with the Catholic kings was more than Sixtus, who had no moral fiber, could withstand. Yet the year after issuing the confirmatory bull he addressed a letter to the inquisitors of Seville (then the' only tribunal), bitterly complaining of the way in which the bull was extorted, and threatening to depose them. He addressed a half-complimentary, half-sarcastic letter to Isabella, expressing his delight in her pious zeal, and hoping she would show it was piety, not avarice, that moved her, by remitting all confiscations to the heirs of the condemned. To this she and her husband refused to bind themselves, although they often did make such remissions in fact. Sixtus was also much discontented that for his judge of appeal the sovereigns substituted a civil functionary. In the next generation Leo X went so far as to excommunicate at once three or four leading inquisitors as contumaciously disobedient. Cardinal Ximenes, himself grand inquisitor, though a temperate one, in a letter to Prince Charles describes as the two great enemies of the Holy Office the Aragonese nation and the pope. At last, after his wife's death and his daughter's lunacy, Ferdinand, now regent of Castile, lost patience, and in 1509 issued a decree denouncing death against anyone who should procure from the pope a protection against the Inquisition. Many protections had been already given out by Rome, of which some were observed, but more, apparently, disregarded.

DISCONTENT.

Had the sovereigns merely asked for a revival, with some modifications, of the old Dominican Inquisition, undoubtedly the pope would have gladly complied. Doubtless the popes, as compared with the Church at large, were not much inclined to persecute, except where their own immediate authority was at stake. Rome fears a little schism more than a great deal of heresy. REASONS Hers is quite the reverse of the Covenanter disposition. OF PAPAL Yet no one then doubted that the good old Dominican Inquisition, with its comfortable cruelties and long somnolences, was a very meritorious institute. This, however, was a very different thing from the Royal Inquisition, which put everything under control of the crown. So long as the king of Spain remained Catholic in doctrine the concordat and the Inquisition made him almost as complete master of the bishops, and of the clergy throughout, as the king of France, or, after the Reformation, the king of England. This could not be other than exceedingly displeasing to the pope.

Why, however, should the popes have brought such charges of cruelty and harshness against the Spanish tribunal? Its modes of

ITALIANS AND

procedure were harsher, doubtless, than those of the Roman Inquisition. But this was a later and, though harsh enough in all conscience, a mitigated copy of the Spanish. On the other hand, the Iberian tribunal was decidedly milder than most SPANIARDS. of the secular courts of Europe. Torture was used everywhere except in England to extort evidence, but in Spain was subject to certain restrictions unknown elsewhere. When torture was disused in other courts it was also discontinued in the Inquisition. Llorente describes the prisons of the Holy Office as light and roomy chambers, at a time when elsewhere they were dens of darkness, filth, and fever. The prisoners were well fed and carefully tended in sickness. There were many shameful abuses, but the prisoners were encouraged to denounce them. For the capitally condemned, burning alive, commonly commuted into previous strangling, was the mode of death, a penalty then universal throughout Europe for various offenses; but the other common punishments of burying alive, drawing and quartering, tearing with hot pincers, and breaking on the wheel were unknown in Spain. The current account of the "Virgin of Madrid," with her hidden knives and deadly embrace, is shown by comparison with Llorente to be an unscrupulous fiction, drawn up by a Polish adventurer trading on American credulity. Had the accused a witness to produce, though from the depths of the American forests, he was safe, says Llorente, until the royal messenger had brought the witness to Spain. Why should the popes then have been so aghast at the cruelty of the Holy Office in Spain?

It was not, apparently, the methods of the Inquisition which they censured so much as the universal Spanish suspiciousness toward the baptized Moors and Jews, especially the Jews, leading to such inordinately numerous arrests and frequent punishments. The Italians had never, like the Spaniards, known the stress of an unintermitted conflict of seven centuries for their nationality and their religion, against two numerous and powerful races. Therefore they could not comprehend the Castilian feeling which surmised in every baptized Moor and Jew a hidden plotter against religion and country. They denounced as intolerable cruelty what the Spaniards held to be simple self-preservation. The popes did, indeed, succeed in saving innumerable lives, and the estates and honor of innumerable families. Yet in great part the Holy Office went on in silent contempt of their intervention in its policy of persecution. Spain is so intensely orthodox that she has often allowed herself strange liberties toward the holy see.

LLORENTE.

As Hefele and Prescott show, Llorente's statistics' are utterly untrustworthy. Yet, as we possess no better, we use them. From 1481 to 1820, or thereabouts, he makes out the Spanish Inquisition to have put to death thirty thousand persons for heresy, STATISTICS OF witchcraft, sacrilege, unnatural vice, smuggling contraband of war, and some other offenses. Protestantism was easily rooted out, so that most of the deaths for heresy must have been for crypto-Judaism. Llorente's numbers give an annual death rate, for all Spain, of about eighty-one. The small rate, as compared with the innumerable burnings of witches alone, in Scotland and Germany, must have been governed by the excessive circumspection of the Holy Office,' which disliked to kill, but kept Spain under perpetual dread. It was this overhanging dread, much more than the actual destruction of life which, even as limited, was mostly for offenses independent of heresy, that made the Inquisition so deadening a force to the intellectual and moral life of Spain. The exaltation of the Moorish wars and of the American discoveries, it is true, secured to Spain a century of splendid litera

But she then began to feel the cold paralysis of the Holy Office, which at last brought everything to a stay.

