs should be engraven on the record of history.

One of them was Don Carlos de Seso, a noble Florentine, who had stood high in the favor of Charles the Fifth. Being united with a lady of rank in Castile, he removed to that country, and took up his residence in Valladolid. He had become a convert to the Lutheran doctrines, which he first communicated to his own family, and afterwards showed equal zeal in propagating among the people of Valladolid and its neighborhood. In short, there was no man to whose untiring and intrepid labors the cause of the Reformed religion in Spain was more indebted. He was, of course, a conspicuous mark for the Inquisition.

[Sidenote: AUTOS DA FE.]

During the fifteen months in which he lay in its gloomy cells, cut off from human sympathy and support, his constancy remained unshaken. The night preceding his execution, when his sentence had been announced to him, De Seso called for writing materials. It was thought he designed to propitiate his judges by a full confession of his errors. But the confession he made was of another kind. He insisted on the errors of the Romish Church, and avowed his unshaken trust in the great truths of the Reformation. The document, covering two sheets of paper, is pronounced by the secretary of the Inquisition to be a composition equally remarkable for its energy and precision.[444] When led before the royal gallery, on his way to the place of execution, De Seso pathetically exclaimed to Philip, "Is it thus that you allow your innocent subjects to be persecuted?" To which the king made the memorable reply, "If it were my own son, I would fetch the wood to burn him, were he such a wretch as thou art!" It was certainly a characteristic answer.[445]

At the stake De Seso showed the same unshaken constancy, bearing his testimony to the truth of the great cause for which he gave up his life. As the flames crept slowly around him, he called on the soldiers to heap up the fagots, that his agonies might be sooner ended; and his executioners, indignant at the obstinacy--the heroism--of the martyr, were not slow in obeying his commands.[446]

The companion and fellow-sufferer of De Seso was Domingo de Roxas, son of the marquis de Poza, an unhappy noble, who had seen five of his family, including his eldest son, condemned to various humiliating penances by the Inquisition for their heretical opinions. This one was now to suffer death. De Roxas was a Dominican monk. It is singular that this order, from which the ministers of the Holy Office were

## particularly taken, furnished many proselytes to the Reformed religion.

De Roxas, as was the usage with ecclesiastics, was allowed to retain his sacerdotal habit until his sentence had been read, when he was degraded from his ecclesiastical rank, his vestments were stripped off one after another, and the hideous dress of the _san benito_ thrown over him, amid the shouts and derision of the populace. Thus apparelled, he made an attempt to address the spectators around the scaffold; but no sooner did he begin to raise his voice against the errors and cruelties of Rome, than Philip indignantly commanded him to be gagged. The gag was a piece of cleft wood, which, forcibly compressing the tongue, had the additional advantage of causing great pain, while it silenced the offender. Even when he was bound to the stake, the gag, though contrary to custom, was suffered to remain in the mouth of De Roxas, as if his enemies dreaded the effects of an eloquence that triumphed over the anguish of death.[447]

The place of execution--the _quemadero_, the burning-place, as it was called--was a spot selected for the purpose without the walls of the city.[448] Those who attended an _auto da fé_ were not, therefore, necessarily, as is commonly imagined, spectators of the tragic scene that concluded it. The great body of the people, and many of higher rank, no doubt, followed to the place of execution. On this occasion, there is reason to think, from the language--somewhat equivocal, it is true--of Philip's biographer, that the monarch chose to testify his devotion to the Inquisition by witnessing in person the appalling close of the drama; while his guards mingled with the menials of the Holy Office, and heaped up the fagots round their victims.[449]

Such was the cruel exhibition which, under the garb of a religious festival, was thought the most fitting ceremonial for welcoming the Catholic monarch to his dominions! During the whole time of its duration in the public square, from six in the morning till two in the afternoon, no symptom of impatience was exhibited by the spectators, and, as may well be believed, no sign of sympathy for the sufferers.[450] It would be difficult to devise a better school for perverting the moral sense, and deadening the sensibilities of a nation.[451]

[Sidenote: PROSECUTION OF CARRANZA.]

