The Spanish Inquisition

by Henry Kamen

  Quite obviously, the Spanish theologians were willing to accept Protestants if no alternative solution could be found. Several years before, Charles’s confessor Garcia de Loaysa, who became archbishop of Seville and inquisitor general until 1546, had stated precisely to the emperor: “My advice is that Your Majesty should make a compromise and excuse their heresies.”35 The political situation in Germany offered no other option. In Spain, however, the inquisitors seem to have had a completely different policy; there they were vigilant against any entry of the virus of heresy, especially if it came from Germany.

  The area most vulnerable to the penetration of foreign ideas was Seville, center of international commerce. In 1552 the Inquisition there seized some 450 Bibles printed abroad.36 As a center of printing, Seville was also one of the towns where foreign typesetters and printers might fall foul of the alert over heresy.37 As archbishop of Seville, Manrique had encouraged the appointment of scholars from Alcalá to be canons and preachers in the cathedral. But times were changing, both in Spain as a whole and in Seville. In 1546 the city obtained a new archbishop who was also made inquisitor general, Fernando de Valdés, a ruthless careerist who saw heresy everywhere.38

  One of the cathedral preachers in Seville, Juan Gil, commonly known as Egidio, was nominated by Charles V in 1549 as bishop of Tortosa. The appointment was quashed when Egidio was accused of heresy and in 1552 made to retract ten propositions. “In truth,” commented a member of the disciplinary committee, the emperor’s confessor Domingo de Soto, “apart from this lapse he is a very good man, and his election [as bishop] was a good decision.”39 Egidio died in peace at the end of 1555.40 In 1556 Valdés objected to the appointment as cathedral preacher of Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, an Alcalá humanist and converso who had been chaplain to Charles V in Germany. His writings were examined for heresy. Arrested by the Inquisition, he died in its cells two years later. Neither Egidio nor Constantino can be considered a Lutheran. They were humanists who believed in a strongly spiritual religious life and none of their views appears to have been explicitly heretical.41

  There were, certainly, Protestant sympathizers in Seville. International trade links brought together in the city a broad range of people and opinions that could not fail to influence some Spaniards. Heretical books were imported in quantity. The Spanish “Protestants” in Seville probably totaled around 120 persons, including the prior and members of the Jeronimite monastery of San Isidoro, together with several nuns from the Jeronimite convent of Santa Paula. The Seville group managed to exist in security until the 1550s, when some monks from San Isidoro opportunely fled. The exiles included Cipriano de Valera, Casiodoro de Reina,42 Juan Pérez de Pineda and Antonio del Corro, who played little part in Spanish history but were glories of the European Reformation. The first three named, as we shall see shortly, during their exile gave to Spain something it badly lacked: a new translation of the Bible.

  Meanwhile, in northern Castile, another circle of Protestant sympathizers had come into existence.43 The founder was an Italian, Carlos de Seso, who had turned to Protestantism after reading Juan de Valdés, and who from 1554 had been corregidor (civil governor) of the town of Toro. His missionary zeal soon converted an influential and distinguished circle centered on Valladolid and numbering some fifty-five persons, most of noble status and some with converso origins. The most eminent of the converts was Dr. Agustín Cazalla, who had been to Germany as chaplain to Charles V and had also accompanied Philip there. Cazalla was influenced by his brother Pedro—parish priest of Pedrosa, near Valladolid—and with him the whole Cazalla family, led by their mother Leonor de Vivero,44 fell into heresy. Their beliefs were no simple extension of the illuminist or Erasmian attitudes of the previous generation. In their clear rejection of most Catholic dogma the Valladolid heretics were true Protestants. They also included scions of impeccably Old Christian nobility. A leading member of the group, Fray Domingo de Rojas, son of the marquis of Poza, recruited young Anna Enríquez, daughter of the marquis of Alcañices. He told her “that there were only two sacraments, baptism and communion; that in communion Christ did not have the part attributed to him; and that the worst of all things was to say mass, since Christ had already been sacrificed once and for all.”45

  The Seville group was uncovered in 1557, when Juan Ponce de León, eldest son of the count of Bailén, was arrested together with others for introducing books from Geneva. His chief accomplice was Julián Hernández, who had spent a considerable time in the Reformed churches of Paris, Scotland and Frankfurt, and who specialized in smuggling Protestant literature into his native country.46 The Inquisition collected information and in 1558 made a wave of arrests, including the whole Cazalla family in April and Constantino in August. A harsh repression was set in train by Fernando de Valdés, who was concerned to exploit the discovery in order to regain the favor he had recently lost with the court in Spain.

