Chapter VI Mexico
The ostensible object of the Spanish conquests in the New World was the propagation of the faith. This was the sole motive alleged by Alexander VI, in the celebrated bull of 1493, conferring on the Spanish sovereigns domination over the territories discovered by Columbus; it was asserted in the codicil to Queen Isabella’s will, urging her husband and children to keep it ever in view, and it was put forward in all the commissions and instructions issued to the adventurers who converted the shores of the Caribbean into scenes of oppression and carnage.371 If Philip II was solicitous to preserve the purity of the faith in his own dominions, he was no less anxious to spread it beyond the seas; he prescribed this as one of the chief duties of his officers, describing it as the principal object of Spanish rule, to which all questions of profit and advantage were to be regarded as subordinate.372
It must be admitted, however, that the effort to spread the gospel lagged behind those directed to the acquisition of the precious metals. It is true that, on the second voyage of Columbus, in 1493, the sovereigns sent Fray Buil, with a dozen clerics and full papal faculties, but he busied himself more in quarrelling with the admiral than in converting the heathen.373 The first regular missionaries of whom we have knowledge were two Franciscans who, in 1500, accompanied Bobadilla to the West Indies and, in a letter of October 12th of that year, reported to the Observantine Vicar-general, Olivier Maillard, that they found the natives eager for conversion and that they had baptized three thousand in the first port which they reached in Hispañola.374 They were followed, in 1502, by a few more Franciscans under Fray Alonso del Espinal, a worthy man, according to Las Casas, but who could think of nothing but the Summa Angelica of his brother Franciscan, Angelo da Chivasso.375 The first earnest effort to instruct the natives was made by Fray Pedro de Córdova, who came in 1510 with two Dominicans and was soon followed by ten or twelve more; during the succeeding years he and the Franciscans founded some missionary stations on the coast of Tierra Firme, but they were broken up by the Indians in 1523.376 As, however, we are told that none of the missionaries took the trouble to learn the Indian languages, their evangelizing success may be doubted.377
The efforts to organize a church establishment proceeded but slowly at first. Hispañola was divided into two bishoprics, San Domingo and la Vega. For the former, at a date not definitely stated, the Franciscan, García de Padilla, was appointed, but he died before setting out to take possession. For the latter, Pero Suárez Deza, nephew of Inquisitor-general Deza, was chosen and we are told that he governed his see for some years378 but, as he figures in the Lucero troubles of Córdova, in 1506, as the “archbishop-elect of the Indies” the period of his episcopate is not easily definable. However this may be, the first bishop who appears in the episcopal lists of Hispañola is Alessandro Geraldino, with the date of 1520.379 Cortés, who had asked to have bishoprics organized in his new conquests, speedily changed his mind and requested Charles V to send out only friars. The priests of the Indians, he said, were so rigidly held to modesty and chastity that, if the people were to witness the pomp and disorderly lives of the Spanish clergy, they would regard Christianity as a farce and their conversion would be impracticable. Charles heeded the warning and, during the rest of his reign, he appointed as bishops only members of the religious Orders, while the secular clergy were but sparingly allowed to emigrate and those who succeeded in going earned as a body a most unenviable reputation.380 The Church thus started grew rapidly and, towards the close of the century, Padre Mendieta informs us that New Spain (comprising Mexico and Central America) had ten bishoprics, besides the metropolitan see of the capital, four hundred convents and as many clerical districts, and that each of these eight hundred had numerous churches in its charge.381
It seems strange that the Spanish monarchs, combining earnest desire for the propagation of the faith with intense zeal for its purity, should have so long postponed the extension of the Holy Office over their new dominions, while thus active in building up the Church. The Indian neophytes, it is true, were not in need of its ministrations, but the colonists might well be a subject of concern. Manasseh ben Israel (circa 1644) tells us that, after the expulsion in 1492, many Jews and Judaizing New Christians sought an asylum in the New World and that Antonio Montesinos, a Spanish Jew who had long lived there, reported that he found the Jewish rites carefully preserved, especially in certain valleys of South America.382 It is true that there were repeated efforts to prohibit New Christians and those who had been penanced by the Inquisition, with their descendants, from emigrating to the Indies, but this was a provision difficult to enforce, and relief from it was a financial expedient tempting to the chronically empty treasury of Spain. In the great composition of Seville, in 1509, there was a provision that, for twenty thousand ducats, the disability should be in so far removed that such persons could go to the colonies and trade there for two years, on each voyage. After Ferdinand’s death, this was confirmed by Charles V, but he soon afterwards, September 24, 1518, ordered the Casa de Contratacion of Seville not to permit them to embark. They complained loudly of this violation of faith and, on January 23, 1519, he ordered the Inquisition of Seville to examine the agreement and, if it was found to contain such a clause, the prohibition should be withdrawn. Six months later, on July 16th, it was renewed, exciting fresh remonstrances that they were compelled to pay the money while the privilege was denied. The matter was then referred to the Suprema, which decided that the complaints were justified, whereupon Charles, on December 13th, ordered the inquisitors of Seville to permit them to go, provided the whole amount of the composition, eighty thousand ducats, had been fully paid.383 Thus, in one way or another, the enterprising New Christians sought successfully to share in the lucrative exploitation of the colonies, and it illustrates the ineffectiveness of Spanish administration that, in 1537, it felt obliged to call in papal assistance to supplement its deficiencies. Accordingly Paul III, in his bull Altitudo divini consilii, forbade all apostates from going to the Indies and commanded the colonial bishops to expel any who might come.384 Prince Philip followed this by a decree of August 14, 1543, ordering all viceroys, governors and courts to investigate what Moorish slaves or freemen, recently converted, or sons of Jews resided in the Indies and to banish all whom they might discover, sending them to Spain in the first ships, for in no case were they to be allowed to remain.385
It is evident that the persevering New Christians evaded these regulations and that their success in this was a subject of solicitude, yet there was long delay in providing effectual means to preserve the faith from their contamination. It is true that, when bishoprics were erected, the jurisdiction over heresy, inherent in the episcopal office, might have been exercised on them, had not the Inquisition arrogated to itself the exclusive cognizance over all matters of faith and regarded with extreme jealousy all episcopal invasions of its province. This is illustrated by a case in 1515 which shows how indisposed it was even to delegate its power. Pedro de Leon, with his wife and daughter, had sought refuge in Hispañola, where the episcopal provisor arrested them and obtained confessions inculpating them and others. In place of authorizing him to complete the trial and punish them, the Suprema notified him that the inquisitor-general was sending a special messenger to bring them back to Seville, together with any other fugitives whom the provisor may have arrested, and he is commanded to deliver them without delay or prevarication, under penalty of forfeiture of temporalities and citizenship; moreover, the Admiral Diego Colon is commanded to render aid and favor and the Contratacion of Seville is required to furnish the messenger with a good ship to take him to the Indies and to see that on his return he has a vessel with a captain beyond suspicion and a place where the prisoners can be confined and kept secluded from all communication.386
This was evidently a very cumbrous and costly method of dealing with heretics, but it does not appear that the Holy Office consented to delegate its powers until 1519, when Charles V, by a cédula of May 20th, confirmed the appointment by Cardinal Adrian the inquisitor-general, of Alfonso Manso, Bishop of Puertorico and the Dominican Pedro de Córdova, as inquisitors of the Indies, and ordered all officials to render them obedience and assistance.387 On the death of Pedro, the appointing power is said to have vested in the Audiencia of San Domingo which, in 1524, appointed Martin de Valencia as commissioner. He was a Franciscan of high repute for holiness who in that year reached Mexico at the head of a dozen of his brethren and was received by the Conquistadores on their knees. We are told that he burnt a heretic and reconciled two others, which if true would show that he was clothed with the full powers of an inquisitor. He soon afterwards returned to Spain and we hear of Fray Tomás Ortiz, Fray Domingo de Betanzos and Fray Vicente de Santa María as succeeding him in 1526 and 1528, but the references to these shadowy personalities are conflicting and there are no records of their activity.388
With the appointment of bishops in New Spain, in 1527, and the gradual systematic organization of the hierarchy, it would seem that special inquisitoral powers were delegated to them, of the results of which we have traces in the sanbenitos or tablillas of those burnt or reconciled which were hung in the cathedrals. Early in the nineteenth century Padre José Pichardo made a list of those remaining in the cathedral of Mexico, which has recently been printed and from this we learn that an auto de fe was celebrated in 1536, at which Andreas Morvan was reconciled for Lutheranism, and another in 1539, when Francisco Millan was reconciled for Judaism and a cacique of Tezcoco was burnt for offering human sacrifices.389 This latter stretch of authority by Archbishop Zumárraga was contrary to the policy of the government and, in 1543, Inquisitor-general Tavera superseded him by sending Francisco Tello de Sandoval, inquisitor of Toledo, to Mexico to perform the same office. His commission, dated July 18th of that year, empowers him to take up and prosecute to the end all cases commenced by previous inquisitors, and a letter of Prince Philip, July 24th, to the royal officials of New Spain, commands them to give him all requisite assistance.390 It does not appear, however, that he was furnished with officials to organize a tribunal and, as his principal charge was that of a visitador or inspector of the ecclesiastical establishment, it is not probable that he accomplished much as inquisitor. The list of sanbenitos shows no more autos de fe until 1555, by which time the work had fallen back into the hands of Archbishop Montúfar, for the home Government was evidently unwilling to assume the heavy cost of a fully organized tribunal, and the bishops were ready to perform its duties. When, in 1545, Las Casas, as Bishop of Chiapa, asked the royal Audiencia of Gracia á Dios to sustain him in his episcopal jurisdiction against his recalcitrant flock, he makes special reference to cases of the Inquisition as included in it and, soon after this, in Peru, Juan Matienzo says that the bishops exercised inquisitorial jurisdiction and that, when any attempt was made to appeal from them, they would elude it by claiming that they were acting as inquisitors.391 That this was recognized at home is manifested by Prince Philip, in 1553, extending to the Indies the Concordia of Castile regulating the fuero of familiars, as though there was a regularly organized Inquisition throughout the colonies.392
In the auto of 1555, Gerónimo Venzon, an Italian, was reconciled for Lutheranism and it was followed by one in 1558, when María de Ocampo was reconciled for pact with the demon.393 There was also an Englishman named Robert Thompson, condemned for Lutheranism to wear the sanbenito for three years, and a Genoese, Agostino Boacio, for the same crime, to perpetual prison and sanbenito. These two latter were shipped to Seville to perform their penance, but Boacio managed to escape at the Azores. In 1560 there were seven Lutherans reconciled, concerning whom we have no details; in 1561 a French Calvinist and a Greek schismatist and in 1562 two French Calvinists.394 This shows that the episcopal Inquisition was by no means inert, and a sentence rendered by the Ordinary of Mexico, in 1568, indicates that its severity might cause the installation of the regular Holy Office to be regarded rather as a relief. A Flemish painter, Simon Pereyns, who had drifted to Mexico, in a talk with a brother artist, Francisco Morales, chanced to utter the common remark that simple fornication was not a sin and persisted in it after remonstrance. That the episcopal Inquisition was thoroughly established is indicated by his considering it prudent to denounce himself to the Officiality, which he did on September 10, 1568. In Spain this particular heresy, especially in espontaneados, was not severely treated, but the provisor, Esteban de Portillo, took it seriously and threw him in prison. During the trial Morales testified that Pereyns had said that he preferred to paint portraits rather than images, which he explained was because they paid better. This did not satisfy the provisor who proceeded to torture him when he endured, without further confession, three turns of the cordeles and three jars of water trickled down his throat on a linen cloth. This ought to have earned his dismissal but, on December 4th, he was condemned to pay the costs of his trial and to give security that he would not leave the city until he should have painted a picture of Our Lady of Merced, as an altar-piece for the church. He complied and it was duly hung in the cathedral.395 A still more forcible example of the abuse of episcopal inquisitorial authority was the case of Don Pedro Juárez de Toledo, alcalde mayor of Trinidad in Guatemala, arrested with sequestration of property by his bishop, Bernardino de Villalpando, on a charge of heresy. He died in September, 1569, with his trial unfinished; it was transferred to the Inquisition on its establishment and, in the auto de fe of February 28, 1574, a sentence was rendered clearing his memory of all infamy, which we are told gave much satisfaction for he was a man much honored and the vindictiveness of the prosecution was notorious.396
These inquisitorial powers, however, were only enjoyed temporarily by the bishops and when, in 1570, a tribunal was finally established in Mexico, a circular was addressed to them formally warning them against allowing their provisors or officials to exercise jurisdiction in matters of faith and ordering them to transmit to the inquisitors any evidence which they might have or might obtain in cases of heresy. The bishops apparently were unwilling to surrender the jurisdiction to which they had grown accustomed, for the command had to be repeated, May 26, 1585.397
It is worthy of remark that there seems to have been no pressure from Rome to extend the Inquisition over the New World. St. Pius V, notwithstanding his fierce inquisitorial activity in Italy, could give Philip II the sanest and most temperate advice about the colonies. On learning that the king proposed to send thither officials selected with the utmost care, he wrote, August 18, 1568, to Inquisitor-general Espinosa to encourage him in the good work. The surest way, he says, to propagate the faith is to remove all unnecessary burdens and to so treat the people that they may rejoice more and more to throw off the bonds of idolatry and submit themselves to the sweet yoke of Christ; the Christians who go thither should be such as to edify the people by their lives and morals, so as to confirm the converts and to allure the heathen to conversion.398 To do Philip justice, he earnestly strove to follow in the path thus wisely indicated, but Spanish maladministration was too firmly rooted for him to succeed. If he could not thus render the faith attractive he could at least preserve its purity; the colonists were becoming too numerous for their aberrations to be left to episcopal provisors, overburdened with a multiplicity of other duties, and the only safety lay in extending to the colonies the Inquisition whose tribunals would have no other function.
The incentive to this, however, was not so much the danger anticipated from Judaizing New Christians as from the propaganda of the Reformers, who were regarded as zealously engaged in sending to the New World their heretical books and versions of Scripture and even as venturing there personally in hopes of combining missionary work with the profits of trade. This is the motive alleged by Philip II, in his cédulas of January 25, 1569, and August 16, 1570, confirming the action of Inquisitor-general Espinosa in founding the Mexican tribunal.399 Leonardo Donato, the Venetian envoy, in his report of 1573, assents to this as the cause, not only of the establishment of the Mexican Inquisition but also of the prohibition of intercourse with the colonies to Germans and Flemings, although the latter were Spanish subjects.400 The Protestant missionary spirit in fact was, at this time, by no means as ardent as the Inquisition sought to make the faithful believe, yet it could reasonably point in justification to the number of Protestants who furnished the material for the earlier inquisitorial activity.
Although the decision to establish colonial tribunals was reached and made known in the cédula of January, 1569, Philip proceeded with his usual dilatory caution. It was not until January 3, 1570, that Espinosa notified Doctor Moya de Contreras, then Inquisitor of Murcia, that he had been selected as senior inquisitor of the projected tribunal; he was to enjoy a salary of three thousand pesos and the fruits of a prebend in the cathedral; he was to have a colleague, a fiscal and a notary or secretary, while such other officials as might be necessary would be appointed on the spot, in accordance with instructions to be given to him.401 Contreras declined the appointment on the ground of his health, which would not endure the voyage, and his poverty, for he was endeavoring to place his sister in a convent. Espinosa insisted, pointing out that the position would be but temporary and would lead to promotion, which was verified for, in 1573, Contreras became Archbishop of Mexico, served for a time as viceroy, and, on his return to Spain, was made president of the Council of Indies.402 The junior inquisitor was the Licenciado Pascual de Cervantes, canon of Canaries, who was instructed to learn the duties of his office from his experienced senior. Their commissions bore date August 18, 1570, and empowered them to evoke and continue all cases that might be in the hands of inquisitors or episcopal officials. It was not until November 13th that they set sail from San Lucar for the Canaries, where they hoped to take passage on the fleet. In this they were disappointed, as it did not call at the islands, and they were detained in Tenerife until June 2, 1571. Cervantes died on the voyage July 26th and Contreras was wrecked on the coast of Cuba, August 11th, but he found refuge on another vessel and reached San Juan de Ulua August 18th. He entered the city of Mexico September 12th, but the ceremonies of reception and installation were delayed until November 4th.403 These were of the most impressive character. A proclamation, two days before, to sound of drum and trumpet, had summoned to be present in the cathedral, under pain of major excommunication, the whole population over twelve years of age. From the building assigned to the tribunal, the viceroy and senior judge of the royal court, followed by all the officials, conducted the inquisitor to the church, where, after the sermon and before the elevation of the host, the secretary of the Inquisition read the royal letters addressed to the viceroy and all other officials, reciting at great length the dangers of the heretic propaganda and commanding every one to render all aid and service to the inquisitors and their officials, arresting all whom they should designate and punishing with the legal penalties those whom they should relax as heretics or relapsed. Moreover the king took under his protection all those connected with the Holy Office and warned his subjects that any injury inflicted on them would be visited with the punishment due to violation of the royal safeguard. Then an edict was read, embodying the oath of obedience and pledging every one, under fearful maledictions, spiritual and temporal, to aid the Inquisition in every way and to denounce and persecute heretics as wolves and mad dogs. On this the viceroy arose and, placing his hand on the gospels which lay on a table, took the oath and all the officials present advanced in procession and followed his example.
The Inquisition thus was fairly established in the city of Mexico; it issued its Edict of Faith and, on November 10th, it published letters addressed to all the inhabitants of its enormous district, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Darien to the unknown regions to the North, commanding them and their officials to take the same portentous oath of obedience. In an age of faith, it is easy to see how profound was the impression made when the population of every parish and mission was assembled in its church and listened to such utterances in the name of Christ and the pope, with their reduplication of threats and promises, and each one was required to raise his right hand and solemnly swear on the cross and the gospels to accept it all and obey it to the letter.404
As communication between the tribunal and the Supreme Council in Madrid was slow and irregular, there was necessity that it should have greater independent authority than that allowed to the provincial Inquisitions in Spain, which at this period were constantly becoming more and more subject to the central head. Accordingly it was furnished not only with the general Instructions current everywhere but with special elaborate ones, providing among other matters that in the consulta de fe, or meeting to decide upon a sentence, if there should be discordia or lack of unanimity among the inquisitors and the episcopal Ordinary (who always took part in such matters) the case was not referred to the Suprema, as in Spain, unless the question was as to relaxation to the secular arm; if this was involved, the accused was to be sent to the Suprema, which decided his fate. If the sentence was to torture or reconciliation, or a milder penance, then the opinion prevailed of the two inquisitors, or of the Ordinary and one of the inquisitors, while if all three were discordant, then the consultors decided as to which of the three opinions should be adopted. Appeals to the Suprema against sentences of torture, or of extraordinary punishments, were similarly replaced by giving the prisoner another hearing, allowing the fiscal to argue against him and reconsidering the sentence in the consulta de fe.405 These instructions also prescribed the enforcement of the Index of prohibited books, both as to the suppression of those existing in the colony and the watchful supervision of imports, all of which Doctor Contreras hastened to execute by requiring every owner of books to present a sworn list of those in his possession. It would not be easy, however, to define whence he derived his authority for his next step, which was to forbid the departure from the land of any one without a special licence from the Inquisition—a stretch of power which we are told met with the hearty concurrence of the viceroy, Martin Enríquez, who had not otherwise manifested much prepossession in favor of the new jurisdiction thus established in his territories.406
The inquisitor evidently magnified his office and the result soon showed how much more efficient was a tribunal of which the energies were concentrated on a single object, than the desultory action of the episcopal provisors. He had, on his arrival, lost no time in filling up his staff by appointing an alguazil mayor, an alcaide of the secret prisons, a portero or apparitor and a messenger, as well as a receiver of confiscations, to whom he assigned the handsome salary of six hundred ducats, not anticipating how slender, for some time, were to be the receipts from that source. His efforts were seconded at home for, by a carta orden of the Suprema, January 5, 1573, the Spanish tribunals were instructed to give precedence over all other business to requests from colonial Inquisitions for evidence to be taken and furnished, experience having already shown the great benefit arising from their establishment there.407 The publication of the Edict of Faith had brought in many denunciations; arrests were frequent and the number of prisoners soon exceeded the capacity of the improvised prison—among them some thirty-six Englishmen, the remnant of the hundred of Sir John Hawkins’s men who had taken their chances on shore after the disaster at San Juan de Ulua, in 1568.408 The fruits of this energy were seen when the first great auto de fe was celebrated February 28, 1574, with a solemnity declared by eyewitnesses to be equal in everything, save the presence of royalty, to that of Valladolid, May 21, 1559, when the Spanish Lutherans suffered. A fortnight in advance it was announced throughout the city with drums and trumpets, the Inquisition commenced to erect its staging and the city authorities did the like for themselves and their wives, and invited the judges and their wives to seats on it. A week later, on learning that prominent officials from all parts of the country were coming, the invitation was extended to them. The population poured in from all quarters, crowding the streets and occupying every spot from which the spectacle could be witnessed. The night before was occupied in drilling, in the courtyard of the Inquisition, the unfortunates who were to appear and at daylight they were breakfasted on wine and slices of bread fried in honey.
The accounts of the auto as given by Señor Medina are somewhat confused, but from them we gather that there were seventy-four sufferers in all. Of these, three were for asserting that simple fornication between the unmarried was no sin; twenty-seven were for bigamy; two for blasphemy; one for wearing prohibited articles although his grandfather had been burnt; two for “propositions;” one because he had made his wife confess to him and thirty-six for Lutheranism, of whom two, George Ripley and Marin Cornu were burnt. These Lutherans were all foreigners of various nationalities, but mostly English, consisting of Hawkins’s men. One of these, named Miles Phillips has left an account of the affair, in which he says that his compatriots George Ripley, Peter Momfrie and Cornelius the Irishman were burnt, sixty or sixty-one were scourged and sent to the galleys and seven, of whom he was one, were condemned to serve in convents; the wholesale scourging was performed the next day, through the accustomed streets, the culprits being preceded by a crier calling out “See these English Lutheran dogs, enemies of God!” while inquisitors and familiars shouted to the executioners “Harder, harder, on these English Lutherans!” Páramo, who doubtless had access to official records, tells us that there were about eighty penitents in all, of whom an Englishman and a Frenchman were burnt, some Judaizers were reconciled, together with several bigamists and practitioners of sorcery. One of these latter, he says, was a woman who had made her husband come in two days to Mexico from Guatemala, two hundred leagues away and, when asked by the inquisitor why she had done this, she replied that it was in order to enjoy the sight of his beauty, the fact being that he was the foulest of men. Bigamy, he adds, was a very frequent crime, for men thought that, at so great a distance from Spain, there was little chance of detection.409
Miles Phillips says that at the conclusion of the auto the victims relaxed were burnt on the plaza, near the staging. This shows that no proper preparation had been made for these solemnities and in fact, it was not until 1596 that the municipality, at a cost of four hundred pesos, constructed a quemadero or burning place, where concremation could be performed decently and in order. It was a ghastly adjunct to a pleasure-ground, for it was situated at the east end of the Alameda. There it remained until the stake was growing obsolete and was removed in 1771 to enlarge the promenade.410
This was the last inquisitorial act of Doctor Contreras, whose promotion to the archbishopric had already taken place. He had been provided with a colleague by the promotion of the fiscal Bonilla in 1572, and the vacancy caused by his retirement was filled by the appointment of Alonso Granero de Avalos. These held an auto March 6, 1575, in which there were thirty-one culprits, twenty-five of them for bigamy and but one Protestant, the Irishman William Cornelius, who was burnt. Less important was an auto celebrated February 19, 1576, with thirteen culprits, all for minor offences, except an Englishman named Thomas Farrar, a shoemaker long resident in Mexico, who was reconciled for Protestantism. Another auto followed December 15, 1577, in which, besides the customary minor offenders, three Englishmen, Paul Hawkins, John Stone and Robert Cook, were reconciled for Protestantism and the first Judaizer, Alvarez Pliego, abjured de vehementi and was fined in 500 pesos.411 The Judaism which thus commenced to show itself speedily furnished further victims for, in 1578, two Spaniards were burnt for it and, in 1579, another, García González Bermejero, while a Frenchman, Guillaume Potier, who escaped, was burnt in effigy for Calvinism. After this, until 1590, the tribunal seems to have become indolent; but few autos were celebrated and the culprits consisted of the miscellaneous bigamists, blasphemers, sorcerers and soliciting confessors, whose cases present no especial interest. With 1590 the yearly autos were resumed. In that year nine Judaizers at least were reconciled, one was burnt in person and one in effigy. With the advent of Alonso de Peralta as inquisitor, in 1594, the tribunal seems to have been aroused to increased activity and the auto of December 8, 1596, was a memorable one in which there were sixty-six penitents, including twenty-two Judaizers reconciled, nine burnt in person and ten in effigy. Even this was exceeded by the great auto of March 26, 1601, also celebrated by Peralta, in which there were one hundred and twenty four penitents, of whom four were burnt in person and sixteen in effigy. There would seem to have been a recrudescence of Protestantism, for among these were twenty-three Lutherans and Calvinists.412
The Inquisition thus vindicated the necessity of its existence if the land was to be purified of heresy and apostasy, for some of the Judaizers had been practising their unhallowed rites for an incredible length of time. García González Bermejero, who was burnt in 1579, had been thus outraging the faith in Mexico for twenty years; Juan Castellanos, who repented and was reconciled in 1590, had done so for forty-eight years. Although their Judaism was almost public, for they ate the paschal lamb and smeared their houses with blood, they were only discovered through the confession of an accomplice tried in Spain, who denounced González. Of a family of Portuguese Jews who suffered in 1592, and the following years, we are told that the father, Francisco Rodríguez Mattos, was a rabbi and a dogmatizer, or teacher. Fortunately for him he was dead and was only burnt in effigy, as was likewise his son, who escaped by flight. His four daughters repented and were reconciled. They were in high social position and a cultured race, for it is said that the youngest, a girl of seventeen, could recite all the psalms of David and could repeat the prayer of Esther and other Hebrew songs backwards. A brother of these girls, Luis de Carvajal, was governor of the province of New Leon and a man who had rendered essential service to the crown; for the crime of not denouncing them, he was prosecuted, publicly penanced as a fautor of heresy and deprived of his office; he relapsed, was tried and tortured in 1595 and was burnt in the auto of December 8, 1596, together with his mother and three sisters.413 The men who founded the Mexican Inquisition knew their duty and were resolute in its performance. They were kept busy for, between 1574 and 1600, they despatched no less than 879 cases, or an average of about thirty-four per annum.414 Considering the complex character of inquisitorial procedure, with its inevitable delays and consumption of time, this represents a creditable degree of industry, equal to that of the great tribunal of Toledo which, at the same period, was averaging thirty-five cases per annum.