Under the royal sanction, the work of persecution now went forward more briskly than ever.[452] No calling was too sacred, no rank too high, to escape the shafts of the informer. In the course of a few years, no less than nine bishops were compelled to do humiliating penance in some form or other for heterodox opinions. But the most illustrious victim of the Inquisition was Bartolomé Carranzo, archbishop of Toledo. The primacy of Spain might be considered as the post of the highest consideration in the Roman Catholic Church after the papacy.[453] The proceedings against this prelate, on the whole, excited more interest throughout Christendom than any other case that came before the tribunal of the Inquisition.

Carranza, who was of an ancient Castilian family, had early entered a Dominican convent in the suburbs of Guadalajara. His exemplary life, and his great parts and learning, recommended him to the favor of Charles the Fifth, who appointed him confessor to his son Philip. The emperor also sent him to the Council of Trent, where he made a great impression by his eloquence, as well as by a tract which he published against plurality of benefices, which, however, excited no little disgust in many of his order. On Philip's visit to England to marry Queen Mary, Carranza accompanied his master, and while in that country he distinguished himself by the zeal and ability with which he controverted the doctrines of the Protestants. The alacrity, moreover, which he manifested in the work of persecution made him generally odious under the name of the "black friar,"--a name peculiarly appropriate, as it applied not less to his swarthy complexion than to the garb of his order. On Philip's return to Flanders, Carranza, who had twice refused a mitre, was raised--not without strong disinclination on his own part--to the archiepiscopal see of Toledo. The "_nolo episcopari_," in this instance, seems to have been sincere. It would have been well for him if it had been effectual. Carranza's elevation to the primacy was the source of all his troubles.

The hatred of theologians has passed into a proverb; and there would certainly seem to be no rancor surpassing that of a Spanish ecclesiastic. Among the enemies raised by Carranza's success, the most implacable was the grand-inquisitor, Valdés. The archbishop of Seville could ill brook that a humble Dominican should be thus raised from the cloister over the heads of the proud prelacy of Spain. With unwearied pains, such as hate only could induce, he sought out whatever could make against the orthodoxy of the new prelate, whether in his writings or his conversation. Some plausible ground was afforded for this from the fact, that, although Carranza, as his whole life had shown, was devoted to the Roman Catholic Church, yet his long residence in Protestant countries, and his familiarity with Protestant works, had given a coloring to his language, if not to his opinions, which resembled that of the Reformers. Indeed, Carranza seems to have been much of the same way of thinking with Pole, Contarini, Morone, and other illustrious Romanists, whose liberal natures and wide range of study, had led them to sanction more than one of the Lutheran dogmas which were subsequently proscribed by the Council of Trent. One charge strongly urged against the primate was his assent to the heretical doctrine of justification by faith. In support of this, Father Regla, the confessor, as the reader may remember, of Charles the Fifth, and a worthy coadjutor of Valdés, quoted words of consolation employed by Carranza, in his presence, at the death-bed of the emperor.[454]

The exalted rank of the accused made it necessary for his enemies to proceed with the greatest caution. Never had the bloodhounds of the Inquisition been set on so noble a quarry. Confident in his own authority, the prelate had little reason for distrust. He could not ward off the blow, for it was an invisible arm stronger than his own that was raised to smite him. On the twenty-second of August, 1559, the emissaries of the Holy Office entered the primate's town of Torrelaguna. The doors of the episcopal palace were thrown open to the ministers of the terrible tribunal. The prelate was dragged from his bed at midnight, was hurried into a coach, and while the inhabitants were ordered not so much as to present themselves at the windows, he was conducted, under a strong guard, to the prisons of the Inquisition at Valladolid. The arrest of such a person caused a great sensation throughout the country, but no attempt was made at a rescue.