  Commenting on the high social origins of many of the accused, Valdés told Charles V that “much greater harm can follow if one treats them with the leniency that the Holy Office has shown towards Jewish and Muslim conversos, who generally have been of lowly origin.” The emperor did not need to be alerted. The sudden emergence in Spain’s two principal cities of a contagion from which everyone felt the country had been free sent shock waves through the nation.47 Charles, in retirement at his villa beside the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura, saw to his horror the rise within Spain of the very menace that had split Germany apart. For him there could be only one response: ruthless repression. His historic letter of 25 May 1558 to his daughter Juana, regent in Spain during Philip II’s absence in the Netherlands, appealed to her to follow the tough policy that he himself had used against heresy in Flanders.

  I am very satisfied with what you say you have written to the king, informing him of what is happening about the people imprisoned as Lutherans, more of whom are being daily discovered. But believe me, my daughter, this business has caused and still causes me more anxiety and pain than I can express, for while the king and I were abroad these realms remained in perfect peace, free from this calamity, but now that I have returned here to rest and recuperate and serve Our Lord, this great outrage and treachery, implicating such notable persons, occurs in my presence and in yours. You know that because of this I suffered and went through great trials and expenses in Germany, and lost so much of my good health. Were it not for the conviction I have that you and the members of your councils will find a radical cure to this unfortunate situation, punishing the guilty thoroughly to prevent them spreading, I do not know whether I could restrain myself leaving here to settle the matter. Since this affair is more important for the service of Our Lord and the good and preservation of these realms than any other, and since it is only in its beginnings, with such small forces that they can be easily put down, it is necessary to place the greatest stress and weight on a quick remedy and exemplary punishment. I do not know whether it will be enough in these cases to follow the usual practice, by which according to common law all those who beg for mercy and have their confession accepted are pardoned with a light penance if it is a first offense. Such people, if set free, are at liberty to commit the same offense, particularly if they are educated persons.

  One can imagine the evil consequences, for it is clear that they cannot act without armed organization and leaders, and so it must be seen whether they can be proceeded against as creators of sedition, upheaval, riots and disturbance in the state. They would then be guilty of rebellion and could not expect any mercy. In this connection I cannot omit to mention what was and is the custom in Flanders. I wanted to introduce an Inquisition to punish the heresies that some people had caught from neighboring Germany and England and even France. Everyone opposed this on the grounds that there were no Jews among them. Finally an order was issued declaring that all people of whatever state and condition who came under certain specified categories were to be ipso facto burnt and their goods confiscated. Necessity obliged me to act i
n this way. I do not know what the king my son has done since then, but I think that the same reason will have made him continue as I did, because I advised and begged him to be very severe in dealing with these people.

  Believe me, my daughter, if so great an evil is not suppressed and remedied without distinction of persons from the very beginning, I cannot promise that the king or anyone else will be in a position to do it afterwards.48

  This letter really marks the turning point in Spain. From now on, thanks to the fears of Charles and the policy laid down for Inquisitor General Valdés, heterodoxy was treated as a threat to the state and the religious establishment. Writing to the pope on 9 September the same year, Valdés affirmed that “these errors and heresies of Luther and his brood which have begun to be preached and sown in Spain, threaten sedition and riot.”49

  Sedition and riot, armed organization and leaders—how far from the dreams of Cazalla and Constantino! Yet once again well-meaning men were prey to the tensions gripping Europe, and the result was a series of autos de fe that burnt out Protestantism in Spain. The first significant auto was held at Valladolid on Trinity Sunday, 21 May 1559, in the presence of the regent Juana and her court. Of the thirty accused, fourteen were burnt in person, including Cazalla and his brother and sister. The only one to die unrepentant was Francisco Herrero from Toro. All the rest died repentant after professing conversion, among them Agustín Cazalla, who blessed the Holy Office and wept aloud for his sins.

