Inquisition

  Paranoia spread. In the neighbouring region of Navarre the priest Lorenzo de Hualle gave sermons in the village of Vera in which he described how over three-quarters of the residents of the village were witches, and that this was a fact which he would repeat a thousand times. He confined a large number of children and adults in his rectory for over forty days, during which time no one could leave unless they confessed to diabolical activities. This led to Hualle’s triumphant exposure of the sect in Vera, although as he wrote to the inquisitorial envoy from Logroño, ‘The men and women under suspicion . . . declare without flinching that there are no witches but that I fabricate them in my house; that everything I say in church is a lie and a fable and I am not to be believed; that I get people to affirm things that do not exist at all by means of promises and threats’.37

  Just as in Miller’s Salem, the witches of the Basque country had been invented. Neighbour had denounced neighbour and nieces had denounced aunts. Just as the Inquisition had created an atmosphere in which no one could be free of suspicion of heresy, so everyone was thought capable of being a witch. At the auto in Logrono in November 1610, six witches were ‘relaxed’, and a further five burnt in effigy; already, in inquisitorial jails thirteen had died in epidemics.38

  The Suprema, it is true, commissioned an inquiry led by the most sceptical of its inquisitors in the Logrono tribunal, Salazar, hoping to dampen down the paranoia. Salazar concluded that almost three-quarters of the confessions were false. Over 1,000 of the cases he examined were of children under twelve, and many of them could not even say how they had managed to go to the coven meetings. There was, in fact, no evidence for the existence of the witches at all.

  Salazar pointed out that it might be best to cease the hunt altogether. After all, in neighbouring south-west France, where there had recently been a similar outbreak of witches, they had all disappeared of their own accord after the bishop of Bayonne had prohibited further mention of them in conversation or in writing.39 Thus did the threat to the social fabric depend so deeply on the paranoia which had invented it in the first place.

  BY 1750 IN SPAIN there was widely said to be a three-pronged attack by the forces of evil on the forces of good. Two of the prongs consisted of Freemasons and philosophers.40 One of these foes had, as we have seen, largely been invented and the other was to lay the foundations for the world as we know it today; this says much for the condition of the inquisitorial mind in the 18th century. The third prong was the Jansenists, by the early 18th century the main intellectual preoccupation of the Inquisition.41 However, as with the Freemasons, precisely what Jansenism consisted of was open to question. Once again it turned out to be highly useful to invent a label with which to create an enemy.

  Originally, the matter had been straightforward. Jansenists were followers of Jansenius, whose book Augustinus was published in 1640 and immediately condemned as heretical by the papacy.42 Yet by the 18th century the movement had become more amorphous, and contained both those who desired a spiritual renewal in opposition to the currents of the Enlightenment, and those who supported a new humanistic rationalism rather as Erasmus had done in the 16th century.43

  The spiritual element in 18th-century Jansenism was in many ways a revival of the movements to interiorize piety which had always been such anathema to the Inquisition.44 The Spanish Jansenists wanted to rescue Spain from her increasing intellectual isolation from the rest of Europe, but also stressed their national heritage. Often, they drew on works by some of the early intellectual enemies of the Inquisition, conversos such as Sanches and Vives, as well as on better-known thinkers such as Descartes.45 They also looked to the theological writings of other conversos, people such as Luis de León and Juan de Àvila.46

  When one takes a step back to think about the implications of the intellectual foundations of 18th century Jansenism, it becomes clear that the Inquisition was correct – up to a point – in its identification of a threat. Members of this movement sought intellectual renewal through the writings of many thinkers whose ideas the Inquisition had condemned two centuries before, and from philosophers whose ideas were similarly suspect. Yet the fact that so many of these ideas had come from conversos serves to show yet again that the Inquisition had merely helped to establish the ideological currents which then came to pose such a challenge.

  What many Jansenists in Spain really stood for in the 18th century was an attempt to blend spiritual renewal with the principles of the Enlightenment.47 This meant that Jansenists often opposed the jurisdiction of the papacy.48 They tended to argue for the expansion of royal power over the Inquisition, something that became known as regalism.49 This gave them a political outlook which was enough, together with their sympathy for some Enlightenment ideas, for them to become associated with the forces which were then chipping away at the edifice of inquisitorial ideology.