It will be observed that no Indians figure among the victims on these occasions, since the zeal of Bishop Zumárraga, in 1536, burned the cacique of Tezcoco. In fact, the native population was exempt from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. This exemption was originally attributable to the theory held by the Conquistadores that the Indians were too low in the scale of humanity to be capable of the faith—a theory largely relied upon to excuse the cruelties inflicted upon them. In 1517, when Las Casas was laboring in their behalf at the Spanish court, this proposition was advanced by a member of the royal council to Fray Reginaldo Montesino, who was assisting Las Casas and who promptly declared it to be heretical. To settle the question, he asked one of the foremost theologians of the time, Fray Juan Hurtado, to assemble the doctors of the University of Salamanca to decide the matter; thirteen of them debated it and drew up a series of conclusions which they all signed, the final one being that whoever defended with pertinacity such a proposition must be put to death by fire as a heretic.415 Notwithstanding this decision, the theory was so generally asserted in the New World that Fray Julian Garcés, the first Bishop of Tlaxcala, wrote to Paul III on the subject and elicited a brief of June 2, 1537, condemning those who, to gratify their greed, asserted that the Indians were like brutes to be reduced to servitude, and declaring them competent to receive the faith and enjoy the sacraments.416 Bishop Zumárraga had already acted on this presumption when he burnt the cacique and this suggested an obstacle, almost as damaging as the popular theory, to the conversion which was the ostensible object of the conquest, for it was evident that the doctrineros, or missionaries, would find their labors nugatory if the Indians realized that, in embracing the new faith, they would be liable to death by fire for aberrations from it. To remove this impediment, Charles V, by a decree of October 15, 1538, ordered that they should not be subject to the inquisitorial process but that, in all matters of faith, they should be relegated to the ordinary jurisdiction of their bishops. As the papal delegation of power to the inquisitors gave them exclusive faculties in all cases of faith, this imperial rescript would have been invalid without papal sanction, but this had already been procured in the brief Altitudo divini consilii of Paul III, June 1, 1537.417
It was probably through an oversight that the commissions issued to Francisco Tello de Sandoval in 1543 and to Dr. Contreras in 1570 granted them jurisdiction without exception over every one, of whatever condition, quality or state; possibly the latter may have commenced to exercise it on the Indians, but the error was rectified by Philip II, in a decree of December 30, 1571, ordering the inquisitors to observe their instructions and the previous law, and the injunction had to be repeated in 1575. Moreover, to silence any objections as to the episcopal power, he procured from Gregory XIII a brief granting full faculties to the bishops to absolve the Indians for heresy and all other reserved cases.418 The Indians thus remained exempt from prosecution by the Inquisition—an exemption popularly attributed to their not being gente de razon, or not rational enough to be responsible—which libel on their intellect Las Casas considers as perhaps the worst of the many offences committed upon them.419 They could, however, endure this philosophically so long as it exempted them from the Holy Office and confided them to the more temperate zeal of the bishops.420
While the Inquisition, as we have seen, maintained its awful dignity before the people, by the solemnity of its public functions and its severity towards the evil-minded, all was not entirely serene within its walls. In fact, its financial history illustrates so vividly some of the aspects of Spanish colonial administration that it is worth recounting in some detail. We have seen that Inquisitor Contreras was promised a salary of three thousand pesos and a prebend in the cathedral, but he was confronted with a decree of January 25, 1569, prescribing that the income of all benefices enjoyed by inquisitors and fiscals in the Indies was to be deducted from their salaries, and the retention of this provision in the Recopilacion shows that it was not of mere temporary validity.421 It was doubtless however waived in favor of the Inquisition, as was likewise another question which speedily arose.
The tribunal was expected to become self-supporting, from confiscations, fines and pecuniary penances, but this required time and meanwhile Philip granted it a subvention from the royal treasury, to continue during his pleasure, of 10,000 pesos per annum, being 3000 each for two inquisitors and a fiscal and 1000 for a notary. Although the tribunal started with but one inquisitor, the thrifty receiver, or treasurer, collected the salaries of two and, when called to account, claimed that he spent the money on the maintenance of poor prisoners. The treasury officials had no authority to allow this and refused further disbursements till the amount was made good but, when Philip was appealed to, he ordered, by a cédula of December 23, 1574, the receiver’s claim to be allowed.422 Thus early began the long-continued bickering between the Holy Office and the treasury, which Philip had already, in 1572, endeavored to quiet by instructing the inquisitors to obtain their salaries direct from the viceroy and not from subordinates, whom he forbade them to prosecute or excommunicate for the purpose of enforcing their demands.423
While Philip had provided liberally for the superior officials, he had taken no thought of the minor positions and, in spite of the solemnity of the autos de fe and the successful persecution of heresy, the internal working of the tribunal was pursued under difficulties, in the absence of resources from confiscations. A curious insight into these troubles is afforded by some correspondence of 1583 with Inquisitor-general Quiroga by the two inquisitors, Santos García and Bonilla. It seems that their portero or apparitor, Pedro de Fonseca, had exhibited to them a commission, which he had secretly obtained from Quiroga, promoting him to the post of notary of sequestrations. They met this piece of jobbery with the favorite inquisitorial formula—obedecer y no cumplir, obeying without executing—for they say they obeyed it without admitting him to the office until they could consult the cardinal. This notariate, they say, is the least necessary of offices, as there are no sequestrations or confiscations, and they have no other portero and no money wherewith to pay a substitute: besides, Pedro is destitute of all qualifications for the position. If a good salary could be assured, proper persons would apply for the position but, in the absence of salaries, the offices have not a good reputation and people say they are bestowed on any one who will accept them. In view of the poverty of the tribunal and small prospect of improvement they repeat what they had previously said that, if the king will not provide for it, it had better be abolished rather than maintained precariously, with the officers relying on the hope of confiscations that never come, so that one resigns today and another tomorrow, leaving only the alcaide and portero, who are so poor that they would also have gone if they saw other means of escaping their creditors. It is therefore suggested that, in addition to the two inquisitors, the fiscal and the notary, salaries be furnished of 600 ducats for an alguazil, 500 for an alcaide or gaoler and 400 for a messenger—or otherwise that, as in Spain, a canonry be suppressed for the benefit of the Inquisition, in each of the eleven bishoprics of the district, though this would have its disadvantages in view of the poverty of the churches and paucity of ministers. Then, in another letter the inquisitors announce that they have filled the vacant post of alguazil by appointing Don Pedro de Villegas, for whom they ask Quiroga to send a commission; it is true, they say, that he is too young, but then both he and his wife are limpio—free from any taint of heretic blood—and he has the indispensable qualification of possessing means to live on without a salary and that, in the present condition of the Inquisition, is the main thing to be considered.424
It is an emphatic testimony to the exhaustion of the royal treasury that so pious a monarch as Philip II should have shown indifference to this deplorable condition of a tribunal which had already given evidence so conspicuous of its services to the faith, but he remained deaf to all appeals and it was left to struggle on as best it could. As the number of its reconciled penitents increased it felt the need of a carcel perpetua or penitential prison, for their confinement and, having no funds wherewith to purchase a building, it besieged the Marquis of Monterey, the viceroy, for an appropriation. In 1596 he yielded in so far as to authorize the treasurer to lend the tribunal 2000 pesos, on its giving security to return the money in case the royal approbation should not be had within two years. The term elapsed without it, but Philip III, September 13, 1599, graciously approved the expenditure, at the same time warning the viceroy not to repeat such liberality without previous permission.425 Even though the monarchs were thus niggardly, there were advantages in serving the Inquisition which in many cases answered in lieu of salary, for official position conferred the fuero or right to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition as well as substantial exemptions. As early as 1572, Philip II decreed that, during the royal pleasure, the inquisitors, the fiscal, the judge of confiscations, one secretary, one receiver, one messenger and the alcaide of the secret prison should be exempt from taxation and the royal officials were ordered, under penalty of a thousand ducats and punishment at the king’s pleasure, to observe this and protect them in all the honors and exemptions which such officials enjoyed in Spain.426
A further, although illegal, relief was found by sharing in the repartimientos under which the Indians were allotted to Spaniards who lived upon their enforced labor. It is to this cruel system that Las Casas, Mendieta and Torquemada attribute the rapid wasting away of the natives and the hatred which they bore to the Spaniards. Among other attempts to diminish the evils arising from the system, repeated laws of 1530, 1532, 1542, 1551 and 1563 prohibited the allotment of Indians to any officials or to prelates, clerics, religious houses, hospitals, fraternities, etc. In spite of this, as soon as the Inquisition was established, it claimed and was allowed its quota in the allotments. It watched vigilantly, moreover, to see that it was not defrauded in any way, for one of its earliest recorded acts, in 1572, was the prosecution of Diego de Molina, the repartidor de los Indios of San Juan, because, in allotting the Indians of that place, the twelve assigned to the Inquisition proved to be boys and incapables, while the useful ones, who could be hired out advantageously, such as carpenters and masons, he gave for bribes to others. He was mercifully let off with five days’ imprisonment and a forcible warning and doubtless served as a wholesome example to other partitioners.427 Like most of the salutary legislation of Spain, it seems to have been impossible to enforce the prohibition, and that the Inquisition continued to enjoy the unpaid service of Indian serfs is manifested by its being specifically included in subsequent repetitions of the law in 1609, 1627 and 1635.428
When, as we have seen, the Judaizers commenced to appear among the penitents in the autos de fe, the longed-for relief derivable from confiscations, fines and penances was at hand. Spanish finance was already suffering the distress which was to become so acute and the treasury naturally looked to find its burden lightened by the income from these sources. It looked in vain, for whatever the tribunal acquired from its victims it retained and it persisted, with incredible audacity, in refusing even to render an account, although the confiscations belonged to the crown which never renounced its claim to them. In 1618 a royal cédula required the receiver to render itemized statements of all receipts and expenditures; in 1621 Philip IV sought to enforce this by ordering his viceroys in the Indies not to pay salaries until proof should be furnished that the confiscations were insufficient to meet them in whole or in part, and this was to be observed inviolably, no matter what urgency there might be, but repetitions of the decree, in 1624 and 1629, show how completely it was ignored.429 Not the slightest attention was paid to these repeated royal commands and, to the last, the Inquisition never permitted either the king or the Council of Indies to know what it acquired in this manner, although the sums were large and the tribunal became wealthy through investments of the surplus, besides making, with more or less regularity, very considerable remittances to the Suprema.
Finding himself thus baffled by the immovable resistance of the Holy Office, Philip, in 1627, sought to relieve his treasury by despoiling the Church. He reported to Urban VIII that he expended 32,000 ducats a year on the tribunals of Mexico, Lima and Cartagena, wherefore he prayed that the bull of Paul IV, January 7, 1559, suppressing a prebend in every cathedral and collegial church in Spain, for the benefit of the Inquisition, might be extended to the Indies. Urban complied in a brief of March 10, 1627, whereupon Philip ordered the archbishop and bishops to remit to the senior inquisitors of their respective tribunals the fruits of the prebends as they should fall in, furnishing, at the same time, to the royal officials a statement of the sums thus paid, so that the amount should be deducted from the salaries.430 Receipts from this source commenced at once and went on increasing as vacancies occurred, amounting, according to the estimate of the Council of Indies, to 30,000 pesos per annum for the three tribunals, while the Suprema admitted that those of Mexico and Lima produced about 11,000 pesos each, but those of Cartagena, it said, yielded only about 5000.431
During this time there had been frequent collisions between the inquisitors and the treasury officials, arising from the refusal of the former to reveal the amount of the confiscations and penances and the obedience, more or less persistent, of the latter to the royal commands to require such statements as a condition precedent to paying the royal subvention. In these collisions the inquisitors enforced their demands as usual by prosecution and excommunication, giving rise to unseemly controversies and, when the Suprema forbade their use of such measures, they were reduced to impotence. In a letter of February 13, 1634, they complained bitterly of this; during 1633, they said, in spite of all their efforts, they received no money until October, after all the royal officials had been paid and, as they had no other means of support, they were exposed to the deepest humiliations.432 The suppressed canonries, however, introduced an element of pacification and, in the Concordia of 1633, between the Suprema and the Council of Indies, a plan to harmonize differences was agreed upon which was a practical surrender to the Inquisition. It provided that every year, before the first tercios (four months’ instalments in advance) were paid, the receivers should render a sworn itemized statement of all receipts and expenditures, including confiscations, fines and penances, in accordance with the royal cédulas and, when this was delivered to the viceroy, the tercios should be paid in advance without delay. If the treasury officials should take exception to any portion of the statement, they were to forward it with their comments to the Council of Indies, but this was not to interfere with the prompt payment of the salaries and the inquisitors were to furnish the Suprema with their explanations. If the statement should show a surplus applicable to the salaries, this was, if agreed to by both parties, to be deducted from the second tercio; but if the inquisitors presented any reasons why this tercio should be paid in full, the treasury should pay it and the question be referred for settlement to the two Councils. The inquisitors were not to proceed against the treasury officials with censures or fines or other penalties, but were to apply to the viceroy, to whom positive instructions were sent to pay them punctually, both the arrearages then unpaid and the current salaries, while any fines or penalties that had been imposed were to be withdrawn or, if collected, to be refunded.433
This elaborate arrangement is only of importance as showing that, in spite of the suppressed canonries, the treasury was still required to support the tribunal and that the latter could be bound by no agreements however solemnly entered into. Except at Cartagena it was never carried into effect. No statement of receipts was ever rendered. In 1651, Count Alva de Aliste, the viceroy, reported to Philip IV that he had no means of learning what the confiscations amounted to but, on cautiously sounding the inquisitors, they told him that they reported them to the Suprema and would obey its instructions. They might well keep the facts secret. In the exterminating persecution of the wealthy New Christians, during the decade 1640-50, of which more hereafter, the confiscations were very large, placing the tribunal at its ease for all future time, besides what was embezzled by the inquisitors. The auto of 1646 yielded 38,732 pesos; that of 1647, 148,562. What was gathered in two autos held in 1648 does not appear, but between November 20, 1646, and April 24, 1648, the inquisitors remitted 234,000 pesos in bills of exchange while the crowning auto of 1649 furnished three millions more.434 In spite of this enormous influx of wealth, the Inquisition still maintained its grip on the royal subvention of 10,000 pesos per annum, though for how long it is impossible to determine with positiveness. In the prolonged controversy which raged between the Suprema and the Council of Indies over the relations of the colonial tribunals, the former, in 1667, positively declared that, after 1633, there had been no subvention paid in Mexico or Lima and this assertion was repeated in 1676, but the statements of the Suprema are so full of duplicity that no reliance can be reposed in them.435 On the other hand, in 1668, we find the Council of Indies earnestly advising the king to withdraw the subvention on the ground that the tribunals were rich and could support themselves, as they do in Castile; in 1675 it speaks of the payments as still continuing and urges their discontinuance without consulting the Suprema, as it is a matter wholly within the control of the treasury and, in 1676, Carlos II answered the Suprema by demanding a prompt decision as to a proposition made by the Council of Indies to discontinue the subventions enjoyed by the three tribunals for the salaries of their officials.436 When they were definitely discontinued it would be impossible to assert, but it is probable that those of Mexico and Lima were stopped in 1677, while that of Cartagena was prolonged even later. In 1683 Inquisitor Valera of that tribunal complained that, owing to the exhaustion of the public treasury through wars and piratical attacks, an arrearage had accumulated of thirty-three tercios. He claimed that the king was indebted to the tribunal in the sum of 58,000 pesos and he urged its transfer to Santa Fe, where the royal treasury was in better condition to meet the obligation. The transfer was not made, payments of the subvention became more and more irregular and we shall see that in 1706 the tribunal was still unavailingly endeavoring to enforce them.437
In a letter to the king, July 31, 1651, the viceroy, Alva de Aliste, took the ground that the subvention had been merely a loan, to be repaid when confiscations should come in, and as, within the last few years, these had been large enough to settle the debt, he had had the accounts examined and had found that, since the beginning, there had been advanced for salaries 559,189 pesos, 6 tomines and 5 granos and, for other purposes, 6837 pesos, 5 granos, wherefore he suggested that the king should compel restitution of this amount.438 To a treasury so desperately embarrassed as that of Spain the prospect of such relief was most welcome. Philip referred the viceroy’s letter to the Council of Indies, which delayed its reply till December 12, 1652, when it advised the king that examination showed that the salaries were to be defrayed by the confiscations, which were to be reported to the treasury. The only light that could be thrown upon the subject was to be sought in the registration, by the Contratacion of Seville, of the amounts of silver passing through it from Mexico and Peru and from these registers it appeared that the colonial tribunals had remitted to the Suprema the aggregate of 76,965 pesos de ensayados and 85,454 pesos de á ocho, thus showing that those tribunals had revenues largely in advance of their needs. In view of the magnitude of the sums furnished by the treasury, the extensive confiscations, the income of the suppressed canonries and the dire necessities of the royal finances, it therefore advised the king to call upon the Suprema for restitution and to furnish statements of the amount of the confiscations from the beginning. To this the king replied, in the ordinary formula of approval “It is well and so have I ordered.”439 When the Suprema was concerned, however, obedience by no means followed royal orders and so it proved in this case.
Philip’s weakness was shown in his next despatch to the viceroy, February 1, 1653, in which he said that he had determined that the Suprema should arrange to make restitution and that, to facilitate a proper adjustment of the matter, it should furnish a statement of all confiscations from the beginning, “for neither my Council of Indies nor my viceroys have been able to obtain this, but only the records of the shipments of silver from the Indies.”440 There is no evidence that the Suprema made any attempt to obey the royal commands or that it paid any attention to a reiterated demand made on August 12, 1655. Then the effort seems to have been abandoned and the matter was allowed to slumber until attention was called to it again in 1666. Philip had written, August 12, 1665, to the Marquis of Mansera, then Mexican viceroy, urging him to extinguish the debt of 1,333,264 pesos, by which amount the Mexican treasury was in arrears with its payments. The viceroy replied, September 5, 1666, pointing out the difficulty of accomplishing this and, at the same time, keeping up the remittances by the fleet, which were imperatively required by the absolute needs of the monarchy. He added that one of the chief causes of the indebtedness was the large sums withdrawn from it by the salaries and expenses of the Inquisition since its foundation in 1570; this had been intended as a loan, until it could be repaid from the confiscations, fines and penances but, although these had been large, restitution had never been made. The cédula of 1653 had inferred that the matter would be settled between the two councils and therefore the viceroys were powerless, but he suggested that the tribunal was rich and held large amounts of property; it had the disposition, which it might not have in future, to commence making this just and long overdue payment. This despatch the Council of Indies reported to the queen-regent, together with copies of the royal cédulas of 1653 and 1655, in order that she might compel the Suprema to make restitution, not only of the sums reported by Count Alva de Aliste, but of what had since been paid to the tribunal, seeing that it had the means to do so and was remitting such large amounts to the Suprema.441
It is scarce worth while to follow in detail the discussion which ensued, lasting, with true Spanish procrastination, until 1677, when the effort to make the Inquisition refund seems to have been abandoned out of sheer weariness. Of course the feeble queen-regent and the feebler boy-king, Carlos II, failed in the attempt and the only importance to us of the debate lies in the falsehoods and prevarications of the Suprema’s defence. It was notorious that there had been heavy confiscations, for persecution, as we have seen, had become active and exceedingly profitable as the half-century had drawn to a close. The tribunal had grown rich and had made large investments, besides the enormous remittances to the Suprema, and these had been derived almost exclusively from the confiscations and penances. Yet the Suprema endeavored to make it appear that financially confiscation had been a failure. There had been some confiscations, it admitted, in Mexico and Lima; there was the one of Diego López de Fonseca, amounting to 79,965 pesos, but Jorje de Paz of Madrid and Simon Rodriguez Bueno of Seville had come forward with claims amounting to more. They had asked to have the money sent to the receiver of Seville for adjudication and, on its arrival, the king had seized it and, by a cédula of July 14, 1652, had bound himself to satisfy the claimants, which he did by assigning to them certain matters. It was true that, in 1642, a number of Judaizing Portuguese had been discovered in Mexico, of whom some had moderate fortunes and one was reputed to be rich, but on the outbreak of the Portuguese rebellion, for fear that the viceroy would embargo their property, they had concealed it, and although the Inquisition had published censures, only a little had been discovered, while there came forward creditors with evidences of claims amounting to 400,000 pesos, so that it was difficult to make the confiscations meet them, to say nothing of the heavy expenses of feeding the prisoners, hiring houses to serve as prisons and the increased number of officials required. Besides this, there was protracted and costly litigation in investigating the claims and detecting suspected frauds. For this, Archbishop Mañozca was appointed visitador; on his death Medina Rico was sent out for the same purpose and, when he died, the matter had not been settled, nor has it yet.442 If the Suprema was to be believed, confiscation cost more than it came to.