  The next auto at Valladolid was held on 8 October in the presence of Philip, who had now returned to Spain and for whom an impressive ceremony was mounted. Of the thirty accused, twenty-six were considered Protestants, and of these twelve (including four nuns) were burnt at the stake. Carlos de Seso was the showpiece. The inquisitors had for days attempted to make him recant and, in fear for his life, he had shown every sign of repentance. But when at last he realized that he was to be executed regardless, he made a full and moving statement of belief: “in Jesus Christ alone do I hope, him alone I trust and adore, and placing my unworthy hand in his sacred side I go through the virtue of his blood to enjoy the promises that he has made to his chosen.”50 He and one other accused were burnt alive as impenitents. “How could you allow this to happen?” he is said to have called out to the king during the procession in the auto. “If my own son were as wicked as you,” Philip is said to have replied indignantly, “I myself would carry the wood with which to burn him!” The exchange, not documented in any reliable source, is completely apocryphal. Curiously enough, we do have a document demonstrating that almost exactly the same words were used by the pope in an interview with the Venetian ambassador in Rome twelve months before!51

  It was now the turn of Seville, where sympathy for Constantino and hostility to the actions of the Inquisition was widespread. A Jesuit reported in 1559 of the former that “he was and still is highly esteemed,” and that “there are a great many of these murmurings [against the Inquisition].”52 The first great auto there was held on Sunday, 24 September 1559.53 Of the seventy-six accused present, nineteen were burnt as Lutherans, one of them in effigy only.54 This was followed by the auto held on Sunday, 22 December 1560.55 Of the total of fifty-four accused on this occasion, fourteen were burnt in person and three in effigy; in all, forty of the accused were Protestants. Egidio and Constantino were two of those burnt in effigy, while those actually burnt included two English sailors, William Brook and Nicholas Burton, and a native of Seville, Leonor Gómez, together with her three young daughters. This auto de fe was followed by one two years later, on 26 April 1562, and by another on 28 October. The whole of that year 1562 saw eighty-eight cases of Protestantism punished; of these, eighteen were burnt in person, among them the prior of San Isidoro and four of his priests.

  With these burnings native Protestantism was almost totally extinguished in Spain. For contemporaries in 1559, it was the start to an emergency without precedent in their history. That very August the primate of the Spanish Church, archbishop Carranza of Toledo, was arrested by the Inquisition on charges arising in part out of allegations made by Cazalla and Seso (see chapter 8). Threatened, as it seemed, by the incursion of heresy, the inquisitors stretched their resources to check the contagion wherever it might appear. In Toledo in September 1559 placards were found posted up on houses and in the cathedral itself attacking the Catholic Church as “not the Church of Jesus Christ but the Church of the devil and of Antichrist his son, the Antichrist pope.”56 The culprit, apprehended in 1560 and burnt, was a priest, Sebastian Martínez. At the same time, in Seville pamphlets circulated attacking “these thieves of inquisitors, who rob publicly and who burnt the bones of Egidio and of Constantino out of jealousy.” The leaflets also asked the public to “pray to God for his true Church to be strong and constant in the truth and bear with the persecution from the synagogue of Satan” (that is, the Inquisition).57

  The great autos de fe up to 1562 served to remind the population of the gravity of the crisis and taught them to try to identify Lutherans in their midst. As a consequence the tribunals of the Inquisition in the 1560s devoted themselves to a hunt for Lutheran heresy, and drew into their net scores of Spaniards who in an unguarded moment had made statements praising Luther or attacking the clergy. In Cuenca, for instance, no sooner had one resident heard the news from Valladolid than he zealously denounced one of his neighbors to the Inquisition for reading a certain book of whose contents he—being illiterate—knew nothing. In those same weeks the archbishop of Tarragona (Fernando de Loazes, who had some years before been inquisitor in Barcelona) stopped over in Cuenca on his way to his diocese. He was asked about the Carranza case, and replied: “If the archbishop was a heretic, we are all heretics.” He too was denounced to the Inquisition. In both cases, the inquisitors sensibly took no action.58