  The irony was that the Jansenist movement itself had been in part created by the Inquisition, since it was inquisitors, led by Jesuits, who in the first half of the 18th century had defined its enemies as ‘Jansenist’. One Jansenist wrote in 1803 that the Jesuits ‘have always deliberately ensured that the idea of Jansenism is horrific and yet obscure and confused, so that it can be applied to all those who . . . support the reform or abolition of their company’.50

  The connection to the Jesuits had come because in the first half of the 18th century the Inquisition in both Portugal and Spain was increasingly dominated by the Society of Jesus.51 The Jesuits saw Jansenism as a specifically anti-Jesuit doctrine associated with France and Voltaire.52 When two Jesuit friars were asked to compile the Spanish index of censorship in 1747 one of them simply copied an edict of 1722 called the Jansenist Library, and thereby included all the books which he reviled.53 Some friars in other orders were furious, and one declared that the so-called Jansenist books in the index were no such thing54 – which shows just how vague the concept was, and how easy to appropriate for ideological ends.

  The protests against the index of 1747, and at the role of the Jesuits, had serious consequences in Spain, with some contemporaries going so far as to say that doubt had been cast on the index’s legitimacy.55 In Portugal the Jesuits and the Inquisition were soon to suffer an even more damaging setback. Far more serious than the phantom enemy of the Jansenists was a real foe, the one man who did more than anything to put an end to the Inquisition’s stranglehold on society there: Sebastião José Carvalho e Melo, the chief minister of Portugal better known to posterity as the marquis of Pombal.

  A GOOD if doubtless apocryphal story is told of Pombal. In 1773 he was said to have been irked by a proposal of King José I. José, like many before and after him, had suggested that all those with Jewish ancestry should wear a yellow hat. A few days later Pombal came to court with three such hats tucked nonchalantly under his arm. José was understandably bewildered. He asked what they were for, and Pombal answered that he merely wished to obey the king’s orders. ‘But’, José is said to have asked, ‘why do you have three hats?’ ‘I have one for myself, replied Pombal, ‘one for the inquisitor-general, and one in case Your Majesty wishes to cover himself.56

  Pombal was a child of the Enlightenment. He wanted nothing to do with José’s proposal to revisit old forms of discrimination, and proceeded to follow up his humiliation of the king by proposing the abolition of the legal distinctions between Old Christians and conversos. As Pombal held absolute power in Portugal, he was successful, and so managed to blow away the raison d’être of the Portuguese Inquisition.

  Pombal’s rise to such power over the crown was directly related to another moment that had changed the history of his country, the terrible earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755. The first tremor had struck the city just after 9.30 a.m. on 1 November 1755, All Saints’ Day. The tremor had lasted for two minutes, and been followed by seven minutes of violent shaking. The quake had been accompanied by terrible groaning noises, as if the very rocks on which the world was built were entering their death agony.57 Great
cracks opened up in the city streets, and subterranean fires could be seen below.58

  This first tremor destroyed the palace of the Inquisition in the Rossio and the king’s palace on the waterfront. One mansion lost 200 paintings including a Reubens and a Titian, a library of 18,000 books and 1,000 manuscripts. In the royal palace 70,000 books were lost. Thirty-five of Lisbon’s forty parish churches collapsed, many onto praying parishioners. The dust thrown into the atmosphere by the destruction made the sky go black,59 and the devastation was completed by a second tremor, at around 11 a.m., which led to a tidal surge in the Tejo after which only 3,000 of the city’s 20,000 houses were habitable.60 The wave destroyed ships and flooded the streets. Fires broke out, fanned by a north wind, and people fled the city in panic, believing that the world was about to end.61

  Beautiful Lisbon, guarded by the Castle of St George and appearing to visitors as if in an amphitheatre,62 graced with big skies stretching out into the Atlantic, was utterly destroyed. The streets were reduced to piles of ash and broken stones and the charred remains of walls.63 The cities of the Algarve suffered similar devastation.64 The force of the earthquake can be measured by the experience of the terrified residents of Mafra, who saw the vast palace of John V raise and lower itself, move from side to side, creaking and groaning with the earth and threatening to lay bare the vanity of all monuments to human ambition.