In the same way it sought by garbled statements to conceal the fact that it was secretly deriving a considerable revenue from the colonial tribunals, thus proving that they were possessed of superabundant means. In its private accounts for the year 1657, there is an item of 10,000 ducats from those of Mexico and Lima, with the remark that this is always in arrears and is now two years overdue443—for the tribunals were as anxious as the Suprema to conceal their gains. Yet it could not hide the fact that it was in receipt of large remittances through the Contratacion of Seville and the Government, in its extremity, had an awkward habit of seizing what took its fancy and possibly paying for silver in vellon, for we chance to hear of such an occurrence in 1639 and again in 1644.444 The Council of Indies, as we have seen, did not fail to call attention to the large amounts which it was thus receiving, but it airily replied, in its consulta of November 16, 1667, that the three tribunals had, at various times, remitted the aggregate of 130,803 pesos, 3 reales, as the proceeds of sales of varas or offices of alguazil, and that this and much more, from the home tribunals, amounting in all to over 700,000 pesos, had been contributed to the necessities of the State. It repeated this, May 11, 1676, with the addition that the colonial tribunals had sent about 8000 pesos to the fund for the attempted canonization of Pedro Arbués and that there were also remittances for the media añata of the officials and for the deposits of aspirants to office to defray the expenses of the investigations into limpieza—the whole manifesting extreme desire to divert attention from the confiscations.445 In spite of these subterfuges there can be no question that the tribunals of Mexico and Lima accumulated vast amounts of property. The magnificence of the palace of the Mexican tribunal, rebuilt from 1732 to 1736, shows that it could gratify its vanity with the most profuse expenditure.446 That it was fully able to do this without impairing its revenues may be assumed from the assertion, in 1767, of the royal fiscal, when arguing a case of competencia before the Audiencia, that if its accumulations were not checked, the king would have but a small portion of territory in which to exercise his jurisdiction.447 Certain it is that the tribunal continued to be able to render large pecuniary support to the home institution. In 1693 we hear of a remittance of 93,705 pesos and in 1702 of 19,898 in spite of heavy defalcations by the receivers. This was followed by remittances of 40,000 pesos in 1706, of 16,500 in 1720, and of 31,500 in 1727. In 1771 the tribunal lent to the viceroy, for the emergencies of the war with England, 60,000 pesos, which were repaid, and, in 1795, a further loan was made of 40,000 to aid in the war then raging.448 As late as 1809 the Government seized a remittance from it to the Suprema of 60,131½ pesos and gave a receipt for the proceeds, being 915,886 reales, for which, after the Restoration, we find the Suprema claiming restitution.449 In spite of these reiterated drains we shall see hereafter what wealth the tribunal possessed when suppressed.
If we are to trust the list of sanbenitos hung in the cathedral of Mexico, after the great auto of 1601, there ensued a period of comparative inaction for nearly half a century, in which Protestants almost disappeared and were replaced by comparatively few Judaizers.450 The sanbenitos however represent only the serious cases and the tribunal continued to gather its customary harvest of bigamists, blasphemers, sorcerers, solicitors and other minor offenders, some of whom yielded a liberal amount of fines.451 In fact, a report of the cases pending in 1625 amounts to the very considerable number of sixty-three, showing that there was ample business on hand, receiving attention with more or less diligence.452 After this however the activity of the tribunal diminished so greatly that, on July 12, 1638, it reported that it had not a single case pending, and a year later that it had but one, which was against a priest charged with solicitation in the confessional.453 This is a singular tribute to the efficacy of the Edict of Faith—a proclamation requiring, under pain of excommunication, the denunciation of all offences enumerated under it, of which any one might be cognizant or have heard of in any way. According to rule, this should be solemnly published every year in all parish and conventual churches; it kept the faithful on the watch for all aberrations and rendered every one a spy and an informer. It had, however, at this time, fallen into desuetude. In a letter of February 13, 1634, the inquisitors say that for ten years the publications had been suspended in consequence of the indecency which attended it after the viceroys refused to be present, owing to quarrels as to ceremonial, and they ask that a royal order should be issued through the Council of Indies requiring the attendance of the civil magistracy in the procession and publication.454
Nearly ten years more, however, were to elapse, before the questions of etiquette and precedence were settled, and at last, on March 1, 1643, the Edict was read with all solemnity in the cathedral of Mexico and was followed by an abundant harvest of denunciations.455 How numerous these habitually were may be gathered from partial statistics of those received after a publication of the Edict in 1650. These were recorded in eight books, of which four, representing presumably one-half, have been preserved, containing altogether two hundred and fifty-four cases of the most varied character, as may be seen by the summarized classification below.456
The most significant feature in this mass of so-called testimony is the manner in which the most trivial acts inferring suspicion were watched and denounced, so that every man lived under a universal spy-system stimulated by the readiness of the Inquisition to listen to and make record of the veriest gossip passing from mouth to mouth. Thus one informer relates how in 1642, eight years before, he saw Simon de Paredes quietly put to one side on his plate a piece of pork that came to him from among the miscellaneous contents of the olla. Another gravely deposes how a man had casually told him that he had heard how a miner named Blas Garcés, of the mines of Los Papagayos, now dead, had once taken some of the herb Peyote to find some mines of which he had chanced to see specimens, and the marvels which thence ensued.457 From the book of Membretes kept by the tribunal it would appear that when this kind of evidence did not lead to a prosecution it was carefully preserved and indexed for reference in case of subsequent testimony against an individual. Such was the training of the population and such was the shadow of terror under which every man lived.
Meanwhile, during the quiescent period of the tribunal, the class of New Christians, who secretly adhered to the ancient faith, increased and prospered, accumulating wealth through the opportunities of the colonial trade which they virtually monopolized. Their fancied security, however, was approaching its end. The vigorous measures taken in Spain, between 1625 and 1640, to exterminate the Portuguese Judaizers, revealed the names of many accomplices who had found refuge in the New World; these were carefully noted and sent to the colonial tribunals.458 Moreover, from 1634 to 1639, the Lima Inquisition was busy in detecting and punishing a large number of its most prominent merchants guilty of the same apostasy, who had relations with their Mexican brethren, revealed during the trials. The tribunal seems to have been somewhat slow in realizing the opportunities thus afforded, but in 1642 there opened an era of active and relentless persecution which was equally effective in enriching its treasury and in purifying the faith. To prevent the escape of its victims, on July 9th it sent orders to Vera Cruz prohibiting the embarkation of any Portuguese who could not show a special licence from it. A wealthy merchant named Manuel Alvarez de Arrellano had already sailed for Spain, but his ship was wrecked on Santo Domingo and he was compelled to return to Havana. The tribunal was on his track and, on December 1st, it sent orders to its commissioner at Havana to arrest him, seize all his property, sell it at auction and send him in chains with the proceeds to Vera Cruz. This was successfully accomplished and, in acknowledging his arrival, the tribunal gave further instructions as to some cases of cochineal, which it understood to have been saved from the wreck.459
There was small chance of escape for any culprit. The New Christians were closely connected by family, religious and business ties, and each new prisoner was forced to implicate his friends and kindred. Gabriel de Granada, a child of 13, arrested in July, 1642, was made to give evidence against 108 persons, including his entire family.460 There were then three inquisitors, Francisco de Estrada y Escobedo, Bernabé de la Higuera y Amarilla and Juan Saenz de Mañozca, whose names became a terror to the innocent as well as to the guilty. Their cruel zeal is manifested in a letter to the Suprema virtually asking authority to relax ten persons, although they had confessed and professed repentance in time to entitle them, by the rules of the Inquisition, to reconciliation.461 It was a wild revel of prosecutions and condemnations. Medina Rico, the visitador or inspector who came in 1654, reported that, in reviewing the proceedings, he found that no attention had been paid to the defences presented by the accused, although in many cases they were just. A single case will indicate the heartlessness of the tribunal. September 24, 1646, Doña Catalina de Campos sought an audience to say that she was very sick and near unto death and that she would die in the Catholic faith in which she had lived. She was sent back to her cell, no attention was paid to her and some days later she was found dead and gnawed by rats.462
The result of this method of administering justice was a succession of autos particulares, in 1646, 1647 and 1648, followed by an auto general in 1649.
In 1646 there were thirty-eight Judaizers reconciled and, as reconciliation, in addition to prison and sanbenito, inferred confiscation, the harvest as we have seen was large. In 1647 the number was twenty-one.463 In 1648 there were two autos—a public one on March 29th and an auto particular in the Jesuit church on March 30th. In the former there were eleven penitents for various offences, eight Judaizers penanced and eight reconciled, two reconciliations for Mahometanism, twenty-one effigies of Judaizers burnt and one burning in person. In the latter there was one penitent brought from the Philippines for suspicion of Mahometanism, who escaped with abjuration de levi and servitude for life in a convent for instruction; there were two for personating priesthood and administering sacraments without orders, who received 300 and 200 lashes respectively and were sent to the galleys; one for marrying in orders, who abjured de vehementi and was sent to serve in a hospital for five years; a bigamist who had 200 lashes and the galleys; a curandera, who employed charms to cure disease and was visited with 200 lashes and perpetual exile from Puebla, and finally there were twenty-one Judaizers. Of these, two escaped with fines of 2000 and 3000 ducats respectively and perpetual exile from Mexico, one was only exiled and eighteen were reconciled with confiscation and various terms of imprisonment, in addition to which five of them were scourged and, of these latter, two were also sent to the galleys.464
The great auto general of April 11, 1649, marks the apogee of the Mexican Inquisition and of this we have a very florid account, written by an official.465 A month in advance the solemn proclamation announcing it was made in Mexico, March 11th, with a gorgeous procession, to the sound of trumpet and drum, and this had previously been sent to every town in New Spain, so that it was published everywhere at the same hour. Consequently, for a fortnight in advance of the appointed day, crowds began to pour in, some of them from a distance of a hundred or two hundred leagues, till, as we are told, it looked as though the country had been depopulated. The reporter exhausts his eloquence in describing the magnificence of the procession of the Green Cross, on the afternoon preceding the auto, when all the nobles and gentlemen of the city, in splendid holiday attire, took part, and the standard of the Inquisition was borne by the Count of Santiago, whose grandfather had done the same in the great auto of 1574 and his father in that of 1601. A double line of coaches extended through the streets, from the Inquisition to the plazuela del Volador, where the ceremonies were to be performed, and so anxious were their occupants not to lose their positions that they remained in them all night and until the show was over. It might seem that all Mexico, from the highest to the lowest, was assembled to demonstrate the ardor of its faith and to gain the indulgence which the Vicar of Christ bestowed on those who were present at these crowning exhibitions of the triumph of the Church Militant. Inside of the Inquisition the night was spent in notifying of their approaching fate those who were about to die and in preparing them for death.
Of the one hundred and nine convicts there was but one Protestant, a Frenchman named François Razin, condemned to abjure for vehement suspicion of heresy and to two years’ service in a convent for instructions; as he was penniless, we are told that he was not fined. There were nine Judaizers who abjured for vehement suspicion and were banished to Spain; three of them, being impoverished, were not fined but on the other six were imposed mulcts, ranging from 1000 to 6000 ducats, amounting in all to 15,000 ducats and one in addition had 200 lashes. There were nineteen reconciled, whose estates of course were confiscated, as also were those of the relaxed, seventy-eight in number. Of these, fifty-seven were effigies of the dead, of whom ten had died in prison, two of the latter being suicides, in addition to which were eight effigies of fugitives. Thirteen were relaxed in person, but of these twelve were garroted before burning, having professed repentance and conversion in time. Only one was burnt alive—the hero of the occasion, Tomás Treviño of Sobremonte. His mother had been burnt at Valladolid, and nearly all of his kindred, as well as those of his wife, had been inmates of the Inquisition. He had been reconciled in the auto of 1625 and there could be no mercy for a relapsed apostate, though he could have escaped the fiery death by professing conversion again. He had lain in prison for five years during his trial, always denying his guilt, but when notified of his conviction, the night before the auto, he proclaimed himself a Jew, declaring that he would die as such, nor could the combined efforts of all the assembled confessors shake his resolution. To silence what were styled his blasphemies, he was taken to the auto gagged, in spite of which he made audible assertion of his faith and of his contempt for Christianity. It is related that, after his sentence, when he was mounted to be taken to the quemadero, the patient mule assigned to him refused to carry so great a sinner; six others were tried with the same result and he was obliged to walk until a broken-down horse was brought, which had not spirit enough to dislodge its unholy burden. An Indian was mounted behind him, who sought to convert him and, enraged at his failure, beat him about the mouth to check his blasphemies. Undaunted to the last, he drew the blazing brands towards him with his feet and his last audible words were—“Pile on the wood; how much my money costs me!”466
The inquisitor-general, Arce y Reynoso, on October 15, 1649, congratulated Philip IV on this triumph of the faith, which had been the source of joy and consolation and universal applause, whereat the pious monarch expressed his gratification and desired the inquisitors to be thanked in his name. As summarized by Arce y Reynoso the results of the four autos were two hundred and seven penitents of whom a hundred and ninety were Jews, nearly all Portuguese. There was one drawback to his satisfaction. The penitents sentenced to banishment were directed to be sent to Spain, and repeated royal orders required that they should be transported free of charge, but the captains of all vessels, both naval and commercial, refused to carry them without pay and, as they had been stripped of all their possessions, they could not defray the passage-money themselves, while the Inquisition made no offer to supply the funds. Consequently they remained in Vera Cruz or wandered through the land, throwing off their sanbenitos and infecting the population with their errors. Arce y Reynoso suggested to the king that he should give them rations while on board ship so as to help to bring them over. It never seemed to occur to him that the Inquisition, which was enriching itself with their confiscations, could spare the trifle requisite for the execution of its sentences on these homeless and penniless wretches.467
After this supreme manifestation of its authority, the Inquisition became again somewhat inert, for its attention was largely absorbed in settling the details of the confiscations which involved the greater portion of Mexican commerce.468 The tribunal had its routine business of bigamists, soliciting confessors and women guilty of so-called sorcery—cases usually despatched in the audience-chamber—though there was an auto particular celebrated October 29, 1656. In 1659, however, there was a public auto on November 19th which, though not large, merits attention by its severity and the peculiarity of some of the delinquents. Of these there were thirty-two in all—twelve blasphemers, two bigamists, one forger, one false witness, one for violating the secrecy of the prison, one who had been reconciled for Judaism in 1649 and had thrown off the sanbenito, a woman for suspicion of Judaism, an alumbrado, or mystic, with visions and revelations. Then there were two sisters Romero, prosecuted for fraudulent visions and revelations, of whom one was acquitted and the other had 200 lashes and ten years’ service in a hospital—a third sister having been penanced in the auto particular of 1656. There was also Manuel Méndez, a Portuguese, suspected of Judaism, who had died in prison and was now acquitted. Another Portuguese, Diego Díaz, was not so fortunate; he had been condemned in 1649 to abjuration de vehementi and perpetual banishment, but he did not leave Mexico; arrested February 26, 1652, he had lain in prison awaiting an auto and was now sentenced to be burnt alive as pertinaciously impenitent; by mistake the executioner commenced to garrote him, but was stopped by the alguazil mayor, who ordered the fire lighted, so that he had both punishments. Similar was the case of Francisco Botello, arrested in 1642, sentenced in 1649 to 200 lashes and banishment, remaining in Mexico, arrested again in 1650 and now garroted and burnt. These two cases indicate the treatment accorded to those alluded to above, who, after being stripped of their property, were ordered to leave the country, but were not furnished with means to do so.
Another convict, Francisco López de Aponte, was accused of pact with the demon and of heresies. He gave signs of insanity, but on examination by physicians was pronounced sane. Under severe torture he remained perfectly quiescent and insensible to pain, which could only be explained by diabolical aid, so he was shaved all over and inspected carefully for charms or for the devil’s mark, but in vain. A second torture was endured with the same indifference and he was condemned to relaxation as an apostate heretic. On the night before the auto he said to the confessor who endeavored to convert him “There is no God, nor hell, nor glory; it is all a lie; there is birth and death and that is all.” During the auto he manifested no emotion and was burnt alive as an impenitent.
Juan Gomez had been arrested, May 28, 1658, as an Illuminist and herége sacramentario, for teaching many opinions contrary to the Catholic faith. Condemned to relaxation, he maintained his heresies until, during the auto, he weakened and professed repentance, notwithstanding which he was burnt alive.
Pedro García de Arias was a wandering hermit who, although uneducated, had written three mystic books containing erroneous doctrine. When on trial he claimed that he had never committed sin, and he abused the Inquisition, for which he was scourged through the streets with 200 lashes. When notified of his condemnation to relaxation he protested that he would not beg for mercy, but on the staging he asked for an audience, in which he insisted that there were no errors in what he had written. Nevertheless he was garroted before burning, when his books, hung around his neck, were consumed with him.
Sebastian Alvárez was an old man who claimed to be Jesus Christ, but was pronounced to be sane by the experts who examined him. He persisted in his delusion and was sentenced to relaxation. On the staging he asked for an audience and was remanded to the Inquisition, where two days later he had an audience and, as he still asserted himself to be Christ, he was sentenced to burning alive if he did not retract. On the way to the quemadero he retracted and was garroted before burning.
In this curious assemblage of eccentric humanity, the most remarkable of all was an Irishman named variously William Lamport or Guillen Lombardo de Guzman. He had lain in prison since his arrest as far back as October 25, 1642, on a denunciation that he was plotting to sever Mexico from Spain and make himself an independent sovereign, for he claimed to be the son of Philip III by an Irish woman, and thus half-brother to Philip IV. This was his real offence, but the Inquisition claimed jurisdiction because he had consulted an Indian sorcerer and certain astrologers to assure the success of his enterprise. The details of his scheme show that it was suggested by the success with which, in June, 1642, Bishop Palafox, acting under secret orders from Philip, had ousted from the viceroyalty the Marquis of Escalona, who was suspected of treasonable leanings towards João of Braganza and the revolted Portuguese. With the aid of an Indian singularly skilled in forgery, Lamport had drawn up all the necessary royal decrees which would enable him to seize control, on the arrival of the expected new viceroy, the Count of Salvatierra. Yet he was no common adventurer, but a man of wide and various learning, thoroughly familiar with English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek, with the classical poets and philosophers, with the Scriptures and the fathers and with theology and mathematics. This was proved by the memorials which he drew up in prison, without the aid of books, yet full of citations and extracts in all languages and of scripture texts. These were scrutinized by the calificador who verified the citations and found them all correct and who moreover certified that there were no errors of faith.
In the account of his life, which all prisoners of the Inquisition were required to give, he stated that he had been born in England, from which he had fled in his twelfth year because of a pamphlet entitled Defensio Fidei which he had written against the king. After marvellous adventures in many regions, in which he had rendered services to Spain, Philip IV had summoned him to Madrid, where Olivares patronized him. He was then sent to Flanders to aid the Cardinal Infante, to whose success he largely contributed, especially at the battle of Nördlingen (1634). After much other service, Philip gave him the title of Marquis of Cropani and the viceroyalty of Mexico, from which he was to eject the occupant—and for this he held forged royal cédulas. That there was some residuum of truth at the bottom of his story would appear from his familiarity with details of persons and events, and there is no doubt that he was an object of interest in Madrid, for a royal cédula of May 13, 1643, ordered the case to be expedited and that after his punishment all his papers should be given to the judge, Andrés Gomez de Mora. Why the case should then have been protracted for seventeen years is inexplicable, unless it was designed to keep him imprisoned for life, but, however that may be, he continued to be a source of solicitude, not unkindly, for the Suprema, under royal orders, wrote June 21, 1550, that he should be given a cell-companion to alleviate his confinement if he so desired and that every care should be taken of his life. Again, on July 7, 1660, when the Suprema received the account of his relaxation, it wrote to ask why this had been done against its express orders. Altogether the case is a mystery to which the clue is lost.