  These years helped the old and ailing59 Inquisitor General Valdés to save his career for a while longer. He attempted to convince Philip II that a major crisis was in the making, and that only the Inquisition could resolve it. In May 1558 he wrote informing the king, who was then in Brussels, of Lutheran books in Salamanca and many other places, of problems with the Moriscos, of the discovery of judaizers in Murcia, and of the Lutherans in Valladolid and Seville.60 The Murcia cases, in which personal conflicts led to a large number of people being executed on very flimsy evidence,61 was a local phenomenon of passing importance. The Protestant cases were serious enough, on the other hand, to encourage Valdés to ask, virtually, that the country be put into the hands of the Inquisition.62 He suggested that new tribunals be set up immediately in Galicia, Asturias and the Basque country; that a second tribunal be set up in Valladolid; that special vigilantes be set up everywhere; that no book should in future be printed without the permission of the Inquisition; that no books be sold without prior examination by the inquisitors; and so on. Fortunately, the new king took no notice of these suggestions at the time, but a few of them were implemented later, notably the idea of establishing a tribunal in Galicia.

  The Protestant scare was in any case never as grave as Valdés made out. After the anti-Lutheran repression of these months, the Inquisition was in reality over the hump. From the 1560s Judaism was no longer an issue and the Reformation no longer a threat. Autos de fe were wound down. When held they were more showy and ceremonious, in the manner of the great autos of 1559, to make up for the lack of penitents.63 In perspective, the Protestant crisis in Spain, often presented as a singularly harsh period of repression, was somewhat less bloody than the ferocious religious persecution in other countries. The mid-sixteenth century, a fateful time in Europe for religious freedom, was certainly the period when the death penalty for heresy was heavily used in Spain. Even so, it has been calculated that no more than eighty-three persons—sixty-four Spaniards and nineteen foreigners—died at the hands of the Inquisition between 1559 and 1563.64 The English authorities under Queen Mary had executed nearly four times as many heretics as died in Spain in the years just after 1559, the Frenc
h under Henry II at least three times as many. In the Netherlands fifteen times as many had died. An expert estimates that “between 1523 and 1566, around 1,300 men and women in the Habsburg Netherlands lost their lives, while thousands more were fined, mutilated or banished.”65 And this was before Philip II’s general the duke of Alba began his repression there! In these last three countries, very many more died for religious reasons in the years that followed. “The healthiest country of all is Spain,” Philip II observed with some justice to the inquisitor general.66

  Despite all the alarms, Protestantism never developed into a real threat in Spain. Several cases, from all over the peninsula, are known to us because they appear in the records of the Inquisition. Three men appeared on suspicion in an auto in Saragossa on 17 May 1560. In an auto of 20 November 1562 two were burnt alive for Protestantism.67 The total number of Spaniards executed for “Lutheranism” (as the inquisitors insisted on labeling all varieties of Reformation belief) during the crisis years 1559–62 was, as we have seen, sixty-four. Those cited during the late century for the same offense totaled about two hundred. Most of them were in no sense Protestants. The majority of these cases demonstrated in reality the ignorance of the inquisitors rather than any real Lutheran threat. They recall the equally indiscriminate persecution that the tribunal had directed against conversos a half century before. Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as “Lutheran.” Disrespect to church images, eating meat on forbidden days were taken as signs of heresy. A hapless uneducated woman of Toledo who claimed in 1568 that “all those who die go straight to heaven,” was accused of the heresy of denying the existence of purgatory.68 It is clear that in such cases, of which there were very many, the agents of the Holy Office were reacting to unofficial beliefs among the people rather than to any infiltration of heresy.