PENANCES.

Far more numerous than the executions were the lesser punishments, imprisonments, fines, and, chiefly, church penances light and heavy. These Llorente estimates at some three hundred and fifty thousand. For the last fifty or seventy years, says Llorente, the Holy Office hardly inflicted any other punishments than these penances. They did not, even the heavier, prevent a man from being subsequently advanced to a bishopric or intermarried with royalty. Yet the frequent interpositions of the popes for the mitigation of them show that they must have been felt as a lowering discomfort throughout Spain. An auto-de-fé (Portuguese, auto-da-fé) had that name indifferently, whether there were executions or not. Not unfrequently an auto-de-fé might have even nine hundred culprits, yet no one of them would suffer death. From 1538 on, by royal decree, all American Indians were exempt from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. The remains of imagined walled-up victims appear to be those of friars, who, according to common use, had after death received intramural interment. This usage may have been Mexican, or it may have come from Europe, as there appear to be some traces of the same practice there.

EXEMPTION
OF INDIANS.

1 These citations from Llorente are from Hefele's Life of Cardinal Ximenes. Lea gives some droll instances of its long hesitations in making arrests.

CHAPTER XII.

BOURBON REFORMS.

BOURBON and reform seem a contradiction in terms. Yet Spain was so thoroughly medieval that influences which elsewhere were reactionary became in Spain actually progressive.

BOURBONS

THEMSELVES REFORMERS IN SPAIN.

Of the history of Spain for the last four hundred years half belongs to the house of Austria, half to the house of Bourbon. By the marriage of Isabella, queen of Castile and Leon, with her cousin Ferdinand, king of Aragon and Valencia and by his own subsequent usurpation king of Navarre, and by the later conquest of Granada, six of the seven kingdoms of the peninsula were united under one crown. By the death of the male heir, Don John, this multiple diadem ultimately descended on the head of Donna Joanna, eldest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. She had been married to Philip the Handsome,' archduke of Austria, eldest son of the emperor Maximilian and of his first wife Mary, daughter and heiress of Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy. By this marriage Joanna had two sons, Charles and Ferdinand, in succession emperors.

On the death of Isabella, in 1504, her husband, who had no authority in Castile except in the right of his wife, was forced to withdraw into his own kingdom of Aragon, in the northeast, while Philip and Joanna came on from the Netherlands, the rich inheritance of the former from his mother Mary, to govern their new kingdom. Philip at once arrogated the full regal authority to himself, with no protest from his wife, who had already begun to show signs of the gloomy madness under which she continued during the fifty remaining years of her life. But in a few months the Flemish prince was carried off by one of the sudden fevers of the Castilian plateau, and as Joanna obstinately refused to take up REGENCY OF the reins, and Ferdinand refused to return, in resentFERDINAND. ment of his expulsion by the grandees, the great Cardinal Ximenes was forced to assume the regency. Finding the nobility too turbulent for him, Ximenes at last, in 1506, persuaded the king of Aragon to swallow his resentment and to reassume the government of Castile, which he then conducted with full authority

1 This may remind of Philip the Fair, king of France.

in his daughter's name during the ten remaining years of his life.'

At the death of Ferdinand, in 1516, his grandson Charles, who was then sixteen, soon came on from Brussels and assumed the government and also the regal title, consenting, however, to place Donna Joanna's name first in all public acts. It is the mother and son, thus jointly reigning, though not jointly governing, who form "The Sovereigns" who now and then meet us in the pages of Prescott. Joanna lived until within two years of her son's abdication, dying about 1553. Her lunacy showed itself especially intractable in two points-an utter unwillingness to sign any paper, and a great aversion to the offices of the Church. The latter does not appear to have been any token of heresy, but merely one of the freakish humors of insanity. is known that on the night of her death she was tortured to compel her to receive the communion, until the screams of the wretched creature were heard in the town below the castle in which she was confined.

LONG INSAN

It ITY OF QUEEN

JOANNA.

CHARLES V.

Her son became Charles I of Spain; but when, in 1519, on the death of his paternal grandfather, the emperor Maximilian, the young king was himself chosen emperor, as Charles V, the higher title mostly absorbed the lower. Charles was a true Fleming, short, somewhat stout in figure, a blonde, phlegmatic and considerate, and not unamiable in temper. Even in Spanish affairs he listened more to Flemings than to Castilians, to the great discontent of the latter. His influence placed in the papal chair Adrian VI, the solitary Dutch pope. Yet he was not in the least degree affected by the new doctrines prevailing in the Netherlands. Indeed, he was already in Spain when the Reformation broke out. He always remained thoroughly attached to the elder system in Church and State, to which, indeed, his double dignity of Roman emperor and king of Spain seemed to devote him. He is said at the very least in forty years to have caused the death of fifty thousand persons in the Low Countries for sacrilege and heresy alone, almost twice as many as the Spanish Inquisition put to death on every ground in three centuries. His government of the Netherlands awakens less horror than that of his son chiefly because he did not let loose war upon them and did not interfere with their traditional civil rights. He sometimes, it is true, remitted more or less of his opposition against the Protestants of Germany in order to coerce the popes in Italy (a 1 Hefele, Leben von Cardinal Ximenes, passim.