Diego Pinto, the companion given to share his confinement, was soon won over to join him in a plan of escape, which was executed December 26, 1650, with remarkable skill and perseverance. In place of flying to some safe retreat Lamport spent the night in affixing in various prominent places certain writings which he had prepared, and in persuading a sentinel at the palace to convey one to the viceroy urging him to arrest the inquisitors as traitors. Towards dawn he induced a householder to take him in and awaited the result of his papers, besides writing others, when the host became apprehensive and made him remove to another house. No time was lost by the tribunal in issuing a proclamation, describing his person and ordering his capture under severe penalties; his host promptly reported him and he was carried back to the Inquisition, when he was lodged in an exceptionally strong cell, his feet in stocks and his hands in fetters. In January, 1654, he asked for writing materials, with which he composed a tremendous attack on the Inquisition, and during the winter he utilized the sheets of his bed to write a book, which when transcribed proved to be a treatise in Latin verse which filled 270 closely written pages. He had now lain twelve years in prison without trial; his overwrought brain was giving way and his insanity became more and more manifest. At last the time for the auto approached and, on October 8, 1659, without further audience, the accusation was presented; the trial proceeded swiftly and on November 6th sentence was pronounced, condemning him to relaxation for divination and superstitious cures showing express or implicit pact with the demon, besides which he had plotted rebellion and was a heretic sectary of Calvin, Pelagius, Huss, Luther and other heresiarchs and an inventor and dogmatizer of new heresies. As a special punishment for his defamatory libels and forgery of royal decrees, he was to listen to his sentence on the scaffold with a gag and hanging by his right arm fastened to an iron ring. During the night before the auto he assailed with opprobrious epithets the holy men who sought to save his soul; he exclaimed that a hundred legions of devils had entered his cell with them and finally he covered his head with the bed-clothes and refused to speak. At the auto on the staging he was like a statue and at the stake he escaped burning alive by throwing himself against the iron ring encircling his throat with such force that it killed him.469
The last act of the tragedy was the burning of the effigy of Joseph Bruñon de Vertiz, a priest whose offence was that he had been the dupe of the imposture of the Romero sisters and had reduced to writing their visions and revelations. Arrested September 9, 1649, he speedily admitted that he had been deceived and cast himself on the mercy of the inquisitors, vainly endeavoring to ascertain what was the nature of the charge against him so that he could confess and retract whatever errors were imputed to him. It was not, however, the estilo of the Inquisition to do more than to tell the accused to search his memory and clear his conscience and after eighteen months of this suspense Bruñon’s mind commenced to give way. He was left in his cell apparently forgotten, except when he would seek an audience to ask for writing materials with which, in 1652 and 1654, he drew up and presented attacks upon the tribunal of a character to show that he was becoming insane through despair. No notice was taken of these ebullitions and on April 30, 1656, he died without the sacraments, after six years and a half of incarceration, during which he had never been informed of the charges against him. His body was thrust into unconsecrated ground and the trial was continued against his fame and memory as an alumbrado heretic, in an accusation presented May 11, 1657. There was no defence possible by his kindred; he was duly condemned and in this auto of November 19, 1659, his effigy was brought forward, clad in priestly garments, the impressive ceremony of degradation was performed and it was cast into the flames with his bones exhumed for the purpose.470
Cruel as all this performance may seem to us, it was in strict conformity with the convictions of the age and, when Philip IV received the report of the auto, he warmly congratulated the inquisitor-general on the vigilance which preserved the purity of the faith by inflicting merited chastisement.471
With this auto the murderous activity of the tribunal may be said virtually to end. Until the end of the century its business consisted almost exclusively in the commonplace routine of bigamists, blasphemers, petty sorcerers, soliciting confessors, clerics administering the sacraments without priest’s orders and the like. Thus in an auto celebrated January 15, 1696, out of twenty-six penitents, there was but one heretic with a sanbenito; there was a Greek schismatic reconciled and the rest were sixteen bigamists, one Franciscan tertiary for Illuminism, a woman for imposture and four men and two women for the superstitious practices conveniently classed as sorcery with explicit or implicit pact with the demon.472 Yet during this half-century there were a couple of cases showing that a nearly bloodless career was not due to any surcease of fanatic zeal. In November, 1673, was arrested a wandering hermit named Juan Bautista de Cardenas, charged with being iluso y alumbrado, with grave suspicion of sacramentarian heresy. After giving the customary account of his life he took refuge in absolute silence, which suggested that he was possessed by a demon, but exorcism proved unavailing. Sharp torture was then tried, but it elicited only the usual shrieks of pain. The conclusion drawn from this was that he was a contumacious heretic and in July, 1675, he was condemned to relaxation, when, on being notified of it, he only said that if he was carried to the quemadero he would die for God. The tribunal however did not dare to execute its own sentence and sent the papers to the Suprema which, June 22, 1676, altered it to abjuration de levi, deprivation of the habit he wore and exile from the cities of Mexico and Puebla, adding that the torture had been abusive seeing that he had not been formally testified against for heresy. The other case was that of Fray Francisco Manuel de Cuadros, who had left his Order and practised as a curandero, or curer of disease by charms. He was thrown in prison, November 14, 1663, and during his trial, which was protracted for nearly fifteen years, he confessed to being an agnostic, except as to the existence of God, but he admitted that he was ignorant and half-crazy. At the auto of March 20, 1679, he was condemned to relaxation after degradation, but at the quemadero he showed signs of repentance, in virtue of which he was admitted to the sacraments and was strangled before burning.473
In the public autos there is no trace of one of the principal duties of the Inquisition in the repression of the prevalent crime of the seduction of women by their confessors, euphemistically known as solicitation in the confessional. Even as bigamy had been brought under inquisitorial jurisdiction by the somewhat forced assumption that it implied erroneous belief in the sacrament of matrimony, so solicitation was held to infer in the confessor error as to the sacrament of penitence. At least this was the reason alleged when, recognizing that the spiritual courts were useless to check the practice, Paul IV, in 1561 entrusted its suppression in the Spanish dominions to the Inquisition, and Gregory XV, in 1622, extended this to other lands in which the Holy Office existed. Priests, however, for the avoidance of scandal, were never paraded in public autos, unless they were to be deprived of their orders; their sentences were read in the audience-chamber with closed doors and in the presence only of a selected number of their brethren, to whom the fate of the culprit should serve as a wholesome warning.474 While, therefore, the knowledge of this offence was sedulously kept from the public, it gave the tribunal considerable occupation. The morals of the Colonial clergy, for the most part, were notoriously loose and, in the solitary missions and parishes among the natives, evil passions had free rein.475 This was enhanced by the almost assured prospect of immunity, for the women seduced were the only possible accusers and it has always proved exceedingly difficult to induce them to denounce their seducers. Naturally therefore the Inquisition, on its establishment, was speedily called upon to prosecute such culprits and, up to 1577, it already had five cases.476 It seems however not to have enforced its exclusive jurisdiction over the offence if we may judge from the proceedings in the case of Fray Juan de Saldaña, in 1583, for when it assumed the prosecution he was undergoing six months’ imprisonment by his superiors because at Tequitatlan he had violated an Indian girl and, when she refused to continue the connection, he had her arrested and flogged, after which she submitted. Though only 34 years of age he was a person of consideration in his Franciscan Order, he had occupied various positions of importance and at this time was guardian of the convent of Suchipila, where he seduced three sisters, his penitents, the daughters of Diego Flores, the encomendero of Suchipila and a person of distinction. There seems to have been little or no concealment about it; he boasted openly of the women he had seduced, Spanish as well as Indian, not only in Suchipila but in his visitations, and he evidently had no idea that he was incurring risk of the Inquisition, for when remonstrated with he asked what his prelates could do to him—it was only a dozen strokes of the discipline and a year’s suspension from his guardianship. When brought to trial he was frank in his admissions; two years before he had been deprived of confessing Spanish women, but as guardian he had licence to do so; he mentioned seven Indian women whom he had seduced in confession besides a mestizo and several Spaniards. In these cases, the accusation of the fiscal and the exordium of the sentence are eloquently rhetorical as to the heinous guilt in one, clothed with the awful power of the priesthood, using that power to lead astray the souls seeking salvation through him, but when it came to defining the penalty there is a tenderness which suggests that in reality the offence was regarded as much less important than aberration on some minute point of faith. When his sentence was read, May 5, 1584, he was subjected to the discipline for the space of a miserere; he was deprived of the faculty of confessing, was suspended from orders for six years, was recluded for two years in a convent with the customary disabilities and was banished for six years from the see of Guadalajara.477
Such treatment was not adapted to strengthen the carnal-minded against temptation so severe and the vice flourished accordingly. As the inquisitors stated in a letter to the Suprema of May 22, 1619, it was a very frequent offence in those parts and many confessors regarded it as trivial,478 and the list of cases of solicitation for the years 1622-4 contains fifty-six names, of which seven were from Manila, for the Philippines were a dependency of the Mexican tribunal. That leniency increased with time may be assumed from the case, in 1721, of Fray Francisco Diego de Zarate, President of the Mission of Santa María de los Angeles of Rio Blanca, a Franciscan entrusted with many important positions. The summary in his trial states that the evidence collected proved a hundred and twenty-six acts of solicitation with fifty-six women and that it was his habit to solicit every one who came to him to confess. It is impossible to conceive anything more brutal than some of the details of the evidence; the offence in many cases was almost public and might have continued indefinitely had he not banished from Rio Blanco a woman and her family because she resisted him, whereupon she talked and created a scandal that rendered action necessary. Of the women, twenty-one were Indians, eight were Spaniards (one of them his near relative), eight Mulattos, four Mestizos and fifteen whose race is not specified. When the accusation, detailing all the cases, was read to him, he admitted its correctness and indeed he had previously made a written confession which contained a large number that had escaped the investigations of the prosecution. Aggravated as was this case Fray Francisco escaped with a second reading of his sentence in the Franciscan convent, where a circular discipline was administered, perpetual deprivation of confessing and of active and passive voice in his Order, six months’ suspension from celebrating mass and two years’ reclusion in a convent, of which the first was to be passed in a cell with fasting on bread and water on Fridays and Saturdays, and the last place in choir and refectory.479 Yet inadequate as was the habitual treatment of the offence by the Inquisition, it was regarded as unduly harsh by the clerical authorities. The inquisitors, in a letter of 1666 to the Suprema, by way of illustrating the prevalent laxity of the Religious Orders, mention that after they had penanced four frailes for solicitation, they were applied to to remove the restrictions which prevented the culprits from being promoted to prelacies.480 Self-denunciation, as in Spain, was tolerably certain to win virtual immunity. In 1712, Luis Marin, vicar of Nativitas, accused himself by letter, to which the tribunal promptly responded by summoning him to appear within thirty days, but that only a reprimand was intended is evident from the summons being accompanied with a faculty to absolve him from the excommunication incurred, sent to Padre Fernández de Córdova, S. J., who was instructed to counsel him to abstain for the present from confessing women.481
The very miscellaneous functions assumed by the Inquisition in extending its jurisdiction over a variety of matters foreign to its original purpose is illustrated by a fortuitous collection of 397 cases between its commencement in 1572 and the year 1800. In these the offences alleged are482—
| Bigamy | 76 |
| Judaism | 71 |
| Offences against the Inquisition | 49 |
| Solicitation | 44 |
| Blasphemy | 39 |
| Sorcery and superstitions | 29 |
| Heresy | 20 |
| Propositions | 13 |
| Illuminism | 12 |
| False witness | 10 |
| Personating priesthood | 7 |
| Miscellaneous | 27 |
The considerable proportion of offences against the Inquisition arose from the perpetual troubles caused by what was known as its temporal jurisdiction, apart from its spiritual sphere of action. Every one connected with it in an official capacity, however insignificant, with his family, servants and slaves, was entitled, in a greater or less degree, to the fuero, or jurisdiction of the Holy Office, and to exemption from pleading or prosecution in the secular court if a layman, or the episcopal court if an ecclesiastic. As favoritism rendered this privilege virtually an immunity for crime it was eagerly sought and, as it was the source of influence and of profitable business, the tribunal endeavored to extend its jurisdiction in every way, with little regard to the limits imposed by law. This led to constant conflicts between the rival jurisdictions, in which the tribunal used without scruple its faculties of excommunication and of treating any opposition as an attempt to impede its freedom of action, a crime to be prosecuted and severely punished. In Spain these irreconcilable pretensions were the cause of constant troubles, the settlement of which was through the process known as competencia, carrying them up to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition on the one hand and to the Council of Castile or of Aragon on the other, with the monarch as the final arbiter. In the Colonies, however, as we shall see, this system was practically eluded, and the tribunals became even more arbitrarily lawless than those of the home country, sometimes abusing their power after a fashion that involved the whole land in confusion, for in matters of faith they had no superior, short of the inquisitor-general, and it rested with themselves to define what was, directly or indirectly, a matter of faith.
There were two classes of officials whose claims to the fuero were different. Those known as titulados y asalariados were directly employed in the tribunal, holding commissions from the inquisitor-general, enjoying salaries and understood to devote themselves exclusively to its service. For them and their families and dependants the fuero was complete, in both civil and criminal matters, and both active and passive—that is, whether as plaintiff or defendant. They were comparatively few in number, their position was unchallenged and, whatever may have been the injustice and oppression thence arising, there was little occasion for dispute. Beyond these were the unsalaried officials—commissioners and their notaries and alguazils, stationed at all important centres, consultors, calificadores or censors and, above all, familiars numerously scattered throughout the land. All these pursued their regular avocations and only acted when called on for special service; they received no salary, but the positions were eagerly sought, chiefly on account of the privileges and immunities which they conferred. Of these the familiars were by far the most numerous and troublesome. In Spain the definition of their privileges had been the subject of numerous settlements known as Concordias and, when Philip II established the colonial tribunals, he endeavored to forestall trouble by extending to them the Castilian Concordia of 1553, which was much less favorable to the familiars than those of the kingdoms of Aragon and, at the same time, he sought to limit the number of appointees.
Among the documents issued in 1570 is a cédula addressed to the colonial authorities, in which Philip conveys to them the regulations adopted by the inquisitor-general. In the city of Mexico there are allowed twelve familiars, in the cathedral towns four, in other towns one. Lists of these and of all changes are to be furnished to the local magistracy, so that they may see that the number is not exceeded and, in case of improper appointments, they are to report to the tribunal or, if necessary, to the inquisitor-general. In civil suits the familiars are not entitled to the fuero, whether as plaintiffs or defendants. In criminal matters not as plaintiffs while, as defendants, they are to enjoy it except in cases of treason, unnatural crime, raising popular commotions, forging letters of safe-conduct, resistance to royal commands, abduction or violation of women, highway robbery, house or church breaking, arson of houses or harvests and “other crimes greater than these” and also in resistance or disrespect to the royal judges. Excepted also is official malfeasance in those holding public office. Arrest by secular judges is permitted, in cases entitled to the fuero, provided the culprit is handed over to the Inquisition, together with the evidence, which is to be at his expense. If the offence is committed outside of the city of Mexico, the offender cannot return to his place of residence without exhibiting a copy of the inquisitorial sentence, with evidence of its fulfilment. By a cédula of May 13, 1572, moreover, offences committed against Indians were added to the excepted cases.483
This all appears definite enough, but it was easily evaded. At first there seems to have been a disposition to conform to its intent. In 1575 a familiar named Rodrigo de Yepes, who had given the lie to, and repeatedly struck in the face, the alcalde of Valladola, was arrested by the civil magistrate and claimed by the tribunal but, after a competencia, or discussion of the case by the civil and inquisitorial authorities, the latter admitted that it was excepted and surrendered him. On the other hand, in 1615, Diego de Carmona Jamariz, a familiar of Puebla, was arrested for the murder of his enemy, Joan de Olivárez, and was surrendered to the Inquisition without a competencia, although murder would seem to be a greater crime than highway robbery or burglary. The widow prosecuted him before the tribunal, but it was useless and the case was dropped. In Spain, the Inquisition had devised the ingenious argument that, until a crime was proved, it could not be classed as excepted and therefore the affair was under its jurisdiction until conviction, which enabled it to protect its familiars, and this plea was used, in 1616, in the case of Gonzalo Antúnez Yáñez, a familiar, prosecuted by order of the viceroy.484
It was not only the familiars who gave trouble, but the numerous other unsalaried officials. The commissioners with their notaries and alguazils formed little groups in the provincial towns, of which the members supported each other and set the magistrates and courts at defiance. In the original instructions issued to the inquisitors they were admonished to be careful in the selection of commissioners, who were not to interfere with the constituted authorities or to provoke quarrels, but were merely to execute the mandates of the tribunal and to report on such matters as should present themselves.485 Distance and the difficulty of communication, however, rendered them prone to abuse their position, and in this they were emboldened by the unwavering support of the tribunal. Throughout all the Spanish Colonies the commissioner was an object of dread and the subject of perpetual complaint on the part of the secular and ecclesiastical powers. The general sentiment is expressed, as late as 1777, by Santiago Joseph, Bishop of Cuba, in a letter to Inquisitor-general Bertran. All the commissioners whom he had known, he said, had been ignorant persons, with the exception of one whose term of service was brief. There was no salary to attract competent men and the place was taken only to serve as an excuse for neglecting all clerical functions and duties. The commerce of Havana brought numerous heretics who scattered their poison and he dared not interpose for fear of the consequences of invading inquisitorial jurisdiction. The existing incumbent paid no attention to this and, when not absent, was wholly occupied in stirring up quarrels with the civil authorities.486
The commissioners of Mexico fully justified this characterization by the good bishop. In the great majority of cases the hopelessness of resistance to their arbitrary acts caused submission, but occasionally one emerges to light which illustrates the spirit animating the Inquisition and its officials. In 1699, Father Pistoya, S. J., the ecclesiastical judge of Sinaloa, prosecuted Martin de Verastegui for incestuous adultery with Maria García. Thereupon his intimate friend, Pérez de Ribera, the commissioner, to protect him, promptly appointed him notary, an act for which he had no authority. Pistoya sent the evidence in the case to the royal court of Guadalajara (Jalisco), which ordered the Governor of Sinaloa, Don Jacinto de Fuensaldaña, to arrest the guilty pair, embargo their property and send them to the royal prison of Guadalajara. Ribera claimed him as an official of the Inquisition and, on refusal, excommunicated the governor and the military officers who had executed his orders and posted them as such on the tablillas of the church. The tribunal sustained its commissioner; the governor was obliged to appear before it and beg for absolution; the commissioner was empowered to take testimony in the case and report it to the tribunal, which naturally found the parties innocent and Verastegui was rewarded with a genuine notary’s commission in lieu of the fictitious one which had protected him from justice. It is no wonder that, in replying to their report of another outrageous case in 1695, the Suprema had sharply rebuked the inquisitors, ordering them to act with justice and moderation and prevent the complaints of their proceedings, which came daily to the king from the Council of Indies, but the case of Verastegui shows how little respect they paid to the admonition.487
Yet, with all this, there were comparatively few of the bitter struggles, so frequent in Spain during this period, between the royal and inquisitorial jurisdictions. It was not that the inquisitors were less arbitrary and audacious than at home, for their distance from the court rendered them even more independent, but that the secular magistracy felt its weakness and offered less resolute resistance. Spain was far off and the viceroy, though representing the royal autocracy, was under strict orders to show every favor to the Inquisition. There was kept in the royal chancellery the formula of a letter to all viceroys, emphasizing the great services of the Inquisition to religion and to the king and ordering it to be favored and guarded in all its privileges, exemptions and liberties, including those of its officials and familiars. Adherence to this would be regarded as most acceptable service and the contrary would not be permitted.488 This portentous document was sent to the Viceroys of Mexico and Peru in 1603 and was doubtless repeated to them whenever necessary, as it was to other royal representatives at subsequent periods. As a rule however the viceroys and the tribunal were at odds and their quarrels were not conducive to popular tranquillity or edification. More than once we find viceroys like Mancera, Cerralbo and Gelvez threatening the inquisitors with banishment.489
As a matter of course, under such auspices, colonial inquisitors could never be restrained within the limit of their rightful prerogatives, great as these were. A royal cédula of January 20, 1587, scolds those of Lima for illegal protection of their familiars and for vexing the local magistrates by summoning them from long distances before the tribunal. Another of March 8, 1589, rebukes them for creating too many familiars and other officials. Another of August 23, 1595, reprimands those of Mexico for supporting a familiar in refusing to render an account to the royal chancery of his functions as custom-house officer at Vera Cruz.490 These complaints were of almost daily occurrence until at length Philip III sought to cut them off at the root by forming a junta of two members from each of the Councils of the Inquisition and of Indies to advise him. After mature deliberation they did so and the result is what is known as the Concordia of 1610. The prohibitions embodied in this are eloquent of the audacity of the inquisitors in exceeding their functions, abusing their authority in matters wholly outside of their jurisdiction and exercising an insufferably vexatious petty tyranny, the exasperating effect of which was intensified by the immunity enjoyed by the servants and slaves of the officials. These were justiciable only by the tribunal, which invariably protected them, so that the community was exposed without redress to the insolence of a class peculiarly apt to abuse its privileges.
Under pain of forfeiture of office the inquisitors were forbidden, directly or indirectly, by themselves or their kindred, to farm the public revenues or to prevent their being farmed to the highest bidder. Neither they nor the salaried officials were to engage in any kind of trade, under the same penalty. They were not to claim the right of seizing articles at an appraised price, except under urgent necessity for the support of the prisoners or buildings of the Inquisition. Their negroes were not to carry arms except when accompanying their masters. They were not to defend commissioners or familiars in frauds on the revenue nor in refusing to render an account of deposits made with them by order of court. They were not to detain the couriers and messengers who served as a rudimentary post-office and were to remove the prohibition against vessels leaving port or passengers departing without their licence. They were not to arrest the royal alguazils except for grave and notorious excess against the Inquisition. They were to be allowed one alguazil in Vera Cruz and were to dismiss all those appointed elsewhere.491 They were not to protect familiars, who held public office, when prosecuted for official malfeasance, nor commissioners who held benefices for offences committed in their character of incumbents. They were not to order universities to grant degrees in contravention of their statutes, nor were they to interfere in matters of government apart from their functions. They were not to excommunicate a viceroy in cases of competencia, nor was the viceroy to evoke to himself a case that might lead to a competencia. A provision was also made for the settlement of competencias without the tedious resort to the councils in Spain. If the senior judge and senior inquisitor could not agree in their conference, the inquisitors were to name three ecclesiastical dignitaries to the viceroy, who was to select one; he was to be adjoined to the judge and inquisitor and the majority was to decide or, if there were three discordant opinions, the viceroy was to choose between them.492
This project for the settlement of competencias was ineffective. A cédula of February 7, 1569, had extended to the colonies the system in force at home, and under it there had been in Mexico, during the remainder of the century, seven cases; there was one in 1601 and another in 1602, after which they ceased.493 Solorzano tells us that they were not revived by the new regulations, which omitted to specify the place where the conferences were to be held, and the judges and inquisitors each summoned the others to come to them. The judges had old custom and royal cédulas on their side, but the inquisitors refused compliance because the orders had not been transmitted to them through the Suprema which they claimed was requisite to their validity, and thus important cases, both civil and criminal, remained undecided, to the great injury of individuals and the public. Moved by the complaints thus occasioned, Philip III, in a cédula of November 19, 1618, ordered that the conferences be held in the vice-regal palace, where the senior judge was to have precedence over the inquisitor, and this was repeated in a cédula to the court of Lima, May 28, 1621, but again the inquisitors of both Mexico and Peru refused obedience on the same pretext as before. Thus cases continued undecided until the urgency of the Council of Indies led Philip IV to consult both councils and, in 1636, he ordered that the judge and inquisitor should meet before the viceroy, the one who was senior in office taking the right hand.494 This compromise did not suit the pretensions of the Holy Office for precedence and it gained the victory in a cédula of May 30, 1640, which recites that, after many conferences, it was determined that the senior judge must go to the Inquisition, where the senior inquisitor was to have precedence, when the competencia was to be settled under the provisions of the Concordia of 1610.495 Apparently this assumption of their inferiority was insufferable to the judges, for no formal competencia occurred between 1602 and 1711. Matters in dispute were occasionally referred to the councils in Spain, but this was of little benefit for it was usually the last heard of the case.496 To appreciate fully the cruelty of all this, we must reflect that perhaps some accused person or unlucky alguazil, arrested for executing the orders of his superiors, might be languishing in gaol for a life-time, awaiting the settlement of a conflict of jurisdiction which could never be settled.
Whether or not the other prescriptions of the Concordia of 1610 were better observed than those concerning competencias it would be difficult to determine, but the presumption is adverse. At all events, inquisitorial ingenuity was constantly devising new methods of aggression and further complaints led Philip IV to assemble a junta of two members of each council, whose conferences resulted in the enactment of another Concordia, published April 11, 1633. Many of its clauses relate to the ever-present question of precedence, which need not detain us here, except the suggestive one that, at bull-fights in the plaza, the first courses are to be performed before the secular authorities, unless the latter, of their own accord, desire that honor to be paid to the inquisitors. Equally suggestive in another way are the prescriptions that commissioners shall treat the public courteously and that inquisitors shall treat the judges with respect and shall cease molesting the officers of the royal courts with censures and summoning and detaining them. They are again forbidden to engage in trade and are told not to interfere with the elections of secular officials nor, in times of scarcity, are they to persecute with excommunications the guards in charge of boats bringing grain, but are to apply to the viceroy, who will promptly supply their wants. The prohibition of detaining ships is repeated, but they are allowed to grant licences for sailing and for individuals to depart, which practically amounted to the same thing. The inquisitors seem to have gained their point as to the right of seizing goods and materials at a “just price,” for this is allowed, subject to some limitations. The inviolability of the domicile of inquisitors is admitted in the provision that it is not to be abused by secreting goods to the prejudice of third parties; and, in the case of salaried officials, it is limited by a clause that when it is necessary for officers of justice to enter the house of such official, or of the widow of one during her widowhood, notice shall first be given to the tribunal, which shall appoint one of its ministers to be present, with an appointee of the viceroy or court and, if such an appointment is not made within two or three hours, the entry can be made without longer waiting. One of the petty privileges which gave rise to constant exacerbation is indicated in the provision that, of the cattle slaughtered in the public shambles, there shall be given weekly the chine and chitterlings of ten oxen—two to each of the inquisitors, one to the alguazil and secretaries, one to the receiver and notary of sequestrations, and the rest to the poor prisoners; this is said to be all that the tribunal is entitled to and anything more must be paid for, nor shall its servants take the chitterlings and sell them.497
Concordias were only attempts to restrain existing abuses and they could not provide for the perpetual new aggressions suggested by the facile weapon of excommunication through which the Inquisition could overcome the resistance of the secular authorities. The distribution of quicksilver, for instance, to the miners was a matter jealously reserved to the viceroy and the junta of the treasury but, when the Inquisition wanted it for some mines belonging to it in Zacatecas, it forced, by threats of excommunication, the royal officials to supply its demands. Viceroy Mancera, in a letter of December 8, 1666, complains of this and of a case in which the royal treasurer of Guadalajara owed a personal debt to the tribunal of 980 pesos and the commissioner there, by order of the acting inquisitor and visitador, Medina Rico, forced the auditor of the treasury to pay it out of the royal funds, by threats of excommunication and of a fine of 500 pesos. Mancera endeavored by courteous remonstrance to obtain restitution but, after the inquisitors had insulted him, he only succeeded in getting 600 pesos returned. In reporting these matters to the king, the Council of Indies pointed out forcibly how incompatible with subordination and good government were these arbitrary extensions of inquisitorial jurisdiction over matters wholly foreign to the objects of its institution.498
Indeed, the existence of so uncontrollable and disturbing an element goes far to explain the ill-success of Spanish colonial administration. In 1615, Fray Isidro Ordoñez, commissioner in San Francisco del Nuevo Mexico, under pretext of a fictitious order from the tribunal, gathered a band of soldiers and citizens, to whom inquisitorial orders were supreme, and seized Don Pedro de Peralta, Governor of New Mexico, and held him in irons for nine months. Peralta managed to complain to the tribunal, which summoned Ordoñez to the capital and assigned to him his convent for a prison, but Peralta obtained no satisfaction beyond a declaration that there had been no cause for his arrest, while Ordoñez, in place of the severe punishment which he merited, was permitted to attend the general chapter of his Order in Rome, as procurator of the province of Mexico.499 Another Governor of New Mexico, Diego de Peñalosa, fared even worse when, for indiscreet words about priests and inquisitors and expressions verging on blasphemy, he was exposed to the humiliation of appearing as a penitent in the auto de fe of February 3, 1668—thus virtually incapacitating him for further service.500 It was not without grounds that the Council of Indies, in 1696, addressed a formal remonstrance to Carlos II, recapitulating a long array of abuses and violences, showing the impossibility of enforcing observance of the Concordias or obedience to the royal commands. Prelates and governors were alike sufferers from the irrepressible audacity which admitted no responsibility to any one, so long as it was upheld and justified by the Suprema at home, and the council supplicated the king, if not for the total extinction of the tribunal, at least for the dismissal of the officials. Without some thorough change the retention of the colonies could scarce be hoped for, as all the population was inspired with a common hatred arising from its violence.501
As the council says, prelates were as liable as royal officials to be subjected to the lawless action of the tribunal. There never were lacking pretexts for quarrel. In 1617 Archbishop Pedro de Villareal fared badly in a rupture caused by his inserting in an edict some matters which the tribunal claimed to belong to its jurisdiction. In 1623 Bishop Bohorques of Oaxaca had the same experience because he styled himself Inquisidor Ordinario. The episcopate of Archbishop Matheo Sagade Bugueiro, from 1655 to 1662, was a succession of bitter dissensions, during which Bernardino de Amezaga, chief notary of the court of testaments, was arrested by the tribunal, deprived of his office and banished, while Francisco de Bermeo, contador of the Santa Cruzada, was kept long in prison, fined 200 pesos and a negro slave of his was sold to defray it. In 1658 the archbishop made a demand that all edicts read in his cathedral must first be shown to him in order to satisfy him that they contained nothing that invaded his jurisdiction, and his action in enforcing this claim led the tribunal to publish a manifesto declaring that, under the bull Si de protegendis, he had incurred degradation and relaxation to the secular arm.502
There was one case, however, in which the tribunal and the Archbishop of Mexico combined for the persecution of a bishop, for Juan de Mañozca, the archbishop from 1643 to 1653, was cousin of the inquisitor of the same name. The saintly Bishop Juan de Palafox of Puebla, in his capacity of visitador and protector of the Indians, incurred the enmity of the archbishop and of the Viceroy Salvatierra, and an occasion of gratifying it occurred when he undertook to guard his episcopal jurisdiction against the encroachments of the Jesuits. They appointed jueces conservadores to protect their interests and the tribunal rushed eagerly into the fray, with which it had absolutely no right to intervene.503 It ordered the suppression of the writings and edicts of Palafox and forbade any interference with those of the conservators; it sent a commissioner to Puebla who terrorized the community by arresting prominent priests and citizens of the bishop’s party, parading them through the streets in chains and sending them to Mexico, where they were thrown into the secret prison, thus inflicting indelible disgrace on them and their posterity. In spite of the exemption of Indians from inquisitorial jurisdiction, he flogged nearly to death, with four hundred lashes, an unfortunate Indian who, at the command of a citizen, had taken down one of the conservators’ edicts. Palafox was advised that he too would be arrested and fled to the mountains, where he lay concealed for several months.504 When, in 1647, he appealed to the Suprema, powers were sent to the Bishop of Oaxaca to investigate and report, but Archbishop Mañozca threw every impediment in his way and, in his capacity of visitador of the Inquisition, assumed to annul his commission. He appealed to the Bishop of Yucatan, then Governor of New Spain, and to the Audiencia for support, but the archbishop threatened to excommunicate them all and they prudently declined the conflict. Palafox represents to the Suprema that his life was in danger and he begs to be allowed to return to Spain.505 The combination of the archbishopric and Inquisition, under the two Mañozcas, evidently held the whole land in its grasp, and no one was hardy enough to oppose it. Palafox was obliged to abandon Mexico, but he eventually secured a decision in his favor on an appeal to Rome.
