by Henry Kamen
Perhaps the first great case in which the crown used the Inquisition as a political instrument was that of Antonio Pérez. In 1571 Pérez became secretary of state to Philip II. Two years later his patron and chief minister of Philip, Ruy Gómez, prince of Eboli, died. Pérez thereby obtained one of the most powerful posts in the monarchy and also inherited leadership of the court faction formerly led by Ruy Gómez. A contemporary observed that Pérez “climbed so high that His Majesty would not do anything save what the said Antonio Pérez marked out for him. Whenever His Majesty even went out in his coach, Antonio Pérez went with him. When the pope, my lord Don Juan of Austria, or other lords required anything of the king, they had recourse to Antonio Pérez and by his means obtained what they solicited of His Majesty.” Another said, “Great men worshipped him, ministers admitted his superiority, the king loved him.”148 Philip confided matters of state to this brilliant young man of reputed converso origin whose success enabled him to live as a great lord and whose charm led him into a close and still mysterious liaison with the princess of Eboli, the beautiful one-eyed widow of Ruy Gómez.
Ambition eventually led to Pérez’s ruin. At the center of the monarchy, he held the king’s secrets and controlled the money offered by pretendants to favors. His long arm stretched as far as Flanders, where at that moment the king’s half brother, Don Juan of Austria, was acting both as governor and as pacifier of rebellion. Pérez distrusted the implications of Don Juan’s policies and disagreed with the attitude of Don Juan’s secretary Juan de Escobedo. He began to influence Philip surreptitiously against them.
Suspicious of the way his plans for Flanders were being blocked by Madrid, Don Juan sent Escobedo to Spain in 1577 to make enquiries. On arriving at the court it became clear to Escobedo that Pérez had been playing a double game with his master and with the king. He began to look around for evidence to condemn the royal secretary. But Pérez had already managed to convince Philip that Escobedo was the malign influence in the affairs of Flanders. This would, in his mind, make it easier to get rid of Escobedo. He tried using poison, but this failed. Then on the night of Easter Monday, 31 March 1578, hired assassins came up to Escobedo as he rode with a few friends through the narrow, dark streets of Madrid, and ran their swords through his body.
Popular rumor quickly pointed to Pérez as the assassin. Escobedo’s family, aided by Pérez’s rival in the secretariat of state, Mateo Vázquez, demanded justice for the murdered man. Philip refused to believe in Pérez’s guilt, but at the same time he initiated an investigation. It was over a year before any measures were taken. Then, in July 1579, the king ordered the arrest of La Eboli and Pérez. Pérez’s friend Gaspar de Quiroga, archbishop of Toledo and inquisitor general, “did not hesitate to face public opinion by showing an ostentatious liking for Pérez and his group. On the day after the imprisonment of Pérez and La Eboli, when all Madrid singled them out as responsible for the crime, Don Gaspar visited Antonio’s wife and children, and offered money to them, as also to the princess’s children.”149
Not until June 1584 were the charges against Pérez drawn up by the prosecutor. He was accused of selling posts, receiving bribes and betraying state secrets. The Escobedo affair was left aside as though it were irrelevant. The investigation that followed led to Pérez being sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and an enormous fine. He was still subjected to mild treatment, principally because he had in his possession state papers that (he said) incriminated the king. His refusal to surrender them led to firmer treatment by the government, and in 1588 an accusation of murder was presented against him. After two years of rigorous imprisonment, in February 1590 he was put to the torture and ordered to state his reason for murdering Escobedo. His statement under torture produced a confession of responsibility for Escobedo’s death, but did not directly implicate the king. All this time the inquisitor general had continued to protect the secretary. He sent Pérez advice, guided the tactics of his defense, kept him informed of proceedings in the royal council and knew of (and perhaps assisted in) plans to escape. Escape had now become necessary, since all hope was lost after Pérez’s confession. In April 1590, with the help of several highly placed friends, Pérez escaped from prison in Madrid and rode across country to the borders of Aragon.