The primate would have appealed from the Holy Office to the pope, as the only power competent to judge him. But he was unwilling to give umbrage to Philip, who had told him in any extremity to rely on him. The king, however, was still in the Netherlands, where his mind had been preoccupied, through the archbishop's enemies, with rumors of his defection. And the mere imputation of heresy, in this dangerous crisis, and especially in one whom he had so recently raised to the highest post in the Spanish church, was enough, not only to efface the recollection of past services from the mind of Philip, but to turn his favor into aversion. For two years Carranza was suffered to languish in confinement, exposed to all the annoyances which the malice of his enemies could devise. So completely was he dead to the world, that he knew nothing of a conflagration which consumed more than four hundred of the principal houses in Valladolid, till some years after the occurrence.[455]

At length the Council of Trent, sharing the indignation of the rest of Christendom at the archbishop's protracted imprisonment, called on Philip to interpose in his behalf, and to remove the cause to another tribunal. But the king gave little heed to the remonstrance, which the inquisitors treated as a presumptuous interference with their authority.

In 1566, Pius the Fifth ascended the pontifical throne. He was a man of austere morals and a most inflexible will. A Dominican, like Carranza, he was greatly scandalized by the treatment which the primate had received, and by the shameful length to which his process had been protracted. He at once sent his orders to Spain for the removal of the grand-inquisitor, Valdés, from office, summoning, at the same time, the cause and the prisoner before his own tribunal. The bold inquisitor, loth to lose his prey, would have defied the power of Rome, as he had done that of the Council of Trent. Philip remonstrated; but Pius was firm, and menaced both king and inquisitor with excommunication. Philip had no mind for a second collision with the papal court. In imagination he already heard the thunders of the Vatican rolling in the distance, and threatening soon to break upon his head. After a confinement of now more than seven years' duration, the archbishop was sent under a guard to Rome. He was kindly received by the pontiff, and honorably lodged in the castle of St. Angelo, in apartments formerly occupied by the popes themselves. But he was still a prisoner.

[Sidenote: PROSECUTION OF CARRANZA.]

Pius now set seriously about the examination of Carranza's process. It was a tedious business, requiring his holiness to wade through an ocean of papers, while the progress of the suit was perpetually impeded by embarrassments thrown in his way by the industrious malice of the inquisitors. At the end of six years more, Pius was preparing to give his judgment, which it was understood would be favorable to Carranza, when, unhappily for the primate, the pontiff died.

The Holy Office, stung by the prospect of its failure, now strained every nerve to influence the mind of the new pope, Gregory the Thirteenth, to a contrary decision. New testimony was collected, new glosses were put on the primate's text, and the sanction of the most learned Spanish theologians was brought in support of them. At length, at the end of three years further, the holy father announced his purpose of giving his final decision. It was done with great circumstance. The pope was seated on his pontifical throne, surrounded by all his cardinals, prelates, and functionaries of the apostolic chamber. Before this august assembly, the archbishop presented himself unsupported and alone, while no one ventured to salute him. His head was bare. His once robust form was bent by infirmity more than by years; and his care-worn features told of that sickness which arises from hope deferred. He knelt down at some distance from the pope, and in this humble attitude received his sentence.

He was declared to have imbibed the pernicious doctrines of Luther. The decree of the Inquisition prohibiting the use of his catechism was confirmed. He was to abjure sixteen propositions found in his writings; was suspended from the exercise of his episcopal functions for five years, during which time he was to be confined in a convent of his order at Orvieto; and, finally, he was required to visit seven of the principal churches in Rome, and perform mass there by way of penance.

This was the end of eighteen years of doubt, anxiety, and imprisonment. The tears streamed down the face of the unhappy man, as he listened to the sentence; but he bowed in silent submission to the will of his superior. The very next day he began his work of penance. But nature could go no further; and on the second of May, only sixteen days after his sentence had been pronounced, Carranza died of a broken heart. The triumph of the Inquisition was complete.

The pope raised a monument to the memory of the primate, with a pompous inscription, paying a just tribute to his talents and his scholarship, endowing him with a full measure of Christian worth, and particularly commending the exemplary manner in which he had discharged the high trusts reposed in him by his sovereign.[456]

Such is the story of Carranza's persecution,--considering the rank of the party, the unprecedented length of the process, and the sensation it excited throughout Europe, altogether the most remarkable on the records of the Inquisition.[457] Our sympathy for the archbishop's sufferings may be reasonably mitigated by the reflection, that he did but receive the measure which he had meted out to others.