An episode of this case is worth recounting in some detail, not only as illustrating inquisitorial methods but as a rare instance of a victim obtaining a measure of satisfaction. Doctor Juan de la Camara, a canon of the cathedral, was a man of noble birth, proud of his unblemished limpieza, and his appointment as visitador of the see of Guadalajara indicates the estimation in which he was held by his superiors. Unfortunately he was a friend and correspondent of Palafox. When, in 1646, a bitter libel was circulated against the latter, one of the judges of the Audiencia, Alonso González de Villalba, was included in it. Palafox endured the attack in silence and endeavored to make Villalba follow his example, but the latter was so incensed that he wrote a reply in which he handled roughly the inquisitor Mañozca. He showed it to his neighbor Camara, who returned it without comment and said nothing about it except to Don Antonio Urrutía de Vergara, to whom he mentioned it in order that he might tell the archbishop, and to a Doña Catalina de Diosdado, to whom he merely said that he had seen two scandalous papers and that, if the author confessed to him, he would not absolve him.
There was a chance that among his papers something might be found to compromise Palafox, so an order of arrest with sequestration of property was made out, February 7, 1647. At eight o’clock in the morning Camara was roused from his bed and taken in his own carriage to the secret prison, where he was confined in a cell of which the window had been blocked up, so that the single candle to which he was restricted was his only light by day and night. Here he was kept incomunicado for twenty days. After the tenth day, however, on which he was examined, the obstructions were removed from the window and, after the twentieth, his brother, Fray Diego, and some other friends were permitted to see him on obtaining a special licence for each visit. Meanwhile his papers had been carried off to the tribunal, without being inventoried as required by the Instructions; on the day after his arrest his household effects were inventoried and placed in the hands of the receiver, Juan González de Castro, as depository, but they were not removed from the house and no care was taken to ensure their safety.
At nightfall of March 15th he was taken back to his house and told that it was henceforth to be his prison, under pain of excommunication and a thousand ducats. On April 1st his prison was enlarged to the city, under the same penalties, and he was enabled to resume his duties at the cathedral. Of course the immurement in the secret prison, with sequestration of property, of so prominent an ecclesiastic, caused a general sensation; it was at the height of the prosecution of the Judaizers and the inevitable conclusion was that they had implicated him, so that a stain was cast upon his honor which no subsequent exculpation could wholly efface. His papers were withheld from him; his house had been richly furnished, with abundance of silver plate and linen, much of which had disappeared, and he seems to have deplored especially the loss of eighteen ounces of amber. His trial remained unconcluded and his repeated applications for a decision and for the restoration of missing property were filed away without action. His only hope of escape from prolonged and intolerable suspense lay in appealing to the Suprema. The inquisitors had already sought to prejudice it against him for, in a letter of May 20th, they spoke of the incredible efforts and diabolical means employed to intimidate them from the performance of their duty in the matter of Palafox; Camara was an accomplice of Villalba in publishing the libel; he had perjured himself in his confessions and might be assumed to be the author of the worst passages in it. In spite of this the Suprema, by a decree of September 28, 1647, ordered his release, on the security of his oath, and the sequestration of his property to be removed.
Camara succeeded in secretly obtaining from the king an order, November 16, 1647, permitting him to go to Spain, but he was impoverished and sent his brother, Fray Diego, to act for him. The mission occupied Diego for several years, but he finally procured from the Suprema a commission to the Inquisitor Higuera to try the case promptly for, during all this time, it had been held suspended over Camara’s head. This was presented, February 15, 1650, and, on the following July 12th, Higuera, who was at odds with Mañozca, rendered a sentence acquitting him and restoring him to his previous good fame, so that his arrest should work no prejudice to him or to his kindred and their descendants; also that the chapter should pay him all the accrued fruits of his prebend and that his papers and property should be returned to him. From this Camara appealed to the Suprema, which confirmed it, July 7, 1651; then the fiscal of the Suprema appealed and it was again confirmed, July 31st. The whole prosecution was thus stamped as being malicious and groundless, but nevertheless Camara in vain endeavored to regain possession of his papers and of his missing effects.
Archbishop Mañozca died in 1653; the affair of Palafox had created no little scandal in Spain and, in 1654, a new visitador, Pedro de Medina Rico, was sent out with instructions especially to investigate it. Camara promptly set forth his grievances, in September, in a complaint against Estrada and Higuera—for apparently Mañozca, as the subject of the libel, had not sat in the trial. On December 1st he made his formal charges in a criminal action against them, laying his damages at 12,000 pesos, which he claimed to be the amount which the affair had cost him in losses and expenses. It was a bold undertaking and probably unexampled, and he found it impossible to secure the necessary legal assistance for, on January 20, 1655, he represented that none of the procurators of the Audiencia would serve him, wherefore he prayed for an order on Juan de Escobar to appear for him. It was granted and enforced with a penalty of fifty pesos, under pressure of which Escobar took charge of the case. In the same way his witnesses refused to appear until he procured orders on them, with censures for disobedience. The action went slowly on through its various stages; the inquisitors made no effort to justify what they had done and confined their defence to alleging that the affair was a cosa juzgada, which could not be reopened, and to interjecting appeals to the Suprema at every adverse interlocutory decree. It was not until May 31, 1656, that Medina Rico pronounced sentence to the effect that Camara had proved his case completely and that Estrada and Higuera had alleged nothing to palliate their grave offence, the punishment of which he reserved for future decision. As to what affected the interest of the plaintiff, he condemned them jointly and severally to pay him two thousand pesos. The receiver, or depository, was ordered to restore to him everything shown in the inventory and, if it appeared that articles were not deposited with him, the inquisitors must make them good under penalty of a thousand pesos. From this the inquisitors appealed and, after protracted argument, Rico suspended the order to pay the two thousand pesos until the Suprema should decide the appeal, but that the rest of the sentence should be executed without awaiting its action. Then followed a long and confused litigation with the executor of the receiver de Castro, who had been dead for many years and his estate distributed. The documents preserved end with November 14, 1657, at which time they were made up for transmission to the Suprema and what was its final decision cannot be told.506 It is evident that Camara obtained little compensation for his sufferings, but at least he had the satisfaction of seeing his persecutors punished, although inadequately, for official offenders were always treated tenderly by the Inquisition. Medina Rico, as the result of his visitation, formulated hundreds of charges against them, collectively and individually, and rendered sentence, May 17, 1662, in the audience-chamber, where all the officials were assembled. Estrada was condemned to severe reprimand, to a fine of 1500 pesos and to four years’ suspension, though, as he had died October 26, 1661, the penalty fell only on his heirs. Higuera was sentenced to a fine of a hundred pesos and two years’ suspension, which he endured until May 16, 1664. Mañozca was visited more heavily with a fine of 1300 pesos and nine years of suspension.507 This he could afford to disregard for, in the autumn of 1661, he had been provided with the bishopric of Santiago de Cuba whence, in 1666, he was transferred to that of Guatemala and finally, in 1675, he obtained the wealthy see of Puebla, from which he had driven Palafox. Retributive justice, however, at last overtook him, for he died before he could take possession.508 Such were the men who largely filled the tribunals and episcopates of the Colonies.
Among the privileges claimed by the Inquisition was exemption from military service. This was strictly limited by the Concordia of 1633. Officials holding commissions from the inquisitor-general were exempted from appearing in the general musters, but familiars were not, unless actually on duty for the tribunal and, if the enemy was in sight, all were liable to service, save those necessary to guard the papers and records of the tribunal, to whom certificates were to be given. As might be expected, however, little respect was paid to these provisions. In 1685, the alcalde of Puebla called a muster of the citizens to march to the succor of Campeachy. Hipolito del Castillo, alguazil and familiar, claimed exemption, to which he was clearly not entitled. The alcalde threatened to send him on a mule to Campeachy and in effect threw him into prison, placed his head in the pillory and made him pay a fine of 120 pesos. The commissioner at Puebla defended Castillo and, on appeal to the Inquisition, it ordered the money to be returned. Again, in 1718, when eight companies of merchants were formed in Puebla, by order of the viceroy, to make the rounds of the city and drive out malefactors, Martínez de Castro, a familiar and trader, was enrolled; he protested and appealed to the Inquisition, which ordered his discharge, in which the authorities immediately acquiesced.509
The inquisitorial function of censorship was by no means neglected. Even before the establishment of the tribunal, it was felt necessary to guard the faithful from the infection of heretical books and, in 1561, Inquisitor-general Valdés sent to Archbishop Montufar a commission empowering him to examine the book-shops for that purpose.510 This conveyed no censorial power, but Páramo proudly asserts that, almost at the inception of the Holy Office, calificadores were appointed who exercised a most vigilant supervision over all books introduced into the colony, even over those which had passed the examination of the Suprema itself, and who occasionally had the satisfaction of showing that books widely circulated in Spain required expurgation. In fact, a letter of the Suprema respecting the Index then in preparation shows that, as early as 1573, censures of books were received from Mexico. The position of calificador, like that of inquisitor, seems to have been a stepping-stone to the bishop’s chair, for the first one was Domingo de Salazar, promoted, in 1581, to the archiepiscopate of the Philippines; the second was Bartolomé de Ledesma, who in 1581 became Bishop of Oaxaca, and the third was Pedro de Ribera, who in 1594 was elected Bishop of Panama, but died on the road to take possession.511 Apparently the office was one not always easy to fill. In a letter of September 1, 1655, the tribunal informed the Suprema that it was in need of correctors of books and calificadores and it sent the genealogy of Padre Juan Hortiz, Rector of the Jesuit College, as a fit person, though he had not studied theology; the tribunal of Logroño thereupon reported favorably as to his limpieza and, on November 11, 1659, after four years of delay, the commission for him was sent.512 It will be seen from all this that the Mexican Inquisition exercised an independent function of censorship; the earliest printing-press in the New World was established in the city of Mexico and its products were supervised by the tribunal, which condemned them, when necessary, without awaiting a reference to distant Spain. Prohibitory edicts, moreover, emanating from the home censorship, were duly published from every parish pulpit between the Caribbean and the Pacific.513
As was the case in Spain, censorship was not confined to literature but extended to works of art which might offend sensitiveness either of modesty or of veneration. The degree to which this might interfere with affairs of daily life depended upon the discretion of the tribunal, as was instanced by an edict of March 2, 1600. This prohibited all crosses, heads of Christ, the Virgin and the saints and scenes from sacred history carved or engraved or painted or embroidered on furniture, bed-clothing, napery, utensils of all kinds, or other places where these sacred symbols might be exposed to disrespect, and everything of the kind was to be surrendered for the erasure of the images. As Spanish piety had luxuriated in the use of such emblems wherever possible, this raised a cloud of questions, which Fray Diego Múñoz, commissioner at Mechoacan, endeavored to settle in instructions issued to his delegate at Querétaro. Thus branding-irons for cattle and horses, that had a cross on them, were to be surrendered; as for beasts already so branded, the marks were to be erased where possible. Men tattooed with crosses or the name of Jesus were to efface them within fifteen days. Thimbles so adorned, if of gold or silver, were to be returned after filing off the symbols. Moulds for pastry with sacred heads were allowable, because the pastry was eaten and not treated with indecency, and it was the same with tapestries and wall-hangings. That the opportunities afforded by this decree were not neglected is indicated in a complaint to the tribunal from Juan Rodríguez of Querétaro, who relates that Fray Francisco de Parra, Guardian of the Franciscan convent, under orders from Múñoz, had seized and carried off to the convent a bedstead of gilt wood, costing 500 pesos, because it had some carved heads, which were not of Christ or angels; also counterpanes, pillows, curtains, towels, etc., because they had crosses or the word Jesus embroidered on them, and finger-rings with five stones set as a cross. Others had suffered in the same way, and Rodríguez prayed for the restoration of the articles.514
Incident to the censorship was the visita de navíos, or search of all vessels on their arrival, regarded as an indispensable duty to prevent the importation of forbidden books and the immigration of suspected heretics and Judaizers, as well as to ascertain whether, during the voyage, any one on board had committed acts subjecting him to inquisitorial jurisdiction. As in Spain, this performance inevitably led to friction with the secular authorities of the sea-ports. As early as 1584 there is a prosecution of Hernando de Moxica, alcalde mayor, and of Diego de Yepes, regidor of Vera Cruz, for impeding the commissioner in this work and speaking disrespectfully of it, resulting in a fine of five hundred pieces each, with excommunication until they should withdraw their opposition.515 Of course it was difficult to control the officials of the tribunal in the matter of fees and to keep the peace between them and the royal representatives as to questions of precedence, points which the Concordia of 1633 endeavored to regulate by fixing the fee at four pesos, of which two accrued to the commissioner and one each to the alguazil and notary, an amount never to be exceeded, no matter how many assistants might be employed, while existing orders were to be strictly observed as to their concurrence with the royal officials.516 Of course it was not easy for the Inquisition to maintain supervision over so extended a coast. In a consulta of February 15, 1620, the Suprema informed Philip III that there had recently been printed in Holland large numbers of Spanish Bibles to be sent to the colonies and, as the Inquisition was unable to prevent their introduction unaided, the king was asked to instruct the royal officials to exercise greater vigilance. To this he assented and the request was renewed, June 28, 1629. It was probably to meet this that, in 1633, an agreement between the Suprema and the Council of Indies permitted the appointment of an alguazil in Yucatan to aid in searching the ships arriving at the ports.517
With the advent of the Bourbon dynasty, there occurs, in Mexico as in Spain, a disposition on the part of the secular authorities to restrain the overbearing petulance and audacity of the Holy Office. It is true that the tribunal obtained a victory in 1712, in a quarrel with the Royal Audiencia which had prosecuted its notary, and it was so overjoyed that it hastened to communicate the fact to the tribunal of Lima so that it might serve as a precedent. It related how the royal cédula of 1640, repeated in 1667 and 1701, had been strictly observed, when the senior judge came to the competencia and occupied the lowest seat and the decision was that the notary was entitled to the fuero of the Holy Office.518 Though competencias thus commenced to reappear they did not always end so satisfactorily. In 1722, Joseph Freire de Somorostro, commissioner in Zacatapan, was fined 500 pesos and suspended for six years from his functions as an advocate by the royal court, for an offence against its authority. He appealed to the tribunal which, in its customary threatening methods, demanded that the papers in the case be delivered to it within fifteen days, but they were withheld. It succeeded better in the case of Alonso Diaz de la Vega, alguazil of Goamantla who, in 1723, was concerned with his son in a quarrel, in which a man was killed. They were arrested and prosecuted, but the tribunal interfered vigorously, obtained possession of both father and son, gave notice that prosecutors must present themselves within eight days and, as none appeared, discharged the accused—thus affording convincing proof of the advantage of the fuero to criminals. It showed, however, a juster sense of the limitations of its jurisdiction in another case of the same year which illustrates the tendency of its officials to obstruct the secular authorities. The Castellan of Vera Cruz complained to the viceroy of the commissioner, Gregorio de Salinas, who had assisted the mutineers of the fleet in demanding their pay and had defended the asylum of the convent of San Francisco, in which they had taken refuge. The viceroy forwarded the statement to the tribunal, which forthwith ordered the commissioner to desist; the Inquisition had nothing to do with the matter; if he had assembled the officials of the Inquisition with their badges and had taken them to the convent to defend its right of asylum, he had done very wrong and must instruct each of them, before a notary, to keep aloof and he must, in the same way, withdraw the delegated power given to the superior of the convent. It does not appear however that the peccant commissioner was punished in any way for this inexcusable prostitution of the authority of the Holy Office. Another case, in the same year, illustrates the multifarious ways in which these petty local officials abused the mysterious attributes with which they were invested. Valdés la Vandera, commissioner of Valle de Santa Barbara, claimed fees for all interments to which he was invited, even when he did not wear surplice and cap as ordered by the Constitucion Sinodal and, not content with this, charged double fees; he also demanded that, in the assemblies of Corpus, San Pedro and other feasts of obligation, he should have the highest place, in virtue of being commissioner. The clergy complained to the tribunal, which condemned his pretensions and ordered him to desist.519
The enlightened despotism of Carlos III brought increased tendency to curtail the privileges of the Inquisition and to curb its audacity. A cédula of February 29, 1760, declares that the titular and salaried officials shall enjoy the fuero only as defendants, in both civil and criminal matters, and wholly withdraws that of the familiars. Also that in clear and notorious cases there shall be no competencia, but that the viceroy, as the personal representative of the sovereign, shall decide what is fitting to prevent invasion of the royal jurisdiction.520 The transitory liberalism of the period greatly diminished the traditional awe inspired by the Inquisition. About the year 1767, it had a serious conflict with the Audiencia, over the case of a Doctor Bechi, in which the royal fiscal, during his argument, treated it with scant respect, reciting how Charles V had been obliged to limit its jurisdiction in Sicily, how the reigning monarch had exiled from court the Inquisitor-general Quintano Bonifaz, and hinting not obscurely that, if it was abolished, substitutes for it could be found—all of which was made the subject of bitter, and apparently fruitless, remonstrance to the king by the Suprema, in a consulta of February 29, 1768. This unprecedented freedom of speech reveals the existence of a belief in some impending change, and this was stimulated by the startling expulsion of the Jesuits, skilfully managed by the viceroy, the Marquis de Croix, June 25, 1767. The foundations of the ecclesiastical structure seemed to be crumbling and there arose a universally accredited rumor that the Inquisition would be the next to suffer. So definite did this become that the day was fixed for September 3d and the precaution taken by the viceroy, in anticipation of disturbance, by keeping troops under arms all that night, especially in the quarter where the Inquisition was situated, only strengthened the delusion. So firmly rooted was this that, when the night passed away without the expected event, the archbishop called upon the viceroy to learn for himself the truth of the belief that the suppression had only been postponed until certain pending trials should be completed.521
During this period of decadence the functions of the tribunal, in its proper sphere of action, amounted to little more than punishing a few bigamists, so-called sorcerers and soliciting confessors. In 1702 it reported only four cases pending—three for bigamy and a Jesuit, Padre Francisco de Figueroa, for what was known as flagellation, or stripping female penitents and using the discipline on them, an offence akin to solicitation.522 Yet in an auto of 1704 it exhibited eight bigamists and two sorcerers and, in one of 1708, it had thirteen penitents of whom five were bigamists. There was an exception in 1712 when it had the fortune to present a Judaizer who had denounced himself and begged for mercy, notwithstanding which he was condemned to appear in an auto with a gag and to irremissible prison and sanbenito for life. In 1712-13 there were eleven convictions for solicitation and in 1722 an auto with twelve penitents, of whom nine were bigamists, followed soon afterwards with five cases of solicitation. So it went on, gradually diminishing and affording less and less justification for the existence of the tribunal with its large revenues, though when it had an opportunity it demonstrated that it retained its capacity for evil, as in the case of a naval lieutenant, Manuel Germa de Bahamonde, arrested February 24, 1735, for heretical propositions and, after nine years of incarceration, pronounced insane in 1744, when he was sent to the castle of San Juan de Ulua pending transmission to Spain.523
After 1750 there was some increase in business, arising from the prevalence of blasphemy and irreligion in the army, especially in the regiments of foreigners, and cases became more numerous among foreign residents accused of heresy and free-thinking. It was doubtless owing to this that Fernando VI, in a decree of December 31, 1756, imposed the death penalty on recruits who pretended Catholicism in order to enlistment—a severity modified in 1765 by Carlos III to expulsion from the kingdom.524 In spite of these measures, the tribunal, in a letter of April 28, 1766, complained of the number of foreigners sent to Mexico among the troops—their disseminating the heresies of Luther and Calvin and of total irreligion, and their justification of England, thus diminishing the horror and detestation felt by the natives for the English, which it was so desirable to maintain. The Suprema represented this to Carlos, who thereupon ordered that no soldiers should be sent to the Indies who were not assuredly Catholics.525
The increasing discredit into which the tribunal had fallen and the widely spread rumors, as we have seen, of its approaching suppression, seem to have stimulated it to a recrudescence of activity in an effort to assert its continued existence. It celebrated an auto, September 6, 1767, with four culprits—one of them, María Josefa Pineda Morales, for bigamy, who had been arrested as long before as in 1760. Then on March 13, 1768, it held another with seventeen penitents. Cases of solicitation also became more frequent as the century drew to its close.526 A new field of activity, moreover, was opened to it by the outbreak of the French Revolution, when the propaganda of the rights of man increased the importance of the Inquisition as an agency of repression. Already, in 1770, an edict ordered the denunciation within six days of confessors who should use the confessional to encourage ideas contrary to the submission due to the sovereign. The accession of the reactionary Carlos IV and the dread of revolutionary principles began to afford a harvest of cases in which politics had more to do than religion. There were many Frenchmen in Mexico following their trades; they were naturally partizans of the new order of things; their influence was dreaded for they spread their opinions among the people and the organization and methods of the Inquisition rendered it the most efficient instrument for the detection and punishment of liberalism.527
A typical example was that of two Frenchmen, the Capitan Jean Marie Murgier and Doctor Joseph François Morel, accused of a conspiracy to cause a revolution and arrested in 1794. Murgier feigned sickness and, when visited by Dr. José Francisco Rada, he asked the gaoler for a glass of water and during his absence blocked the door with his trunk. Then he seized Rada’s sword and declared that he would kill both him and himself unless the tribunal would liberate him with a full acquittal and furnish him with a pair of loaded pistols. The confusion of the tribunal was great; parleying went on from 10.15 A.M. to 4.30 P.M., when it was decided to break down the door. Guards with hatchets attacked it and Murgier ran himself through with the sword. His comrade Morel cut his throat with a pair of snuffers February 11, 1795. They were prosecuted after death and furnished occasion for the last public auto, August 9th of that year, where their effigies and bones were burnt as those of heretics, deists and materialists. At the same auto there figured the first Judaizer for many years—Rafael Gil Rodríguez, a cleric in the lower orders, who had been arrested October 9, 1788. He proved exceedingly obstinate and was sentenced to relaxation on February 9, 1792, after which he was held awaiting an auto. His resolution failed on the morning of the fatal day, he professed repentance, was reconciled, and thus saved the Inquisition the shame of burning a fellow-creature alive at the close of the eighteenth century. The other penitents were Jean Langouran of Bordeaux, who was reconciled for Lutheranism and atheism, and Jean Lausel of Montpellier who abjured de levi for suspicion of Free-Masonry.528
It was not however Frenchmen alone who suffered for their political opinions. José Antonio Rojas was denounced by two ladies, in correspondence with whom he had expressed his liberalism too freely. In September, 1804, he was condemned, as a formal heretic and materialist, to reclusion in the College of the Propaganda Fide at Pachuca, but he escaped to the United States where he relieved his feelings in a tremendous pamphlet against the Holy Office, which was duly prohibited in an edict of March 6, 1807. The distinguished publicists, Juan Wenceslao Bosquera and José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi, known as El Pensador Mexicano, were also prosecuted for writings that evinced too ardent a spirit of patriotism. It was also doubtless for offences of the same nature that Fray Juan Antonio de Olabarrieta was reconciled for atheism in 1803, and his sanbenito was suspended in the cathedral, for the charge of atheism or any kindred form of speculation was, as we have seen, a convenient one to bring political liberalism under inquisitorial jurisdiction.529
Under the pressure of the time the censorship was sharpened with special rigor and severity. A curious instance of the strictness with which the laws against prohibited books were enforced is afforded by an episode, in 1806, of the Louisiana Purchase. As this rendered necessary a delimitation of the boundary between Mexico and the United States, Carlos IV ordered an investigation and report from the viceroy, who employed Fray Melchor de Talamantes to make it. He found it necessary to consult the works of Robertson and Raynal, but these were in the Index and he applied to the Inquisition, through the viceroy, for the requisite licence, saying that, although the books were detestable, the information they contained, and especially their maps, were important for the public service. The request was refused and, as a compromise, a formal commission was given to two calificadores, Fray José Paredo and Fray José Pichardo, to examine the dangerous books and report to Talamantes such information on the subject as they might find.530 When Spanish diplomacy was thus hampered by such scruples it is no cause of surprise that the eminent historian of Mexico, Lucas Alaman, was prosecuted for reading prohibited books and even the episcopal dignity of Manuel Abad y Queipo, Bishop-elect of Valladolid (Mechoacan) did not save him from trouble for the same offence.531
Yet this reactionary tendency was accompanied with an increasing disposition to enforce the subordination of the Inquisition and to render it an instrument of the Government. A royal cédula of December 12, 1807, takes additional precautions to prevent illegal increase in the number of familiars and officials and to give the secular authority a closer supervision over them. When secular assistance, moreover, was called for, it could no longer be commanded as a right, except in matters of faith; if the temporal jurisdiction was concerned, the Inquisition was put on a level with other ecclesiastical courts, and the magistrate was instructed to examine the merits of the case and to give or withhold his aid accordingly.532 As agitation in Mexico increased with the news of the abdication of Carlos IV and the Napoleonic usurpation, foreshadowing the Revolution, the political importance of the Inquisition, as an agency of repression, became greater and its so-called sacred functions were more and more subordinated. Successive edicts of August 27, 1808, and April 28, June 16 and September 28, 1809, were directed against all proclamations and emissaries seeking to pervert the loyalty of the colonists in favor of the ambitious schemes of the French, and the doctrine of popular sovereignty was denounced as manifest heresy533—a doctrinal definition which was effectively used during the debate on the suppression of the Holy Office, in the Córtes of Cádiz, which had affirmed that sovereignty. Even in a matter so foreign to politics as solicitation in the confessional, it is suggestive to observe that, in the trial for that offence of Dr. Pedro Mendizabal, cura of the parish of Santa Ana (1809-1819) his correct political conduct is urged upon the inquisitors as a matter for their favorable consideration—which may possibly have conduced to his escape in the face of convincing evidence.534
The political functions assumed by the Inquisition become especially manifest in its trials of the two chief martyrs of the war of independence—Hidalgo and Morelos. The former of these, Miguel Hidalgo y Castilla, the parish priest of los Dolores, who first raised the standard of revolt, in conjunction with Allende, Aldama and Abasolo, and who was elected generalissimo of the insurgent army, was a singularly interesting character.535 Born in 1753, he received his education at the royal university of San Nicolás at Mechoacan, where he became rector and theological professor. In the formal accusation during his trial it is asserted that he was known while there as el zorro, or the fox, on account of his cunning, and that he was finally expelled because of a scandalous adventure, in the course of which he was obliged to escape at night through a window of the chapel. Taking orders, he finally settled as cura at los Dolores where, in spite of a large revenue, he encumbered himself with debts. He loved music and dancing and gaming and his relations with women were of a character common enough with the clergy of the period. His abounding energy led him to establish potteries and to introduce silk-culture, which may doubtless account for his indebtedness. He was regarded as a prodigy of learning and kept up his intellectual pursuits, translating tragedies of Racine and comedies of Molière, the latter of which he caused to be acted in his house, his favorite being Tartufe. The priest, García de Carrasqueda, who enjoyed his intimacy for twelve or thirteen years, when on trial by the Inquisition, deposed that they used to read together Cicero, Serri, Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History, Rollings Ancient History and an Italian work on commerce by Genovesi and that he praised highly the orations of Æschines and Demosthenes, Bossuet, Buffon’s Natural History, Pitavak’s Causes Célèbres and various historical works. He was fond of debating questionable points in theology, emitting opinions not wholly orthodox on such subjects as the stigmata of St. Francis, the House of Loreto, the Veronica, whether St. Didymas or Gestas was the penitent thief, the inheritance of original sin, the identity of the three kings and the like, while his high reputation for learning caused him to be regarded as an authority. Altogether he presents himself to us as a man of unusual physical and intellectual energy, not over nice as to the employment of those energies, of wide culture, of vigorous and enquiring mind and of small reverence for formulas or for authority.