There he was protected from the king’s hand by the fueros. Once he had set foot in Aragon the crown of Castile was powerless to touch him. The government in Castile did not hesitate to take appropriate measures against the fugitive, and in July 1590 the royal secretary, Rodrigo Vázquez, put his signature to the death sentence issued against him. That sentence, however, was valid only in Castile. In Aragon, Pérez appealed to be tried by the court of the justiciar of Aragon, which was independent of crown control. They lodged him for his own security in the justiciar’s prison in Saragossa. From here, he began a campaign to win over Aragon to his cause. Several members of the lesser nobility, fired by enthusiasm for the liberties of their country, rallied to him.
There was only one course open to Philip—to use the Inquisition to get at Pérez. And it was Quiroga, as inquisitor general, who was forced to set in motion what Marañón calls the “last and cruelest prosecution against his former friend.” Philip’s recourse to the Inquisition encountered some difficulty at first, because it was necessary to find guilt of heresy before charges could be preferred. But the royal confessor, Father Chaves—who seventeen years before had taken part in the prosecution of Carranza—now managed to find the necessary evidence in some of the more innocuous expletives used by Pérez. Of one sentence where Pérez wagered his word against God’s nose, Chaves noted: “this proposition is suspect of the Badian heresy which says that God is corporal and has human members.” Pérez’s assumed intention to escape abroad from prison, insofar as it included a plan to escape across the Protestant state of Béarn, was presented as heresy because it implied consorting with heretics. Armed with these fabricated accusations, the Inquisition proceeded to move.
On 24 May 1591 the inquisitors in Saragossa had Pérez transferred from the justiciar’s prison to their own in the Aljafería, after the justiciar had been induced to sign a warrant for the removal. By now, Pérez’s propaganda against the king had made him a popular hero in Saragossa. No sooner had the news of Pérez’s move been made known than a mob thronged the streets calling for his release and threatening the authorities. In the ensuing tumult the viceroy of Aragon, the marquis of Almenara, received wounds from which he died a fortnight later. But Pérez was victoriously returned to the justiciar’s prison by the mob, whose members “went all the way calling out, ‘Liberty!’ And he cried out with them.”150 The May riots were repeated on 24 September, when once again the Inquisition claimed jurisdiction over the prisoner and tried to remove him to the Aljafería. The events of 24 September removed any doubts in Madrid about the need for action. It was less a riot than a massacre. The casualties were twenty-three dead and many seriously wounded.151
After this occasion, when the prisoner was set free by the rioters, the whole political situation changed. The Inquisition had failed in its immediate purpose and a viceroy had been murdered by rebels harboring a fugitive. Fearing intervention from France, Philip’s ministers advised that an army be sent in. In October 1591 Castilian troops entered Aragon, met no resistance whatever and entered peacefully into Saragossa. On December 19 some dissident nobles were arrested and dispatched immediately under escort to Castile. The next day the justiciar was arrested. On December 20, just after his arrest, he had his supper tranquilly. Later he was taken to meet a group of officials, including the governor of Aragon, Ramón Cerdán, a Flanders veteran. The king’s sentence was read to him. He became distraught, but was told to compose himself since he had only twelve hours to live. At ten the next morning, he was beheaded in the market square of the city, under the windows of his residence.152
Philip was concerned to reach a general pacification without delay. A general pardon was published in January 1592. It was accompanied by a lis
t of over 150 persons who were excepted. The Inquisition was also encouraged to play its part. The result was an enormous auto de fe held in Saragossa on October 20 that year, when eighty-eight accused participated in the ceremony. The name of Pérez featured among them, on a charge of homosexuality. Many of the others were accused of taking part in the riots against the Inquisition. A further ceremony, including more rioters, was held just over a year later.