  With Lisbon brought to its knees, Pombal was given full control by José I; he was the only minister who seemed equipped to deal with the situation. Pombal acted swiftly, executing looters and disposing of the many dead by taking them out to sea, attaching weights to their bodies and casting them into the deep. Then the rebuilding began, and the structure of the modern city of Lisbon was created; the pleasant wide streets which stretch down from the Rossio to the Tejo were all built in this period. But the Inquisition was not to experience such a renaissance.

  Feelings ran high in Lisbon after the earthquake. This was a city, and a country, which had spent over two centuries in the grip of the scapegoating Inquisition. Many people, moreover, can only have seen the events as divine punishment for wrongs committed. A new scapegoat was needed, and Pombal, whose power was growing all the time – he would be made count of Oeiras in 175965 – settled on a group which he saw as inimical to the Enlightenment values which he wished the new Portugal to adopt: the Jesuits.

  As in Spain, the Jesuits in Portugal had an important role in the Inquisition in the 18th century. But this did not stop rumours circulating about them soon after the earthquake. Pombal himself wrote a series of anonymous pamphlets accusing the Jesuits of all sorts of crimes including running the communities which they controlled in Paraguay with slave labour.66 The Jesuits were said to encourage disobedience to the pope, to support treason and regicide, and to have created their kingdom in Paraguay with the sole purpose of enriching themselves.67

  The pamphlets began to work. On 21 September 1757 all Jesuits were expelled from the royal palace. More denunciations followed, as people sensed that a new scapegoat was in the making. Four months later, in January 1758, the canons of Lisbon wrote that the Jesuits favoured lying about the past, libelling the government or a person in order to weaken them, and wishing the death of a neighbour if it was in their own interests – all charges which surely reveal prevailing attitudes towards the Jesuits.68

  Pombal moved inexorably towards his target. In the summer of 1758 an alleged plot was uncovered against José I led by the noble house of Távora, in which some Jesuit priests were said to be involved. Several were arrested on charges of treason, and on 3 September 1759 the Society of Jesus was expelled from Portugal. Still festering in the dungeons of the Inquisition was one of the ‘plotters’, Gabriel Malagrida, and on 21 September 1761 he was burnt to death in front of the crowds on the waterfront in Lisbon, the last person to be burnt by the Inquisition in Portugal. The Jesuit Malagrida represented everything that the enlightened Pombal detested. After the 1755 earthquake he had preached to the people that the disaster was punishment for Portugal’s sins. He was also said to encourage people to see him as a saint, and to foster credulity among the masses. He was the perfect scapegoat for an enlightened despot such as Pombal.69

  The treatment of the Jesuits created an international scandal and led to the exclusion of Portuguese envoys from the Vatican for nine years. Yet this in itself was an opportunity for Pombal to encroach further on Church power in his attempt to build a modern state. Even though he was now in his sixties, he was a man of indefatigable energy, and moved on to the biggest target of all, the Inquisition.

  As a believer in free trade and Enlightenment ideas, Pombal was not a man with any love for the Inquisition. He saw it as backward and as constraining economic growth through its persecution of the commercial class of conversos,70 and he delighted in removing its powers. Pombal made censorship a state function in 1768, taking it out of the hands of the Inquisition.71 In 1769 he made the Inquisition subordinate to royal commands and ordered that all confiscated property be passed to the state.72 The 1773 decree abolishing legal prejudice against conversos followed,*2 and in this document Pombal could not help noting that such prejudice was contrary to the spirit and canons of the universal Church,73 thereby undermining the entire rationale from which the Portuguese Inquisition had proceeded and showing once again how some of its principles were contrary to true Catholic theology.