Such a character was not likely to escape the attention of the Holy Office. On July 16, 1800, Fray Joaquin Huesca, a teacher of philosophy in the Order of Merced, denounced him to the commissioner of Mechoacan for various unorthodox utterances, at which Fray Manuel Estrada, of the same Order, had been present, and Estrada, on being summoned, confirmed and amplified the accusation. In transmitting these depositions to the tribunal, July 19th, the commissioner reported that Hidalgo was a most learned man, who had ruined himself with gambling and women, that he read prohibited books and, while professor of theology, had taught from Jansenist works. The tribunal necessarily started an investigation, which lasted for more than a year and included the testimony of some thirteen witnesses, resulting in proof of a wide variety of most heretical utterances, any one of which, if pertinaciously maintained, would have sufficed to consign him to the stake. Moreover, he was described as revolutionary in his tendencies, speaking of monarchs as tyrants and cherishing aspirations for liberty; he was well-read in current French literature and had little respect for the censorship—in short he was what was subsequently termed an afrancesado. The commissioner of San Miguel el Grande reported, March 11, 1801, much about Hidalgo’s disorderly life and that he carried about with him an Alcoran but, in a second report of April 13th, he stated that in the recent Easter, Hidalgo had reformed, a matter which was widely discussed and seems to have aroused general attention. In due time, on October 2, 1801, the fiscal reported on this accumulated testimony that, if Hidalgo had uttered the propositions ascribed to him, he should be arrested with sequestration of property, but the witnesses were contradictory and Estrada had the reputation of an habitual liar. He therefore recommended that the case be suspended and the papers be filed for future reference, to which the tribunal assented.
The case rested until July 22, 1807, when a priest named José María Castilblane came forward to say that, in 1801, Estrada had told him scandalous and heretical things about Hidalgo. More serious was a denunciation made, May 4, 1808, by María Manuela Herrera, described as a woman of good character who frequented the sacraments. By command of her confessor she deposed that she had once lived with Hidalgo as his concubine, when he told her that Christ had not died on the cross, but that it was another man; also that there was no hell—this latter she supposed being to quiet her conscience, as they had an agreement that she was to provide him with women and he was to provide her with men. This was again laid before the fiscal who reported, June 8th, in favor of awaiting further proof. Then, on March 15, 1809, Fray Diego Manuel Bringas deposed that he had found Hidalgo in possession of prohibited books, such as Serry’s History of the Congregations De Auxiliis, under his own name and that of Augustin Leblanc, also his Dissertations on Christ and the Virgin, in which he speaks without measure of María de Agreda; that Hidalgo praised this work and called María a deluded old woman.536 Still, with singular moderation, no action was taken to restrain Hidalgo’s audacity and, had he been content to let politics alone, it is safe to say that the Inquisition would not have troubled him, so inert had it become in the exercise of its ostensible functions.
When, however, he started the revolution, September 16, 1810, this lethargy gave place to the utmost activity. The official Gazette of September 28th asserted that he was disseminating among the people the doctrine that there is neither hell, purgatory nor glory; an extract from this was sent to the commissioner at Querétaro, with instructions to obtain its verification, which he had no trouble in doing, although the evidence was hearsay. Without awaiting this, however, the testimony which had been so long slumbering in the secreto was laid before calificadores, October 9th, with orders to report at once. This they did the next day, to the effect that, as he was a sectary of French liberty, they pronounced him a libertine, seditious, schismatic, a formal heretic, a Judaizer, a Lutheran, a Calvinist, and strongly suspect of atheism and materialism. The same day the tribunal resolved that, as he was surrounded by his army of insurgents and could not be arrested, he should be summoned by edict to appear within thirty days. On the 13th the edict was printed, on the 14th it was posted in the churches and was circulated as rapidly as possible throughout the land.
The edict is a singular medley of politics and religion, illustrating the dual character of the Inquisition of the period and the enormous advantage to the Government of possessing control over the ecclesiastical establishment, whereby an attack on the civil power could be made to assume the appearance of an assault on the faith. All the heretical utterances, discredited nine years before by the action of the tribunal, are put forward as absolute facts. It is impiety that has led him to raise the standard of revolt and to seduce numbers of unhappy dupes to follow him. In the inability to reach him personally, he is summoned, under pain of excommunication, to appear for trial within thirty days, in default of which he will be prosecuted in rebeldía to definitive sentence and burning in effigy if necessary. All who support him or have converse with him and all those who do not denounce those who favor his revolutionary projects are declared guilty of the crime of fautorship of heresy and subject to the penalties decreed for it by the canons. When to this are added the proclamations of excommunication issued against the insurgents by the Archbishop of Mexico and the bishops of the disturbed districts, it will be seen how powerful was the restraining influence exercised by the Church over a population trained to submission, and how intense were the passions that braved its anathema.537
In fact, the hatred of the creoles and the Indians for the Gachupines, or Spaniards, was so bitter that four-fifths of the native clergy espoused the cause of the insurgents, in spite of the censures of the Church, and questions of faith became inextricably involved in the contest between the factions. To the loyalists, Hidalgo became a heretic or indeed a heresiarch, and the confessional was so largely used by them that the insurgents became guilty of a new heresy, by asserting that confession to a Gachupin priest was invalid. They found great comfort, moreover, through their belief in the protection of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who was universally revered, and especially by the Indians, as the sovereign patroness of Mexico. On the fateful 16th of September, when Hidalgo was marching on San Miguel el Grande at the head of his little band of insurgents, in passing through Atolonila, he chanced to take an image on linen of the Guadalupe Virgin and give it to one of his men to carry as a banner. It was adopted by the other bands as they rose and it became the standard of the insurrection, usually accompanied with an image of Fernando VII and of the eagle of Mexico, and the inscription “Viva nuestra Señora de Guadalupe! Viva Fernando VII! Viva la America y muere el mal gobierno!” Second in rank as a tutelary power of the insurrection was Our Lady of Puebla and against these the loyalists pitted a new-comer, Our Lady of los Remedios, who was denounced as a Gachupina by the natives. There is a subject of study for the student of mythology in this modernization of the triform Hecate and in the revival of Homeric divinities presiding over the two sides of the battlefield.
The Inquisition labored earnestly to get evidence of sacrilegious acts on the part of the insurgents and, as they were beaten back, it had its emissaries in the territory from which they had been driven, collecting testimony as to individuals who had sympathized with them or had opposed the posting of its edict. The most active of these was Fray Simon de la Mora, who accompanied the royal army in its advance. He reported that it was useless to attempt to enumerate the common people, but he sent the names of fifty-nine persons of standing, many of them ecclesiastics, with the evidence against them, and the notes on the margin of the MS. show that they were forthwith entered for prosecution.
The edict was duly posted in the towns occupied by the army but, in the course of a night or two, it was generally torn down or defaced with paint, in spite of the heavy penalties incurred for thus impeding the Inquisition. Hidalgo felt it necessary to issue a manifesto in defence, protesting that he had never departed from the faith and pointing out the contradictory character of the heresies imputed to him. To this the Inquisition replied with another edict, January 26, 1811, reiterating its charges, stigmatizing him as a cruel atheist and prohibiting certain proclamations issued by the insurgents.538
Meanwhile his trial, in absentia, was proceeding through its several stages as deliberately as though he were an ordinary heretic in time of peace. On November 24, 1810, the tribunal declared that, having evidence that, on October 27th, he had knowledge of the edict, the thirty days’ term should run from October 28th. On November 28th, therefore, the fiscal demanded that he should be treated as rebelde, or contumacious, and that ten days, as usual, should be allowed him to appear in person. The prescribed three terms of ten days each, with two days additional, were scrupulously observed. Then further delay followed and it was not until February 7, 1811, that the formal trial began with the presentation by the fiscal of the accusation. This was in the ordinary form, reciting that Hidalgo was a Christian, baptized and confirmed, and as such enjoying the privileges and exemptions accorded to good Catholics, “yet had he left the bosom of holy Church for the filthy, impure and abominable faith of the heretic Gnostics, Sergius, Berengar, Cerinthus, Carpocrates, Nestorius, Marcion, Socinus, the Ebionites, Lutherans, Calvinists and other pestilential writers, Deists, Materialists and Atheists, whose works he has read and endeavored to revive and to persuade his sect to adopt their errors and heresies, believing wrongly, like them, as to various articles and dogmas of our holy religion and revolutionizing the whole bishoprics of Mechoacan and Guadalajara and great part of the arch-diocese of Mexico, being moreover the chief cause of the great abominations and sins, which have been and still are committed. All this and more, which I shall set forth, constitute him a formal heretic, apostate from our holy religion, an atheist, materialist and deist, a libertine, seditious, schismatic, Judaizer, Lutheran and Calvinist, guilty of divine and human high treason, a blasphemer, an implacable enemy of Christianity and the State, a wicked seducer, lascivious, hypocrite, a cunning traitor to king and country, pertinacious, contumacious and rebellious to the Holy Office, of all of which I accuse him in general and in particular.” The fiscal then proceeds to recite the evidence taken since 1800, followed by a long statement of Hidalgo’s share in the insurrection and winding up with the customary petition that, without requiring further proof, the accused shall be condemned to confiscation and relaxation, in person if he can be had and, if not, in effigy; or, if the evidence be deemed insufficient, he shall be tortured if attainable.
The inquisitors received the accusation and gravely ordered, according to form, that a copy be given to Hidalgo and, in view of his contumacious absence, that due notification be made in the halls, which was accordingly done and record made. Then, on February 19th, the fiscal accused the contumacy of the absent and fugitive Hidalgo in not answering and asked that the case be concluded and received to proof. The inquisitors assented and the proof was presented. May 20th, the fiscal demanded the publication of evidence, which was duly ordered to be made, with the ordinary suppression of their names. A large portion of this consisted of evidence taken during the insurrection, showing acts of sacrilege, contempt for the Inquisition and its edicts and the like, on the part of Hidalgo and his followers. A copy of this was ordered to be given to him and that he answer it in the next audience, of which announcement was made in the halls and duly recorded. It was not until June 14th that the next step was taken, in ordering a copy of both accusation and testimony to be given to him and that by the third day he put in his answer, with the assent of his advocate, an advocate being provided for him in the person of the Licenciado José María Rosas. Then another witness was found in the priest García de Carrasquedo, a prisoner on trial, to whom allusion has been made above. His evidence was taken June 21st and, on the 27th, was submitted to calificadores who, on August 12th, presented a long and learnedly argumentative report, in which they characterized the several propositions with the customary choice selection of objurgatory epithets, as falsa, impia, temeraria, blasfema, malsonante, sapiens hæresim, llena de escandalo, erronea, sapiens errorem Lutheranorum, Judaica y formalmente hæretica, injuriosa al espiritú de la S. M. Iglesia, and they concluded that, if he who uttered them did so with full knowledge of their import, he was a formal heretic. This was practically the last act of the long drawn-out comedy, although some additional testimony concerning Hidalgo was taken and recorded, February 10 and 20, 1812, in the trial of the habitual liar, Fray Manuel Estrada. Events had moved faster than the Inquisition. After the disastrous day of the Bridge of Calderon, Hidalgo in his flight had been captured, March 21, 1811, at Bajan, and carried two hundred leagues farther north to Chihuahua, where he was executed, July 31st, before the calificadores had finished their formulation of his heresies. No notice of this was given to the Inquisition, which was treated with a singular discourtesy, savoring of contempt. The explanation of this probably is that, if it had been apprised of the capture, it could rightly have claimed the prisoner as a heretic, primarily subject to its supreme and exclusive jurisdiction; there might have been danger in escorting him back through the recently disturbed provinces; the processes of the Inquisition were notoriously slow and, after it had tried the culprit and he had abjured and been penanced in an auto de fe, he would still have to be condemned in a military court. It was in every way wiser to try him and despatch him in far-off Chihuahua, and the local military and ecclesiastical authorities coöperated to this result, leaving the Inquisition to find out what it could, and not even forwarding a supplication which Hidalgo addressed to it, on June 10th.
The tribunal waited patiently for eleven months after the catastrophe and then, on June 25, 1812, it wrote, with much solemnity, to its two commissioners in Chihuahua, reminding them that the edict of October 13, 1810, rendered it their duty to keep it advised of the capture of Hidalgo and of all subsequent occurrences. They should have gone to him in prison and exhorted him to make a declaration on all points contained in the edict and whatever else weighed upon his conscience. All signs of repentance should have been observed and reported, and at least his confession to his judges, in so far as the Inquisition was concerned, should have been sent to it. The alcaide, the ecclesiastics and the military officers must now be examined as to his state of mind during his imprisonment, so that the tribunal may be informed as to his repentance or impenitence and thus be enabled to render justice. The two commissioners are to work in harmony, with power of subdelegation, and they are made responsible, before God and the king, for the due discharge of their duties.
The Holy Office evidently took itself seriously and considered that judgement as to Hidalgo’s heresies still lay in its hands. There must have been a flush of indignation and wounded pride when, on January 2, 1813, the inquisitors received from Sánchez Alvarez, one of the commissioners, an answer dated October 27, 1812, reporting that he had applied to Nemesio Salcedo, the commandant-general, who had ordered him to suspend all action and that he, Salcedo, would explain the absolute necessity for this. The tribunal had to wait until February 27th before it received Salcedo’s explanation, dated October 22d, showing how its supreme jurisdiction had been overslaughed with as little ceremony as that of a pie-powder court. With profuse expressions of respect, Salcedo stated that the peace and prosperity of the provinces required that the matter should not be agitated. Hidalgo was not a heretic and would not have been permitted to receive the sacraments and ecclesiastical burial, had he not been duly absolved and reconciled to the Church. A royal order, he said, of May 12, 1810, had conveyed papal inquisitorial faculties to the bishops, and the Bishop of Durango had subdelegated Doctor Francisco Fernández Valetin, the doctoral canon of his church, thus constituting him a papal inquisitor.539 To him, as such, were communicated the answers of Hidalgo on his trial, who ratified them in his presence; he also verified the manifesto of Hidalgo, which was published, and he absolved him. In addition he saw the supplication of Hidalgo to the Inquisition, which would have been forwarded sooner but for the danger of its being intercepted and which was now enclosed, together with the other necessary papers. These were extracts from Hidalgo’s examination, his manifesto to the insurgents and the supplication in question.
It was somewhat brutal to have kept the tribunal so long in the dark on a matter touching its highest privilege and to have detained for sixteen months, on a frivolous pretext, a supplication addressed directly to it, but its position was becoming precarious and it dared not complain. Napoleon’s suppression of the Inquisition of Spain, in 1808, did not count for much, but the Córtes of Cádiz had enacted a liberal Constitution in 1812 and simultaneously the preliminary skirmishing for the abrogation of the Inquisition preoccupied all minds. It was enacted February 22, 1813, and, though the news had not as yet reached Mexico, the result could scarce have been doubted when the tribunal took action on March 13th. It evidently placed no faith in the story of a papal inquisitor, suddenly created in the wilds of Chihuahua, for it wholly ignored his action. The fiscal reported to the tribunal that, in spite of Hidalgo’s supplication for pardon and endeavors to satisfy the charges against him, there were not merits enough to absolve his memory and fame nor, at the same time, to condemn him, as it appeared that he had made a general confession and had been reconciled, whereupon the tribunal ordered the case to be suspended and the papers to be filed in their proper place—an expression of dissatisfaction and an admission of powerlessness. On March 29th it acknowledged Salcedo’s letter and drily thanked him.
Hidalgo’s supplication to the Inquisition, written in his prison on June 10, 1811, is a long and dignified declaration of submission, calmly and clearly reasoned and manifesting full command of his theological learning. But for his confinement, he said, he would hasten to throw himself at the feet of the tribunal, not only to seek pardon for his insubordination, but to vindicate himself from the charge of heresy and apostasy, which was insufferable to him. He answered the various accusations of the edict, denying that he had led an immoral life and exculpating himself with much dexterity from the heresies imputed to him, but if, he added, the Inquisition deemed his utterances heretical, although he had not hitherto so considered them, he now retracted, abjured and detested them. He concluded by begging to be relieved from the disgrace of heresy and apostasy; the tribunal could repose entire faith in his statements for, if he had committed those crimes, the circumstances in which he now found himself would impel him to confess them freely, in order to gain the pardon and absolution that would open to him the gates of heaven and would close them, if withheld, in consequence of his denial.
The frame of mind revealed in this document, which is unquestionably genuine, serves to refute the imputation of forgery so generally ascribed to Hidalgo’s manifesto of May 18th, addressed “A Todo el Mundo” and published in order to quiet the population. Its effusiveness and extravagance of repentance, and the earnestness of its exhortations to his followers to submit, have not unnaturally created suspicion, from their violent contrast to the deep convictions and reckless energy with which he precipitated and sustained the insurrection, but it can be accepted as authentic without impugning his good faith. He was impulsive and enthusiastic and was liable to the revulsions incident to his temperament. His cause had been disowned by God; he had been captured as a fugitive within a few months after he had been at the head of eighty thousand men. The grave was yawning for him, as the portal to the hereafter, in which there was, in his belief, no escape from eternal torment for one who died as a rebel to the Church. He was a fervent Catholic, whose excommunication cut him off from the sacraments essential to salvation, unless he could prove himself worthy of them by earnest repentance and by the amendment which could only be manifested through zeal in undoing that which had brought upon him the anathema. That under such pressure he should seek to avert the endless doom by heart-felt contrition was natural, however strange it may seem to those brought up in a different faith, who can sympathize with his aspirations for liberty but cannot realize the emotions enkindled by his religious convictions.