While the persecution of Carranza was going on, the fires lighted for the Protestants continued to burn with fury in all parts of the country, until at length they gradually slackened and died away, from mere want of fuel to feed them. The year 1570 may be regarded as the period of the last _auto da fé_ in which the Lutherans played a conspicuous part. The subsequent celebrations were devoted chiefly to relapsed Jews and Mahometans; and if a Protestant heretic was sometimes added to this list, it was "but as the gleaning of grapes after the vintage is done."[458]

Never was there a persecution which did its work more thoroughly. The blood of the martyr is commonly said to be the seed of the church. But the storm of persecution fell as heavily on the Spanish Protestants as it did on the Albigenses in the thirteenth century; blighting every living thing, so that no germ remained for future harvests. Spain might now boast that the stain of heresy no longer defiled the hem of her garment. But at what a price was this purchased! Not merely by the sacrifice of the lives and fortunes of a few thousands of the existing generation but by the disastrous consequences entailed for ever on the country. Folded under the dark wing of the Inquisition, Spain was shut out from the light which in the sixteenth century broke over the rest of Europe, stimulating the nations to greater enterprise in every department of knowledge. The genius of the people was rebuked, and their spirit quenched, under the malignant influence of an eye that never slumbered, of an unseen arm ever raised to strike. How could there be freedom of thought, where there was no freedom of utterance? Or freedom of utterance, where it was as dangerous to say too little as too much? Freedom cannot go along with fear. Every way the mind of the Spaniard was in fetters.

His moral sense was miserably perverted. Men were judged, not by their practice, but by their professions. Creed became a substitute for conduct. Difference of faith made a wider gulf of separation than difference of race, language, or even interest. Spain no longer formed one of the great brotherhood of Christian nations. An immeasurable barrier was raised between that kingdom and the Protestants of Europe. The early condition of perpetual warfare with the Arabs who overran the country had led the Spaniards to mingle religion strangely with their politics. The effect continued when the cause had ceased. Their wars with the European nations became religious wars. In fighting England or the Netherlands, they were fighting the enemies of God. It was the same everywhere. In their contest with the unoffending natives of the New World, they were still battling with the enemies of God. Their wars took the character of a perpetual crusade, and were conducted with all the ferocity which fanaticism could inspire.

[Sidenote: RECEPTION OF ISABELLA.]

The same dark spirit of fanaticism seems to brood over the national literature; even that lighter literature which in other nations is made up of the festive sallies of wit, or the tender expression of sentiment. The greatest geniuses of the nation, the masters of the drama and of the ode, while they astonish us by their miracles of invention, show that they have too often kindled their inspiration at the altars of the Inquisition.

Debarred as he was from freedom of speculation, the domain of science was closed against the Spaniard. Science looks to perpetual change. It turns to the past to gather warning, as well as instruction, for the future. Its province is to remove old abuses, to explode old errors, to unfold new truths. Its condition, in short, is that of progress. But in Spain, everything not only looked to the past, but rested on the past. Old abuses gathered respect from their antiquity. Reform was innovation, and innovation was a crime. Far from progress, all was stationary. The hand of the Inquisition drew the line which said, "No further!" This was the limit of human intelligence in Spain.

The effect was visible in every department of science,--not in the speculative alone, but in the physical and the practical; in the declamatory rant of its theology and ethics, in the childish and chimerical schemes of its political economists. In every walk were to be seen the symptoms of premature decrepitude, as the nation clung to the antiquated systems which the march of civilization in other countries had long since effaced. Hence those frantic experiments, so often repeated, in the financial administration of the kingdom, which made Spain the byword of the nations, and which ended in the ruin of trade, the prostration of credit, and finally the bankruptcy of the state.--But we willingly turn from this sad picture of the destinies of the country to a more cheerful scene in the history of Philip.

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