  Pombal followed these decisive moves with a decree abolishing the Inquisition of Goa in 1774 – although it was subsequently reestablished for a time.74 While in Portugal persecution of conversos had continued to predominate, in Goa from 1650 onward the main attention of the Inquisition had moved to prosecuting the crime of Hindu ‘gentility’ – people practising Hinduism while being baptized Christians.75 As late as 1768 people were burnt for this crime in an auto in Goa,76 and Pombal evidently felt that such barbarism did not fit with the modern state which he wished to construct.

  Such sweeping reforms must have bewildered the people of Portugal. In 1750 the Inquisition had been a rock of society, its position unimpeachable; by 1774, although Pombal had not abolished it, he had made it subordinate to the crown and paved the way for its complete removal. Moreover, the persecuting institution had in a sense turned in on itself, burning in its very last auto a member of the Jesuit religious order which had offered so much support to it over its history.

  Yet this should not be surprising. The Inquisition had after all always been an institution for channelling the scapegoating desires of the most powerful sectors of society and for fostering paranoia. The ruling classes always chose the scapegoats, consciously or unconsciously, and after the earthquake of 1755 it was Pombal who was impregnable, not the Inquisition; Pombal’s choice of scapegoat for the earthquake was what mattered, and he fastened on the Jesuits.

  In this key moment in the history of the Inquisition, then, the persecution which it had always directed outward turned in.77 The paranoia which it fostered meant that threats to society were always credible; this time, however, the threat was its ally the Jesuits. Thus the culture of paranoia swung back on the Inquisition like a boomerang. Weakened, stagnant and at bay, the Inquisition would be unable to resist the violence of its own power.

  Seville 1767–77

  UNDER ATTACK IN PORTUGAL, in Spain the Inquisition remained utterly committed to fighting the Enlightenment. Thus while France basked in the intellectual renewal of Diderot, Montesquieu and Voltaire, in Spain proponents of the ideas of these thinkers were attacked. A show trial was needed and the Inquisition fastened on the government orderly of Seville and quartermaster-general of Andalusia, Pablo de Olavide.

  Olavide was the sort of internationalist the Inquisition loathed. He had been born in Lima in 1725 and only come to settle in Spain at the age of twenty-seven. In his mid-thirties he had travelled widely in France and Italy, and on returning to Spain in 1764 had opened a Parisian-style salon which was precisely the sort of vehicle for new ideas which the Inquisition coul
d not abide.78 Two years later, in 1766, depositions against Olavide began to be received.

  The first accuser was Carlos Redonc, a servant of the marquis of Cogulludo, who described Olavide’s palace, Valdeaveiro, as containing hundreds of ‘extremely scandalous paintings’ which could ‘provoke sensuality’.79 Another witness, Francisco Porvelo, expanded on the ‘provocative’ paintings, saying that they had ‘women, who by all appearances were young, with uncovered legs and breasts, having dealings with hermits’.80 Meanwhile scandal was exacerbated by the fact that Olavide had chosen for his bedroom a former oratory where mass had been celebrated.81 All this, and the large number of books that Olavide possessed82 – a suspicious fact in itself – were enough for him to develop a reputation as an enemy of religion.

  This reputation was clearly widespread. On hearing the news of Olavide’s appointment as orderly in Seville, the count of Santa Gadea declared, ‘This Olavide observes the same religion as the mule who draws my carriage’.83 Nonetheless, Olavide settled into the grand surroundings of Seville’s royal alcázar,84 with its beautiful gardens, ornate patios and fine Islamic architecture stretching back to the period of the convivencia. Here, in his apartments overlooking the spires of Seville’s enormous cathedral, Olavide merrily proceeded to scandalize his peers.

  By 1768, just a year after his appointment to Seville, new accusations were being lodged with the tribunal of the Inquisition. Olavide only served meat on Fridays in his lodgings, in contravention of the custom of avoiding it on that day. His rooms were again filled with ‘provocative’ paintings of scantily clad women. He was said to own a portrait of the great enemy of the Inquisition, Voltaire, and some even said that he had met this figurehead of the Enlightenment. He had told a young woman that if she ever considered becoming a nun, she should reject the idea as if it had come to her from the devil. And, to cap all these slights to religious orthodoxy and devotion, he listened to mass while resting on a walking stick and did not even raise himself at the elevation of the host.85