Pérez, meanwhile, was far away. He fled across the mountains to the neighboring Protestant state of Béarn (French Navarre), where he made his base in Pau, which he used as a center for attacking the king in any way possible. He also published there in 1591 a little volume which claimed to explain his situation. Titled Relaciones, it was printed twice in the city and then republished in different editions and languages during his subsequent exile in London and France. The king made some efforts to have Pérez kidnapped, but they came to nothing, and very soon he tired of spending so much money on a person who seemed not worth it. The Inquisition, however, went ahead with its plans. In Pérez’s absence, in the spring of 1592 the tribunal of Saragossa drew up a list of charges accusing him of rebellion, heresy, blasphemy and homosexuality. Though a desperate attempt to invent a case against him, the charges may have had some truth in them, as we shall see. It was the beginning of a complex sparring match between the ex-secretary and his king that gave rise to accusations, counter-accusations and long-enduring historical legends. Perez, for instance, almost immediately began to spread the story that he had fallen into disgrace because of rivalry with the king for the love of the princess of Eboli. It was a piece of gossip that, like all gossip, caught the immediate attention of the public and still remains perhaps the best-known untruth about the entire history of Antonio Pérez.
The failure of all his efforts in Pau convinced Pérez that he must go to England if he wanted firm action. His first direct letter to Queen Elizabeth I was dated April 1592 from Pau. His arrival in England in April 1593, with a letter of support from the king of France, who was interested in an alliance with the English against Spain, began a new and strikingly different phase in his career. He was now, as he wrote, “senex, et prae timore persecutionis exanimis et excanguis.”153 In England he became a member of the coterie around the earl of Essex and a friend of the philosopher Francis Bacon. During the early weeks of his stay he continued to be pursued by Philip II, who was said to be implicated in the plot of a certain Dr. Lopez to assassinate Pérez. Lopez was arrested and executed, not, however, because of anything to do with Pérez, but because the plot was also said to be directed against Elizabeth.
During his stay in England, Pérez drew up several long and complex memoirs proposing policies against Spain, which he sent to the queen and to her chancellor Lord Burghley. He became active in the group of nobles attached to the earl of Essex at Essex House in Westminster, and worked in his secretariat, which consisted of some nobles as well as humanists from Oxford. He stayed in France for a while, then again in England from April to May 1596. By this time he was unable to count on the queen’s firm support. “Her political disillusionment with Pérez coincided with the awareness that he had been entangled with some English adolescents.”154 The most powerful reason for hostility to Pérez at court was, it seems, on these grounds of sexual morality. The accusations leveled against him by the Inquisition in Saragossa may, in all probability, have had some basis in popular rumor, and we cannot entirely discount the matter.
In the end, his many months in England and his access to important figures in government, including the queen, did not achieve any success for Pérez’s many proposals. His position with Elizabeth became extremely shaky when the overconfident Essex, who was now principal commander in Ireland, attempted a rebellion against the queen but was arrested in 1599 and executed as a traitor in 1601. Events conspired to make it impossible for Pérez to achieve his expressed wish to “live and die in England,” a country he claimed to admire even though he did not speak its language.155
In 1604 he went reluctantly to France, where he had enjoyed since the 1590s official status as a personally appointed member of the king’s council, and unsuccessfully tried to gain the support of the court. Pérez never returned to the Spain of his birth and died in comparative obscurity in Paris in 1611, in the house of an Italian banker friend, where he complained of the cold (“this snow in France”) and of his “depression, because I am alone.” His friend arranged for him to be buried in the nearby monastery church of the Célestins.
During its last century—to which we shall give little attention in this study—the Inquisition emerged out of virtual inactivity in only one famous political case, when it arrested a leading government minister, Pablo de Olavide. Olavide (1725–1803) was born into a rich family in Lima, Peru, and moved in 1750 to Spain, where after some initial problems he married a wealthy widow and entered high society. From 1757 to 1765 he traveled extensively through Western Europe, particularly in France, where he imbibed the culture of the great period of the French Enlightenment. During his travels he began buying books, with the intention of building up the finest and most modern collection in Spain. Nearly all the volumes he accumulated and sent to Madrid were in French, and many were on the Inquisition’s list of forbidden books. He had the works of Bacon, Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Rousseau, and all the latest English novels in French translation.156 When he settled down in Spain his contacts, education, and wealth turned his house into one of the cultural centers of Madrid. He was offered a post in the reformed administration that assumed power after the serious urban riots of 1766, which became for him a stepping-stone to success. The year after, 1767, he was appointed to the powerful position of intendant in Seville and Andalucia, but also continued to play a crucial part in the central government. His activities provoked the profound opposition of sectors in the Church, and in 1775 a priest denounced him as “the most dangerous intellectual in Spain.”157 It is true that Olavide’s conduct as a public official had often been provocative. As a partisan of the Enlightenment, he criticized what he felt was superstition, decried the worship of images and the public recital of the rosary. On one occasion he stated jokingly: “What we need is a bit of Mohammedanism in Spain!” His joviality and openness offended many. When he returned to Madrid from Seville in 1776 he was arrested by the Inquisition on charges of heresy and atheism.