The decree of the Córtes of Cádiz, February 22, 1813, suppressing the Inquisition was published in Mexico June 8th. Under it the property of the tribunal was applicable to the treasury for the reduction of the public debt and was forthwith sequestrated; there were no prisoners, the few political ones having been transferred to various convents some days in advance. We have an authentic account of the transaction, made December 20, 1814, after the Restoration, by the alcaide of the secret prison. He says that the decree had been eagerly expected; the tribunal and its ministers were regarded with contempt and its privileges were set at defiance. Immediately after the publication, Viceroy Calleja announced to the senior inquisitor the cessation of its functions; the next day the official commissioned for the purpose came to take possession and commenced an inventory. The building was thrown open to gaping crowds, who gave free vent to their detestation of the institution. On the 11th, the money in the chest was removed; the records concerning the faith were delivered to the Archbishop Bergosa y Jordan, while the papers connected with property were taken by the Intendente of the Government, who confided them to the writer and allotted to him offices in which to keep them. In the Inquisition building was established the lottery, and the adjacent houses of the inquisitors served to lodge its officials, while the main building was used as a barracks and the prisons were turned into shops for tailors, shoemakers and other workers for the army. The total amount sequestrated was 1,775,656 pesos, 5½ reales, consisting of—
| Money in the coffers | 66,566 | pesos, | 2½ | reales. |
| Capital invested | 1,394,628 | “ | 1½ | “ |
| Due on income of censos | 181,482 | “ | 1.7 | gr. |
| Fifteen rented houses | 125,000 | “ | ||
| Furniture, etc., sold at auction, July 19 | 8,000 | “ | ||
| 1,775,676 | “ | 5½ | reales. |
The alcaide proceeds to give us details as to the organization and finances of the tribunal. Besides the inquisitors and fiscal there were seven secretaries, a messenger, a treasurer, a contador, a purveyor of the prison, an alcaide and his assistant, a notary of the sequestrations, two officials of the secreto, an advocate of the fisc and an advocate of prisoners—a largely superfluous force for the trivial work to be performed. The pay-rolls amounted to 33,000 pesos per annum, the subvention to the Suprema was 10,000, and the expenditure for maintaining prisoners, repairs, church functions, etc., brought the annual outlay to 55,000 or 60,000, while the income was 85,000, to which was added 32,000 from the canonries, amounting in all to 117,000—about double the expenses, showing how profitable had proved the purification of the faith.540
On August 31st the archbishop reported to the Government that the decree of suppression had been read in the cathedral on the three Sundays following its receipt. The sanbenitos were at once removed from the places where they were hung; the Prior of the Hospital of San José asked for them to clothe the insane, but the viceroy took them for the troops. The Archbishop requested to have the prohibited books, which were stored in four rooms of his palace, and they were given to him. He was an old inquisitor and lost no time in assuming the jurisdiction over heresy restored to the episcopate by the decree of suppression. As early as June 10th, he issued a pastoral ordering denunciation to him of all persons suspect of heresy and, on September 27th, he published another calling for the surrender of all prohibited books by those who did not hold licences.541
The decree of suppression provided for the continued salaries of the officials and after this the two senior inquisitors disappear—Bernardo de Prado y Obejero and Isidoro Sainz de Alfaro y Beaumont—probably returning to Spain, where refugees from the American tribunals were taken care of. The junior, Manuel de Flores, remained and was ready to resume his functions whenever the “suspension,” as he called it, was removed. His foresight was speedily rewarded, for one of the first acts of Fernando VII on his restoration was the decree of May 4, 1814, abrogating the Constitution of Cádiz, declaring invalid all laws enacted under it and even menacing with the death-penalty all who should keep copies of them. This of itself virtually revived the Inquisition, but legislation was required to reorganize it and this was effected by a decree of July 21.542 Inquisitor Flores had not waited for this, as we find that he had already for some time been gathering evidence against Manuel Abad y Queipo, Bishop-elect of Mechoacan, which he transmitted, August 31st, to the Suprema for its action.543
It was not until December 23d that Viceroy Calleja notified him to re-establish the tribunal, in execution of the royal decree of July 21st; this he followed on January 4, 1815, with a proclamation embodying the decree and announcing that the tribunal had been restored to its jurisdiction and that its property had been returned to it. The archbishop also issued a pastoral requiring all denunciations to be made to it and Flores, on January 21st, published an Edict of Faith ordering the denunciation, within six days, of all heresies, prohibited books and all words of disrespect towards the Holy Office that might subsequently be uttered.544 The tribunal however, was in a sadly dilapidated condition. The alcaide in a letter of December 30, 1814, reports that the restoration of property consisted in the written securities and the real estate, but only 773 pesos of the money had been returned. Notice had been given that the fruits of the canonries and interest on the censos were to be paid as formerly to the tribunal. The purchaser of the furniture, which had been sold at auction in July, was nominally a merchant but in reality the Count of la Cortina, from whom they were endeavoring to get it back at the price which it had brought, but much had been resold; the building had to be refitted for their use and altogether they were in great distress.545 To add to their troubles, the tribunal was so thoroughly discredited that its jurisdiction was invaded on all sides in a manner indicating the contempt in which it was held. Viceroy Calleja issued a proclamation condemning to the flames the Constitution adopted by the insurgents October 22, 1814, at Apatzingan, together with various of their sermons, addresses, etc., and ordering them to be denounced to him under pain of death. Then, on May 24, 1815, he sent a copy of this to the tribunal, inviting it to take action and use all rigor for their suppression. This provoked the liveliest resentment of Flores who complained bitterly to the Suprema, June 29th, of the intrusion on his jurisdiction and of the discourtesy manifested in not previously submitting to him the offending papers. He also enlarged on the harshness with which the decree of suppression had been enforced in 1813 and of the imperfect restitution of property which Calleja had publicly asserted to have been made. He had also endeavored to compel the officials to render military service, but this had been successfully resisted. In spite of all this indignation, however, the insurgent documents were duly censured by the calificadores and, on July 9th, Flores issued an edict condemning them and specifying their errors. The chapter of the cathedral (sede vacante) had also on May 26th published an edict requiring the surrender of these documents to it under pain of excommunication and threatening all priests and beneficiaries who should not exert themselves against the rebels. This was a palpable intrusion on inquisitorial jurisdiction which was deeply resented, and there was also a quarrel with the royal Audiencia which the tribunal accused of invading its jurisdiction and disregarding its fueros in the matter of a pasquinade of which the Audiencia had taken cognizance.546
Under these circumstances it is easy to understand how eagerly Flores seized the opportunity of asserting himself afforded by the capture, November 15, 1815, of the insurgent chief José María Morelos, who shares with Hidalgo the foremost place in the Mexican Valhalla.547
Born in 1764 of humble parents, he was an agricultural laborer up to the age of 25, when he returned to his native Mechoacan and applied himself to the study of grammar, philosophy and morals. Entering the Church, he took full orders and, after serving temporarily the cure of Choromuco, he obtained that of Caraguaro, which was under the rectorship of Hidalgo. It must have been a slender benefice for, in his examination, he explained his not having taken the indulgence of the Santa Cruzada by the plea that before the insurrection he was too poor to pay for it and afterwards the insurgents regarded it as invalid and as merely a device to raise money for the war against them. His morals were those of his class; he admitted to having three children, born of different mothers during his priesthood, but he added that his habits, though not edifying, had not been scandalous, and the tribunal seemed to think so, for little attention was paid to this during his trial and, in the calificacion which preceded his sentence, it is not even alluded to. He joined Hidalgo, October 28, 1810, and must have quickly distinguished himself, for that chief gave him a commission to raise the Pacific coast provinces and, after the rout of the Bridge of Calderon, the burden of maintaining the unequal war fell mainly on Morelos, who was raised successively to the grades of lieutenant-general and captain-general, with the title of Most Serene Highness.
Unlike Hidalgo, who was hurried off to Chihuahua, Morelos when captured was brought to the city of Mexico for trial and execution, arriving there on November 21st. He was carried to the Inquisition, not as its prisoner, but for safe-keeping “on deposit” and Flores, to preserve the secrecy of the Holy Office, made it a condition that the guard accompanying him should not go up stairs or penetrate beyond the first court-yard. It was not until 1.30 A.M. of the 22d that he was lodged in the secret prison, in a cell so dark that he could not read the breviary, which was given to him on his request. The 22d was occupied with an effort to get permission to try him—a competencia carried on in a spirit very different from the masterful audacity of old. Viceroy Calleja desired that Morelos should be degraded from the priesthood, within three days, by the episcopal jurisdiction, in order that his execution should be prompt, and testimony for that purpose was already being taken by the secular and spiritual courts acting in unison. Flores therefore had no time to lose in putting forward the claim of the tribunal, and the fiscal drew up an elaborate paper showing that there were points in the case which came within its jurisdiction. On the 23d a consulta de fe was assembled, consisting of the episcopal Ordinary of Mechoacan, and the consultores of the Inquisition, which represented to the viceroy that, although Morelos was subject to both the secular and spiritual courts, it was persuaded that for other crimes he was justiciable by the Inquisition and that his trial by that tribunal would redound to the honor and glory of God as well as to the service of the State and the king and be efficacious in undeceiving the rebels. Moreover, it promised that the trial should be concluded within four days. Somewhat unwillingly, Calleja granted the request and no time was lost in commencing the most expeditious trial in the annals of the Holy Office—a grim enough comedy to gratify the vanity of the actors, for it could have no influence on the fate of the prisoner, save perhaps in removing the excommunication under which he inferentially lay. Flores, in boasting of this activity, adds that they were much embarrassed by Morelos being frequently taken from them for examination in the other courts, which indicates that the authorities regarded the Inquisition as merely a side-show.
Hurried as were the proceedings, there was due observance of all the formalities required by the cumbrous methods of the Holy Office. That same day, November 23d, the fiscal presented his clamosa, basing it on Morelos having signed the constitutional decree of November 22, 1814, as well as various proclamations condemned as heretical by the Inquisition;548 also on his celebrating mass while under excommunication, and his reply to the Bishop of Puebla, when reproached for so doing, that it would be easier to get a dispensation after the war than to survive the guillotine; also on an edict of Bishop Abad y Queipo of Mechoacan, July 22, 1814, declaring him to be an excommunicated heretic. There was still time for a morning audience and the prisoner was brought before the tribunal, where he was subjected to the customary examination as to his genealogy and whole career, and the first monition was given to save his soul by confessing the truth. In the afternoon he had his second audience and monition. On the morning of the 24th came the third audience and monition, during which he admitted that, at Teypan, he had captured a package of the edicts against Hidalgo and had utilized them to make cartridges. The pompous formulas, urging him to discharge his conscience so that the Inquisition might show him its customary mercy, must have seemed a ghastly jest to a man who knew that his captors would shortly have him shot, and they contrast grotesquely with the feverish anxiety of the tribunal to have a share in the performance.
That same afternoon the fiscal presented the accusation and, considering the haste in which it was prepared, its long accumulation of rhetoric is creditable to the industry of the draughtsman. He describes Morelos as abandoning the Church for the filthy and abominable heresies of Hobbes, Helvetius, Voltaire, Luther and other pestilent writers, rendering him a formal heretic, an apostate from the holy faith, an atheist, materialist, deist, libertine, seditious, guilty of divine and human high treason, an implacable enemy of Christianity and the state, a vile seducer, hypocrite, traitor to king and country, cunning, lascivious, pertinacious and rebellious to the Holy Office. He shows how rebellion is heresy and all rebellious acts are directly or indirectly heretical. To Morelos, in the bottom of his heart, Christ and Belial are equal; he is even suspect of toleration and, as usual, the accusation concludes by asking for confiscation and relaxation. The remainder of the afternoon and the morning audience of the 25th were occupied with the defendant’s answers to the twenty-four articles of the accusation. From what he said it appears that insurgents claimed to be opposing the French domination in Spain, and that Ferdinand’s restoration in 1814 was largely disbelieved or was assumed to be only another phase of Napoleon’s supremacy, showing that Ferdinand could not be a sincere Catholic.
That same morning the publication of evidence was made, consisting wholly of documents, such as the Constitution of October 22, 1814, sundry proclamations signed by Morelos and his printed letter to the Bishop of Puebla, together with the letter of the Bishop of Mechoacan declaring him to be an excommunicated heretic. He was ordered to answer with the advice of his counsel and the three advocates of prisoners were named to him, of whom he selected Don José María Gutiérrez de Rosas. He was sent to his cell to be brought back directly for an interview with his counsel, who was sworn in as customary. There was no time to make copies of the papers, so the unusual course was adopted of entrusting the originals to Rosas, with instructions to return them and present the defence within three hours. In the afternoon he did so and the result showed him to be a ready writer, but he was more occupied in justifying himself for undertaking the defence than in making a plea for Morelos. He savagely denounced the insurrection and the Córtes of Cádiz, whose principles it represented, and he concluded abruptly with a few lines, alleging the repentance of the defendant, from which he hoped for absolution. The inquisitor thereupon ordered the fiscal to be notified and the case to be concluded.
The next morning, November 26th, Flores assembled his calificadores and exhibited to them the proceedings and the condemnations of the insurgent Constitution and proclamations. Fray Domingo Barreda opined that the accused savored of heresy, but the rest were unanimous that he was a formal heretic, who denied his guilt and was not only suspect of atheism but an atheist outright. In the afternoon was held the consulta de fe to decide upon the sentence. Without a dissentient voice it agreed that a public auto should be held at 8 o’clock the next morning in the audience chamber, in the presence of a hundred prominent persons to be designated by Flores. That Morelos should there be declared guilty of malicious and pertinacious imperfect confession, a formal heretic who denied his guilt, a disturber and persecutor of the hierarchy and a profaner of the sacraments; that he was guilty of high treason, divine and human, pontifical and royal, and that he should be present at the mass in the guise of a penitent, in short cassock without collar or girdle and holding a green candle, which, as a heretic and fautor of heretics, he should offer to the priest. As a cruel persecutor of the Holy Office, his property should be confiscated to the king. Although deserving of degradation and relaxation, for the crimes subject to the Inquisition, yet, as he was ready to abjure he was, in the unlikely case of the viceroy sparing his life, condemned to perpetual banishment from America and from all royal residences and to imprisonment for life in the African presidios, with deprivation of all preferment and perpetual irregularity. His three children were declared subject to infamy and the legal disabilities of descendants of heretics. He was to abjure formally, and be absolved from the excommunications reserved to the Holy Office; he was to make a general confession and through life to recite the seven penitential psalms on Fridays and a part of the rosary on Saturdays. Moreover a tablet was to be hung in the cathedral, inscribed with his name and offences.549
The next morning, November 27th, as Flores reports, the auto was duly celebrated in the most imposing scene ever witnessed in the audience chamber, which was crowded with five hundred of the most important personages of the capital. The mass was followed by the impressive ceremony of degradation from the priesthood, performed by the Bishop of Oaxaca. Morelos was delivered to the royal judge and returned to the secret prison whence, at 1.30 of the following night, he was transferred to the citadel. Flores might proudly claim to have vindicated the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, at some sacrifice of its dignity, in the shortest trial of a formal heretic to be found in its records. The object of the indecent haste required by Calleja is scarce apparent, for Morelos was not executed until December 22d.
The tribunal continued to perform its functions. In 1817, the prosecution of Don José Xavier de Tribarren, for reading prohibited books, revealed that Don Cayetano Romero of Guetaria in Guipúzcoa was equally guilty, and the Suprema in Madrid forthwith ordered the tribunal of Logroño to take action against him.550 The latest notable victim was Fray Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra. After holding him for some time in prison, the tribunal, in anticipation of its extinction, sent him to the viceroy as an important offender against the State, with a paper describing him as hating, from the bottom of his heart, the king, the Córtes and all legitimate government, and even as lacking respect for the Holy See and the councils of the Church, his dominant passion being revolutionary independence, which he had vigorously promoted in both North and South America, by his writings full of passion and venom.551
This useless prolongation of existence was soon to end. One of the first measures of the revolution of 1820, which restored the Constitution of 1812, was the royal decree of March 9th, suppressing the Inquisition. Before this reached Mexico officially, the Viceroy Count of Venadita had seen it in the Gaceta de Madrid and had arranged for the extinction of the tribunal. The officials ceased their functions on May 31st; as before, they had transferred their political prisoners to the public prison and those for matters of faith to various convents, the archives were delivered to the custody of the archbishop and the officials hastened to find other homes. Then, on June 14th, the viceroy sent orders for compliance with the decree and, on the 16th, the Inquisitor Antonio de Pereda reported that the tribunal had ceased in all its functions and remained in a condition of absolute extinction. The papers of pending trials were distributed among the appropriate diocesans and the Intendente took possession of the property.552 The officials straggled back to Spain, where they were provided for in common with those of the Peninsula. In the accounts of 1833 there still appear as in receipt of salaries the senior inquisitor, Antonio de Pereda, the secretaries Venancio de Pereda y Cassolla and José María Briergo, and the nuncio y portero, Tomás del Perojo.553
Thus forlorn and discredited passed away the tribunal which had in its prime cast terror over all the provinces between the two oceans, but the impression which it had produced did not disappear with it. In 1821 Don Celestino de la Torre reprinted a savage attack issued in Spain, under the title of “Memorial de la Santa Inquisicion,” which he says, in a prefatory note, is for the disillusionment of the serviles who sigh for the restoration of the Holy Office. It is still more significant that, in the agitation caused, in 1833, by the effort of the Government to reduce the Church to acquiescence in the new order of things, there appeared a little anonymous tract entitled “Mientras no haya Inquisicion se acaba la Religion”—“Without the Inquisition, Religion is destroyed”—arguing that heresy can never be suppressed without the use of force; excommunication, censures and argument are of no avail and the faith of Christ can only be preserved by arming the bishops with all the powers and methods of the Inquisition and enforcing their penal sentences by the State. The bishops, in fact, were quite ready to assume its functions as far as they could for, as late as 1850, on the appearance of a translation of Féréal’s Mystères de l’Inquisition, with notes by Don Manuel de Cuendias, a diocesan junta de censura was held which, without hearing the accused, passed a sentence of excommunication on the editor and on all who should read the book, all of which was publicly proclaimed by edict. This was based on a consulta presented to the junta by Doctor Sollano, who lamented the abolition of the Inquisition and proved satisfactorily that heresy merits the death-penalty.554
The Philippines
When Spain, in 1566, undertook the conquest of the Philippines, they were not erected into a separate government but were placed under the vice-royalty of New Spain or Mexico, with a governor or captain-general in command. When, in 1581, the bishopric of Manila was founded, it was suffragan to the archbishopric of Mexico and was not erected into a metropolitan see until 1595. The islands therefore were included in the district of the Mexican Inquisition, but they were too sparsely occupied by Europeans for the tribunal to think it necessary to establish an organization there. When, however, the first bishop, the Dominican Domingo de Salazar, reached his see in 1572, his zeal led him at once to establish an episcopal Inquisition with a fiscal and other officials, and the regular inquisitorial procedure; he soon found culprits and held a formal auto de fe, exercising his assumed authority with excessive severity. Don Francisco de Zuñiga, a youth of 20, in a discussion, had thoughtlessly declared fornication to be no sin; then on reflection he denounced himself, but notwithstanding this he was obliged to appear in an auto with a gag, and was banished for ten years, with a threat of two hundred lashes if he returned. Canon Francisco de Pareja, suspected of being one of the Alumbrados of Llerena, when arrested for solicitation, hanged himself in prison. Some of Salazar’s penitents on reaching Mexico complained to the tribunal and thus aroused its attention to this invasion of its jurisdiction, when it lost no time in vindicating its rights. March 1, 1583, it sent a commission as commissioner to the Augustinian Fray Francisco Manrique, a man of prominence in his Order, which was the most influential in the islands, and at the same time it notified Salazar that it had done so in consequence of his having assumed to act as inquisitor.555
Bishop Salazar, who was on the point of celebrating an auto de fe, was by no means disposed to abandon the authority which he had assumed. He refused to recognize the commission of Manrique and threatened with excommunication all who should do so. The Licenciado Juan Convergel Maldonado, who supported Manrique, was thrown into prison so harsh that he became insane, when Salazar sent him to Mexico, and Benito de Mendiola, who had served as Maldonado’s messenger, was likewise imprisoned. The traditional rivalry between the seculars and regulars and between the different Orders brought to the bishop ample support from the clergy, the Franciscans and the Jesuits—a high authority among the latter, Padre Alonso Sánchez, even declared that those who recognized the commissioner committed mortal sin. For six months Fray Manrique kept up the struggle and then abandoned it, writing to the tribunal, April 1, 1584, that, to avoid scandal he would do nothing more until it should have provided a competent remedy. The tribunal took prompt and effective steps. It wrote to Manila revoking all the acts of the bishop and to the Suprema, January 17, 1585, reciting the circumstances and pointing out the grave consequences that would follow when Salazar’s success should lead other bishops to follow his example. Through the Suprema it also addressed a letter to Philip II, who responded, May 26th, with a cédula to the bishop, telling him that he had invaded the jurisdiction of the Inquisition and ordering him to abstain from interfering in any way in affairs pertaining to it or with the duties of its commissioners. This was decisive but it was uncalled for. Salazar had already seen his error, had recognized Manrique and had handed over to him the papers in all the cases—seven in number—then pending before him. Thus the jurisdiction of the Mexican tribunal was permanently established over the islands, although subsequently there were one or two attempts made to organize an independent Inquisition there.556
In this the tribunal regarded rather its own ambition to extend its jurisdiction than the interests of the faith, for the whole career of the Philippine commissionership manifests the impossibility of conducting such a business at the distance of a hundred and forty degrees of longitude, when perhaps a year or two might pass without a vessel reaching Acapulco from Manila. The duties and powers of a commissioner were strictly limited and defined. As a rule he could do nothing except in execution of orders from the inquisitors; without such orders he could not make arrests, unless there was immediate danger of the escape of the accused; he could only gather information, report it and await instructions, and it was the same with regard to sequestration; if involved in a competencia he could issue inhibitions on the rival judges, but he could not put into execution the censures and penalties threatened in the formulas unless authorized by the tribunal.557 In the detailed instructions sent to Manrique along with his commission there is little concession made to the difficulties of distance and communication by enlarging his powers. Although he is not allowed to sequestrate property, he is to inventory it and see that it is left in charge of a proper person, but this must be an arrangement between the accused and the depository in which the Inquisition assumes no responsibility. He is expressly told that he can make no arrests without orders, but an exception is made in the case of bigamy, on account of its frequency, when, if he obtains positive evidence against a culprit, he can arrest him and send him to Mexico, confining him in the royal gaol at the public expense, while awaiting a vessel. On the other hand, he is not to interfere with the secular or spiritual courts when they prosecute for bigamy and, if they offer to surrender an offender, he is to tell them to send him to Mexico, but not at the expense of the Inquisition.558 Subsequently, in 1611, another exception was made, in the crime of solicitation in the confessional. The tribunal wrote to the Suprema that, in consequence of the number of denunciations, and in view of the need of the culprits’ presence in the Philippines, whither they had been sent at the royal expense, it had ordered that only two who seemed most guilty should be shipped to Mexico for trial and sentence. It further suggested that in future the commissioner should have power, in conjunction with a judge or other qualified person, to try the cases and send merely the papers to Mexico where the sentence should be rendered. To this the Suprema assented, adding that, in view of the distance and delay, the prisoner should meanwhile be discharged on bail—which indicates that in these cases the commissioner could arrest.559 This does not seem to have been strictly carried out for, in 1613, we chance to hear of three culprits of this kind, sent from Manila to Mexico, with the papers, for sentence. One of these, Francisco Sánchez de Santa María, was accused by twenty-three native women, and another, Don Luis de Salinas, had been shipwrecked on the coast of Japan and the papers had been lost; he succeeded in getting back to Manila, where the commissioner tried him again and despatched him to Mexico.560
Another exception to the prohibition of arrest was made in the case of soldiers who deserted to the Dutch or to Moros and embraced their faith. What to do with these cases presented a problem concerning which the Mexican tribunal consulted the Suprema, as burning them in effigy might prevent their coming back. The Suprema thereupon submitted the matter to Philip III, representing that the soldiers were exposed to such privations that they were forced to fly and find refuge wherever they could, and meanwhile it advised the tribunal to await the action of the royal councils. To this the tribunal replied at much length, May 20, 1620, stating that no action had as yet been taken in such cases, but that the commissioner was ordered to proceed against the culprits and, on convicting them, to send them to Mexico for sentence. The whole discussion, however, was purely academical; there is no trace of such culprits being forwarded to the tribunal and this, possibly, for the very good reason that the military authorities punished the offence with death, when they could lay hands on the delinquents.561 There was another class of cases in which the commissioners seem to have exercised the power of arrest. In 1666 we find the tribunal complaining to the Suprema that soldiers, to escape the rigor of military law, sought prosecution by the Inquisition in order to be arrested and sent to Mexico and to this end would blaspheme or utter heretical propositions. Many of them died on the passage and the expense of this bore heavily on the tribunal. For this the Suprema had no remedy to suggest except the plan adopted with soliciting confessors.562 With these exceptions and the visitas de navios, or searching vessels for prohibited books, the duties of the commissioner were restricted to receiving denunciations, taking testimony, reporting to Mexico and executing such orders as he might receive from there. Still, they were personages of importance; although frailes living in their convent cells, they organized an imperfect kind of court; they had their assessors, notaries, treasurers, consultors and calificadores, their alguazil mayor and familiars and deputized their powers to sub-commissioners in the various parts of the islands.