It says much for the power of the supposedly moribund Inquisition that it was able to keep the once-powerful minister under house arrest for two years. Eventually, in November 1778, he was brought out, put on trial before a select assembly of clergy and officials and condemned to banishment from the capital, loss of all his goods and six years confinement in a monastery. It was a startling affair, in which the Inquisition and conservative sectors of the Church were evidently giving a warning to the government. Olavide was sent to a monastery in the south of Spain, in Murcia. The specific instructions of the inquisitor general in June 1779 were that he should have “a clean and comfortable room, and be allowed at the same time to go out, walking or riding or in a carriage, and permitted to take the waters when the doctors so direct.”158 His confinement, it turned out, was more like a paid holiday. He carried out religious devotions, went to mass daily and kept a frugal diet (for his health), but was accompanied by his family, traveled around taking the waters, and in August 1780 was given permission (for his health) to take the waters at Caldes de Montbuy in Catalonia. Once in Catalonia, he decided it was better to take the waters in Arles, a town just over the French border which he knew personally. In the first week of November, he was free, in France.
He spent the next twenty years in exile, residing mainly in Switzerland and Paris. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the war waged against France in 1793 by Spain and other European powers, he was rounded up in Paris in 1794 as a suspicious foreigner, and kept in prison for two years. He emerged a disappointed and changed man, angry at all the “progressive” ideas that had led to the “horrible Revolution in th
is country.” In 1797 he published at Valencia a book titled Triumph of the Gospel, in which he renounced all his former progressive ideas and praised the Inquisition. At least, that is what the book appeared to be saying. Some scholars suggest that the author had not really changed his attitude, and was framing his message in such a way as to make possible his return.159 Thanks to the publication he was certainly allowed back in 1798 to Spain, where he died quietly, far from public life, in a small Andalucian town.
As these cases show, the Inquisition often had a political role, but a far from decisive one. From what we have seen of the often flimsy network of its officials, the financial difficulties of the inquisitors and the perennial conflicts with all other jurisdictions, it is fair to conclude that its real impact was, after the first crisis decades, so marginal to the daily lives of Spaniards that over broad areas of Spain—above all in the rural districts—it was little more than an irrelevance. In Catalonia, beyond the major cities, a town might see an inquisitor maybe once every ten years, or even once in a century; many never saw one in their entire history.160 Central Castile excepted, this picture is valid for most of Spain. The people accepted the tribunal, on this showing, not because it weighed on them heavily and oppressed them, but for precisely the opposite reason: it was seldom seen, and even less often heard. It has sometimes been suggested that the survival of the proverb “Con el Rey y con la Santa Inquisición, chitón!” (“On the king and the Holy Office, not a word!”)161 is testimony to the power of the tribunal to silence criticism. The suggestion not only betrays an unjustified belief that Spaniards are unable or unwilling to criticize those who rule over them: it is also unhistorical. The archives of the Inquisition contain thousands of cases of forthright criticism by ordinary Spaniards, not subversive radicals wishing to abolish the institution (though many did so wish) but ordinary citizens objecting to bullying familiars, greedy inquisitors and corrupt personnel. Very many Spaniards, neither of Jewish nor of Muslim origin, hated the Holy Office. Like any police system, it was not loved; and its political role was brittle; but many Spaniards seem to have felt that its continuation was a guarantee of the everyday framework in which they lived.