Of real inquisitorial work for the purity of the faith we hear little. During the sixteenth century the only evidences of activity are three cases of Judaizers—Jorje and Domingo Rodríguez of Manila, reconciled in the Mexican auto of March 28, 1593, and Diego Hernández, regidor of Vitoria, accused by his cook of ordering her to cut chickens’ throats instead of strangling them; his property was sequestrated and evidence against him was sought in Oporto from whence he came, but he died during these prolonged preliminaries.563 The seventeenth century is similarly barren, affording few instances except the occasional bigamists and soliciting confessors, military culprits and sometimes a few Dutch prisoners of war. In the Mexican auto of 1648 there appeared Alejo de Castro, an octogenarian sent from Manila on suspicion of Mahometanism, sentenced to perpetual exile from the Philippines and to servitude for life in a convent for instruction in the faith.564 A more noteworthy culprit was Padre Francisco Manuel Fernández, S. J., a devotee of Luisa de los Reyes, a Tagal beata who had ecstasies. He declared that she had died many times and that God had resuscitated her so that she should suffer for the souls in purgatory; he compared her for sanctity to St. Teresa, St. Catherine and St. Inez and insisted that when he kissed her, embraced her and handled her indecently, he had no sensual feeling. It was a clear case of Illuminism against which the Inquisition waged unsparing war, nor was Fernández the only culprit, for another Jesuit, Padre Javier Riquelme was also compromised. Luisa was prosecuted in 1665 and testimony was taken against the Jesuits, but the Mexican tribunal reported, July 17, 1770, to the Suprema that the case had been suspended owing to the activity of the Jesuits in the islands, who always made the cause of their members their own. It complained bitterly of the way in which they impeded the Inquisition and frustrated its labors, when any Jesuit was concerned, whether for solicitation or other offence. They were not to be believed, for there was the case of the French Father Pierre Peleprat, whose detention was ordered, when they asserted that he was dead, but subsequently it was reported that this was not so but that he had been sent to France.565
The eighteenth century offers a similarly eventless record. So great was the inertness that the Edict of Faith, which was the chief source of denunciations and which should be published yearly in all parish churches, became virtually obsolete. From the time of Commissioner Paternina, who published it in 1669, forty-nine years elapsed before it was again published, in 1718, by Commissioner Juan de Arechederra; and Fray Juan de la Concepcion, writing in 1790, tells us that it had never been published since then.566 It was a somewhat remarkable and uncalled-for burst of energy on the part of Commissioner Bernardo de Ustáriz, in 1752, when a score of Moro sailors of an English ship performed some pagan rites with songs and incense and he applied to the archbishop and then to the governor for aid to punish the scandal. Both declined, when he got General Antonio Romero, who was a familiar, to undertake an investigation. Then force was needed to arrest the culprits and a prison to confine them, and Romero sought the Marquis of Ovando, the governor for this, but Ovando replied that the matter was under his exclusive jurisdiction, an assertion which he repeated to Ustáriz, adding that he intended to punish the guilty. Ustáriz complained of this to the tribunal, which declared, February 19, 1754, that the governor had failed in his duty; that his assertion of cognizance of such cases should be expunged from any instrument in which it appeared, and that the commissioner and notary should notify him of this in person. The Suprema, however, took a cooler view of the matter, pointing out that, by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, English subjects could not be prosecuted for practising their religion in Spanish territory, but at the same time it approved of the action of the tribunal and promised to ask the king to make due provision for the future.567 Seeing that baptism was necessary to give jurisdiction to the Inquisition and that natives, even when converted, were not subject to it, this sudden access of zeal on the part of Ustáriz would appear somewhat supererogatory.
Ustáriz also showed his energy, in 1750, by arresting Pierre Fallet, a Swiss of Neuchâtel and a convert from Calvinism. In 1742 Commissioner Arechederra had taken from him two indecent prints; in 1748 Commissioner Juan Alvárez had deprived him of another and denounced him to the Mexican tribunal as suspect of heresy. The tribunal, on March 14, 1748, ordered his arrest with sequestration, at the same time dismissing Alvárez for his indiscretions and replacing him with Ustáriz. The sequestration showed that Fallet’s property consisted of some uncollectable credits and many debts but, among his books on history, voyages and mathematics, in English, French, Flemish, Spanish, Latin and Greek, were found two prohibited ones—Rapin’s History of England and a “Historia publica y secreta de la corte de Madrid.” He was duly sent to Mexico, where he entered the secret prison, January 17, 1752, with broken health. An accusation of seventy-six articles was accumulated against him, but his sentence on August 8th consisted merely of abjuration for light suspicion, three months’ reclusion in the Jesuit College for instruction and some spiritual penances. This laborious trifling, so ruinous to the unfortunate subject, was crowned by the Suprema, which pondered over the case until March 7, 1772, when it ordered its suspension. Fallet, meanwhile, had been allowed to return to the Philippines, where his conduct was reported as exemplary.568
Censorship of a similarly futile kind was exercised in the denunciation of objectionable books or passages, which had to be forwarded to Mexico for action. Of this a single example will suffice. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dominican Fray Francisco de San José was one of the most zealous and successful missionaries. He left a number of works in Tagal, some of which were printed, while others reposed in MS. Among the latter was a volume of sermons that had considerable repute, and in this the Augustinian Fray Juan Eusebio Polo, in 1772, discovered a passage conveying the Dominican view entertained at the period, as to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. Not daring to denounce it to the Dominican commissioner, he did so directly to the Mexican tribunal, adding that he could not send the MS., because it was borrowed, but he furnished certificates of two of his Augustinian brethren as to the accuracy of his translation. This was forwarded to the Suprema which, on January 27, 1774, ordered a copy of the book to be searched for in Mexico and Manila, the translation to be examined by experts, the matter to be voted on and then referred back to Madrid. Apparently this ended the case.569
If the natives were exempt from inquisitorial jurisdiction, they were subject to that of the missionary fathers and it may be questioned whether in this they were to be envied. About 1756 an obstinate revolt in the Island of Bonol throws some light on the relations between the converts and their spiritual guides. A district belonging to the Jesuits was placed under the control of Padre Morales who, observing that one of his subjects did not attend mass or frequent the sacraments, ordered him to be arrested. The man was known to be a desperate character and it was not until Morales laid explicit commands on the alguazil mayor of the village that the attempt was made, which resulted in the killing of the alguazil and the flight of the culprit. Francisco Dagohoy, brother of the slain, brought the corpse to Morales for Christian burial, which the padre refused, unless the regular fees were paid, intimating moreover that the alguazil had died under excommunication as a duellist. Naturally exasperated, Dagohoy, who was a leader among his people, assembled them, set forth their wrongs eloquently and had little difficulty in persuading them to follow him to the mountains, to the number of some three thousand. Entrenching themselves, they kept up a predatory warfare, in which Morales was killed and also an Augustinian Fray Lamberti. The rigor with which the taxes were exacted by the Spaniards drove many to join them and the rebellion was still flourishing in 1792, in spite of repeated overtures and offers of pardon—indeed, it may be doubted whether it was ever completely pacified under Spanish domination.570
While this Philippine branch of the Inquisition accomplished so little for the faith, it was eminently successful in the function of contributing to the disorder and confusion which so disastrously affected Spanish colonial administration. As everywhere else, the immunity of the officials was a fruitful source of trouble. In 1601, Benito de Mendiola, a familiar, was prosecuted in the secular court for the murder of Roque Espina de Cáceres, secretary of the governor, but the commissioner interposed and a long competencia followed, at the end of which, after a delay of ten years, the papers in the case were ordered to be surrendered to him by a decree of the Suprema of November 28, 1611. In consideration of the distance and delay, Mendiola was liberated on bail; the widow of his victim desisted from the prosecution and finally, after further postponement caused by the difficulties of communication, the Mexican tribunal sentenced him to four months’ banishment, two months’ suspension from his office as notary and a fine of fifty pesos—a punishment sufficient to show his guilt and his escape from justice.571
The same question came up, in 1635, under Governor Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera, whose stormy term of office was a continuous succession of broils with the several ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The Archbishop Hernando Guerrero was engaged in a mortal struggle, first with the governor and then with the Jesuits, in which his experience singularly resembled that of Bishop Palafox of Puebla. He was twice excommunicated, his temporalities were seized and he was relegated for a time to Corregidor Island. Compelled to a humiliating submission, he took the precaution of making a preliminary protest before the notary Diego de Rueda, whereupon the governor seized Rueda and threw him into the castle of Santiago. It chanced that he was a familiar; the commissioner, Fray Francisco de Herrera, claimed him and excommunicated the juez conservador of the Jesuits, who had excommunicated the archbishop. The juez yielded to the superior jurisdiction of the Inquisition and ordered Rueda released, but the Governor stood firm and when Herrera sent two frailes of his order with a demand for the prisoner, Corcuera seized them and sent them to Cavite with orders to confine them in their convent.572 This was probably but a small part of Herrera’s contests with the civil power for, in 1636, Corcuera applied to the Mexican tribunal asking that frailes be no longer appointed as commissioners, on account of the disturbances which they excited; if clerics of prudence were selected, peace would be preserved and the scandals caused by the Dominicans would be averted. In 1638 the Council of Indies renewed the request to Philip IV, asking that prebendaries of the churches should be chosen; Philip sent corresponding instructions to the Suprema but, on its remonstrating, he referred the matter back to the Council and nothing was done.573
Corcuera’s successor, Diego Fajardo, had an opportunity of learning the extent to which the audacity of a commissioner could reach, and the utter disregard of all considerations of public policy. About 1650, an order came to the commissioner to seize, with the utmost secrecy, the governor of one of the provinces, who was also commandant of a fortified post. The commissioner quietly summoned his alguazil mayor and a sufficient number of familiars, sailed for the province, surprised the governor in his bed, carried him off and imprisoned him in a convent until there should be a vessel sailing for Acapulco. Fajardo was an irritable and passionate soldier, whose governorship was a continuous broil with the warring jurisdictions of the colony, and who could appreciate the risk of depriving a fortified place of its commander, at a time of perpetual warfare with the Dutch and the natives. His wrath was expected to be extreme at the contempt thus shown for his office and for the safety of the colony, but his reverential fear of the Inquisition overcame all other considerations and, when informed of the matter, he gently rebuked the commissioner for not having afforded him the opportunity of earning the graces and indulgences granted for participation in so pious a work, as he would have eagerly served as an alguazil in making the arrest.574
Yet perhaps the most troublesome of the commissioners with whom the Inquisition afflicted the islands was the Augustinian Fray José de Paternina Samaniego. He was grossly ignorant and had led a disorderly life in both Spain and Mexico. His fellow Augustinian, Fray Cristóbal de Leon, told him that he was unworthy to occupy so high an office, for he was an apostate whom the General of the Order had condemned to the galleys when visiting the convents of Old Castile, whereupon he accused Cristóbal to the provincial as a Jew and a usurer, causing his imprisonment with such harshness that it cost him his life. Yet this was the man whom the inquisitor-general sent to the Philippines, in 1663, as commissioner. His unfitness soon manifested itself, and his prelates wrote to the Mexican tribunal recommending his replacement; other remonstrances were sent to the Suprema, which ordered the collection of material against him, and nothing further was done.575
On board the ship which carried Paternina to Manila there was another passenger, Don Diego Salcedo, a Fleming who, as maese de campo, had rendered distinguished service in the Flemish wars, and who was coming to the Philippines as governor. The two men conceived a mutual dislike which was heightened when Salcedo dismissed from command of the fleet Don Andrés de Medina, who was a close friend of the commissioner, and refused employment to his nephew, González Samaniego. Still bitterer grew his hatred when Salcedo succeeded him in the favors of a married woman, whose paramour he had been, and he openly declared that he would be revenged.
Salcedo was arbitrary and covetous; he must have made full use of the opportunities afforded by his position, for at his death his fortune was reckoned at 700,000 pesos—much of which he had the prudence to remit to Mexico. He was not popular; he was speedily involved in the dissensions which seemed inevitable, with Archbishop Poblete, and a faction was formed against him at the head of which stood the commissioner. A conspiracy for his ruin was organized and in February, 1666, there came to the Mexican tribunal letters from Paternina, from the archiepiscopal notary and from the Castellan of Manila accusing him of indifference to the service of God and the king and of his communication with Dutch heretics. Then the archbishop, in a letter of June 20, 1666, to the inquisitor-general, represented that Salcedo surrounded himself with Flemings and Dutchmen, one of whom was a Calvinist; that he never attended mass on feast-days or heard sermons; it was not known that he confessed or took communion except at Easter; that he created scandal by his relations with a married woman and that his cupidity was insatiable. This brought from the queen-regent a letter of November 11, 1666, to Salcedo, reprimanding him for his disregard of church observances, but nothing more. Paternina sent fresh accusations to the tribunal, and the archbishop and the Bishop of Cebu wrote to the Viceroy of Mexico; then the tribunal ordered its commissioner at Acapulco to examine secretly the passengers and crews of vessels arriving from the Philippines and all the accumulation was sent to the Suprema which, on November 22, 1667, ordered the case to be suspended; Paternina must act with caution and, if he obtained further information, he was to forward it.
The failure of his plans thus far showed Paternina that he must assume the responsibility. Archbishop Poblete died December 8, 1667, and it was not until September, 1668, that the commissioner was ready to take vigorous action, assured of the support of two judges of the Audiencia who hoped to succeed to power, of high officials with whom Salcedo had quarrelled, and of individuals to whom promises were made of offices, encomiendas and other advantages, while there was the enticing prospect of plunder in the sequestration of the governor’s fortune. It was not difficult to obtain from his enemies evidence such as it was—evidence which the Mexican tribunal subsequently pronounced not only to be factitious on its face, but to amount at most only to a presumption plusquam leve. This was submitted, September 28th, to nine frailes as calificadores, some of whom pronounced the accused to be vehemently suspect of the errors of Luther and Calvin. Then three consultors were called together—the Dean José Millan de Poblete, nephew of the archbishop, the archiepiscopal provisor, Francisco Pizarro de Orellano, and the Licenciado Manuel Suárez de Olivera, from whom Salcedo had taken 12,000 pesos and who was soon afterwards prosecuted for Judaism. These worthies on October 6th decided that the commissioner could proceed to arrest, seeing that the three prescribed conditions were more than fulfilled. Of these conditions the most important, in the present case, was the danger of immediate escape of the accused, for which, as an afterthought, there was subsequently collected testimony so transparently futile that the Mexican tribunal described the danger of flight as a mere baseless pretext.
The forms having thus been observed, Paternina, on October 8th, issued the warrant of arrest addressed to the Admiral Vizcarra y Leiva as alguazil mayor—Vizcarra having been one of the principal witnesses. It ordered him to seize Salcedo wherever he could be found, to sequestrate his property and deliver it to Fray Mateo Ballon, guardian of the Franciscan convent. Salcedo was aware of the machinations against him, but imagined himself in full security and took no precautions. The warrant was delivered to the admiral at 9 P.M. on October 9th and between 12 and 1 A.M. he entered the palace with a band of Franciscan frailes armed with pikes, swords and bucklers. They seized Salcedo in bed, fettered him and, without allowing him to dress, carried him as he was in a hammock to the Franciscan convent and threw him into a narrow cell. After a few days he was removed to the house of the Capitan Diego de Palencia, his declared enemy, and then to the Augustinian convent of San Pablo, where Paternina kept him incomunicado and chained to the wall. The day of the arrest the judges ordered the bells of the cathedral to be rung as a sign of rejoicing that they had assumed the government. In fact, one of the judges, Juan Manuel de la Peña Bonifaz, an accomplice in the conspiracy, assumed the nominal government and there ensued a period of terror for all who were not of their faction. Paternina became the virtual ruler and he inspired general fear by banishing ten or twelve of the principal citizens, by forbidding any one to speak of the affair under heavy penalties and excommunication, and by bringing charges against a number of persons of being hostile to the Inquisition. The rich sequestration became an object of plunder. A nephew of Bonifaz profited largely from it, nor was Paternina neglectful of the chance, for we happen to hear of his entrusting 20,000 pesos to the Capitan Pedro Quintero, to be used for his benefit, and also of his extorting bribes from shipmasters for delivering to them goods embargoed with those of the governor. In short, as the Mexican tribunal reported to the Suprema, they committed a thousand iniquities.
How long Salcedo lay in his chains does not appear, but it must have been more than eighteen months, for he was probably shipped to Mexico during the summer of 1670. He died at sea November 24 of that year, making a most Christian end, for he confessed three times. A further proof of his orthodoxy may be found in the fact that he appointed as his executor the Mexican Inquisitor Ortega Montañes—a position which the Suprema forbade him to accept—and the estate was handed over, when the sequestration was lifted, October 31, 1671, to Don Gerónimo Pardo, Auditor of the Audiencia, who held powers from Salcedo’s sister and three brothers.
The vessel by which Salcedo was shipped did not reach Acapulco until January 7, 1671, being the first that had come for two years. It brought the earliest direct intelligence of the events at Manila and the report of Paternina, but the news had already arrived there by way of Batavia, Holland and Madrid. In Madrid it had naturally aroused the Council of Indies which presented to the queen-regent a consulta embracing three propositions: I. If the commissioner made the arrest without orders from the tribunal, he should be severely punished for exposing the colony to risks so great. II. If the arrest was by order of the tribunal, it should have notified the Viceroy of Mexico in order that he might make provision for simultaneously filling the vacancy. III. That precise instructions for the future should be given for the arrest of persons of that rank, in conformity with the royal cédulas and concordias providing for such cases. To this the Suprema, still completely in the dark as to the circumstances of the case, replied somewhat superciliously that, if the commissioner had exceeded his duty, he would be punished appropriately; that the arrest was not ordered by the tribunal but, if it had been, no notice was due to the viceroy in matters of faith; the cédula of April 2, 1664, provided for the government of the Philippines in cases of vacancy, which is all that human foresight can anticipate. No new instructions were necessary, as such cases were already provided for in the existing regulations; sentences on persons of the rank of Don Diego Salcedo were not executed without consulting the Suprema, except when irremediable injury might be anticipated from delay, and it was an accepted rule that, in important cases of faith, all such personages were subjected to the Inquisition. To this the Council of Indies rejoined by insisting that it should not be left to the discretion of a commissioner to determine whether the danger of delay justified arresting a governor and imperilling the safety of the colony; the tribunal should give notice to the viceroy, without violating the secrecy of the Inquisition, and it concluded by asking that definite instructions be given to the inquisitor-general and Suprema that in matters of such importance such action should be taken as would avoid the danger of a recurrence of similar proceedings. Even the Council of Indies did not venture to hint that the governor of an important colony, if suspected of heresy, could not be suddenly arrested, and it only objected to this being done without preliminary precautions.
In June, 1670, the news of Salcedo’s arrest filtered through Madrid to Mexico but it was not until January 7, 1671, that the official report from Paternina reached Acapulco. The tribunal, in forwarding, January 18th, an abstract of this to the Suprema, made haste to exculpate itself from all responsibility, pronouncing the whole affair to be the greatest abuse ever committed by an official, especially by one of the Inquisition, a trampling on justice, with grievous discredit to the prudence and equitable procedure of the Holy Office, arising from hatred of Salcedo and carried out by a conspiracy between Paternina and the judges who desired to seize the government. This rendered necessary exemplary punishment, so that all might understand that the tribunal did not undertake to punish crimes that did not pertain to it, nor serve as an instrument for the gratification of passion, and this demonstration should be made in Manila, in order that the honor and fame of Salcedo might be restored, although he had lost life and fortune. The tribunal therefore, while awaiting instructions, proposed to suspend Paternina and give his office to another, with orders to shut him up in a convent and also to raise the sequestration. This it did and appointed as his successor Fray Felipe Pardo, though when the Suprema, June 4, 1671, confirmed the suspension, with incredible blindness, it replaced him with the Dean José Millan de Poblete, who had been his active accomplice. Pardo however probably retained the office, as the dean had been promoted to the bishopric of Canaries, and one of the results of the affair was to transfer the commissionership from the Augustinians to the Dominicans.
Paternina escaped the punishment which he merited for he died, January 18, 1674, like his victim, on the voyage to Acapulco. The Suprema had ordered his imprisonment and trial, but the sentence was not to be executed without its confirmation. Despite its assurance to the Council of Indies that nothing more was necessary to regulate arrests of governors, it issued, under pressure from the queen-regent, June 30, 1671, a carta acordada prescribing special rules for such occasions. Meanwhile in Manila there had been a natural revulsion. The new governor, Manuel de Leon y Saravia, took full advantage of the opportunity to emancipate the secular power from the predominance of the ecclesiastical. He withdrew the sequestrated property out of the hands of the treasurer of the Inquisition; he released Juan de Berestain who had been imprisoned as an accomplice of Salcedo; he prosecuted and banished the Franciscan provincial and the guardian of the Franciscan convent, and the good frailes complained that they were persecuted as by an enemy; and we are assured that he reduced the power of the Holy Office until its officials were so despised that if they had to arrest the vilest individual no one would help them.576
There is nothing more connected with the Philippine commissionership that is worth relating, except to explain the disappearance of its records. When the British captured Manila, October 5, 1762, these were not removed from the city. No attention was paid to them at first but, on March 12, 1763, an English Catholic and Don César Fallet, who had been penanced by the Inquisition, informed the commissioner, Fray Pedro Luis de Serra, that he was about to be arrested and the archives to be seized, whereupon he burnt them all and when the English came they found nothing. He was taken before the authorities where he told what he had done; the tribunal approved of his action and sent him renewed instructions.577
Although not directly connected with our subject, there is interest in observing the zeal with which the purity of the faith was conserved in the Far East. The commissioner, Juan de Arechederra, in a letter of July 6, 1724, from Manila to Francisco de Garzeron, inquisitor and inspector of Mexico, encloses a sentence rendered in Canton by Fra Giovanni Bonaventura de Roma, as delegate judge and commissioner of Giovanni de Cazal, Bishop of Macao, on Antoine Guigue, a French missionary convicted of Jansenism. Guigue, it appears, had obeyed orders in publishing the appeal of his archbishop, Cardinal Noailles, to a future council against the bull Unigenitus, he had maintained that councils are superior to popes, that popes sometimes erred and other Jansenist heresies, besides receiving and circulating Jansenist books. Moreover it was asserted that he had been guilty of solicitation when on missions in the interior. He had not obeyed the citations and had allowed the trial to go by default, wherefore his sentence was publicly read, March 1, 1724, in the church Siaò Nân Muen of Canton. He was suspended from all priestly functions, he was ordered to leave the province and betake himself to a convent in which he was to remain, performing certain spiritual exercises, until he had satisfied the pope, and all this under penalty of perpetual imprisonment for disobedience.578 The Emperor of China at the time was ordering all Christian missionaries to leave his dominions, but the common danger was insufficient to allay the strife arising from Pasquier Quesnel’s speculations on sufficing attrition.