by Henry Kamen
Foreign visitors who publicly showed disrespect to acts of Spanish religion (refusing to take off one’s hat, for example, if the Sacrament passed in the street) were liable to arrest by the Inquisition. This happened so frequently that nations trading to Spain made it their primary concern to secure guarantees for their traders before they would proceed any farther with commercial negotiations. England, being a market for Spanish materials, secured easier terms than might have been expected. In 1576 the Alba-Cobham agreement settled the position of the Inquisition vis-à-vis English sailors. The tribunal was allowed to act against sailors only on the basis of what they did after arriving in a Spanish port. Any confiscation was to be confined to the goods of the accused alone, and was not to include the ship and cargo, since these did not usually belong to him. Despite the outbreak of hostilities between England and Spain over the Dutch question, the agreement of 1576 continued to hold good for at least two decades after.56 When peace eventually came under James I, the agreement was incorporated into the treaty of 1604.
In general, since the late sixteenth century the authorities in Spain’s principal ports had turned a blind eye to the trading activities of foreign Protestants, mainly English, Dutch and Germans. The peace treaties with England in 1604 and with the Dutch in 1609 merely accepted the situation. Some French merchants continued to fall foul of the tribunal.57 In broad terms, however, the resolution of the council of State in 1612, accepted by the Inquisition, was that English, French, Dutch and Bearnese Protestant merchants not be molested, “provided they cause no public disturbance.”58 Commercial realities imposed the need for toleration.
England secured a renewal of these guarantees after the war of 1624–30, in article 19 of the peace treaty of 1630, which promised security to English sailors “so long as they gave no scandal to others.” The proviso was not to the liking of the government of Oliver Cromwell, which took power in mid-century. In 1653 he proposed to Spain a treaty of alliance which would have given Englishmen virtual immunity from the Inquisition. The relevant articles would have allowed English subjects to hold religious services openly, to use Bibles freely, to be immune from confiscation of property and to have some Spanish soil set apart for the burial of English dead. So great was his prestige that the Spanish council of State was quite ready to concede the articles,59 but the proposal was rejected because of the firm opposition of the Suprema, which refused to allow any compromise.
Foreign Protestants did not normally appear in autos de fe at the end of the seventeenth century, but the pressure on them continued, especially in the ports. Catalonia, for example, experienced the presence of foreigners in the form of sailors in the ports, soldiers in foreign regiments of the Spanish army and French immigration across the Pyrenees. The Barcelona tribunal had regular numbers of “spontaneous” self-denunciations from foreigners wishing to become Catholics. In the 1670s and 1680s there were about a dozen cases a year, often outnumbering prosecutions of native Spaniards. In the record year 1676 no fewer than sixty-four foreigners came before the Inquisition there, renounced the heresies they had professed and asked to be baptized.60 There were still unfortunate cases—such as the twenty-three-year-old Englishman who was arrested for public misbehavior in Barcelona in 1689 and died in the cells of Inquisition—but in general the Holy Office was both lenient and tolerant. It is significant that after the long War of the Spanish Succession from 1705 to 1714, when thousands of heretical (Huguenot, English and German) troops had been captured by Spanish forces on Spanish territory, not a single fire was lit by the Inquisition to burn out any heresy that might have entered the country.
The fate of foreigners who fell into the hands of the Holy Office may best be examined in the well-documented history of the tribunal in the Canary Islands. The Canaries were a regular port of call for Englishmen, not only for direct trade (in wines) but also because they were a convenient halt before the long voyage across the Atlantic to Spanish America and the South Seas. Between 1586 and 1596 in particular, English traders and sailors were subjected to irregular persecution by the Spanish authorities, then at war with England. An auto de fe held at Las Palmas on 22 July 1587 included for the first time fourteen English seamen, one of whom—George Gaspar of London—was relaxed in person, the only Englishman ever to suffer death in this tribunal. The next public auto, on 1 May 1591, included the burning of the effigies of four English seamen, two of whom had been reconciled in the previous auto. The auto de fe of 21 December 1597, apparently the last in which Englishmen appeared,61 included eleven English sailors. This is not, of course, the total number of Englishmen who were captured by the Inquisition. The lists show that from 1574 to 1624 at least forty-four Englishmen were detained in the cells of the Canaries Inquisition. Many saved their skins by “spontaneous” conversion. During the seventeenth century at least 89 foreigners became Catholics in this way, and in the eighteenth century 214 did, of whom the English were a majority.62
The English sailors were particularly vulnerable to the Inquisition because many of them were old enough to have been baptized in the true faith under Queen Mary, and young enough to have conformed without difficulty to the Elizabethan settlement. They were consequently apostates and heretics, ideal material for the tribunal. The long history of tolerance to traders, however, influenced the tribunal to take a more realistic attitude towards foreigners. When war broke out again in 1624 between England and Spain, the resident English were left unmolested, thanks to the inquisitors in the Canaries. Commercial reasons were the main motive behind the anxiety of the authorities not to persecute foreigners unnecessarily. The moderate attitude seems to have encouraged the traders, for by 1654 the number of Dutch and English residents in Tenerife alone was put at fifteen hundred.63
This happy state of affairs was almost immediately shattered by Cromwell’s clumsy aggression against Hispaniola in 1655. The Spanish authorities undertook reprisals against the community of English merchants in the peninsula, who, forewarned of the Hispaniola expedition, got out of the country before the blow fell. Officials charged with carrying out the reprisals arrived too late. In Tenerife the confiscations “in this island, in Canary, and in La Palma are of small consideration.” In the port of Santa María “there was one Englishman, no more.” In Cadiz only the English Catholics remained. In San Lucar “they were so forewarned that nothing considerable remains,” and “the majority of them and the richest have sold everything and left with the English fleet.”64 They eventually came back, as they always did. By that time Protestant merchants had little to fear from the wrath of the Inquisition, which had grown to respect the existence of bona fide trading communities where religion counted far less than the annual profit. To this extent the Holy Office was moving out of an intolerant age into a more liberal one.
If we were to consider these activities out of their context, the Holy Office would appear to have intervened in nearly all the main aspects of religious life. This impression can lead to mistaken conclusions. Some writers have assumed that the Inquisition was an effective weapon of social control, keeping the population in its place and maintaining the social and religious norms of the Counter-Reformation. Others consider that the inquisitors succeeded in imposing on the popular culture of the masses an elite culture that was both rigid and orthodox. There is no plausible evidence to support either of these contentions, which are the stuff of scholarly discourse but vanish into insubstantial air when looked at closely. Social control was always possible when attempted within specific limits and by an effective authority, but implausible when looked for in the parameters within which the inquisitors operated,65 namely, the three or four state units constituting peninsular Hispanic territory,66 over a time span of more than three centuries.
In their daily lives Spaniards, like others in Europe, had to deal with many authorities set over them. They contended with secular lords, royal officials, Church personnel, religious communities and urban officials. The Holy Office also was one of these authorities. But e
xcept at times when the inquisitor came round on his visitation, the people had little contact with him and could not possibly have been influenced by him. The presence of a local familiar or comisario did not affect the situation; their job was to help the inquisitor if he came, not to act as links in an information network.
The likely degree of contact, in a world where (unlike our own today) control depended on contact, is in effect an excellent guide to whether the Inquisition managed to have any impact on the ordinary people of Spain. The evidence from the tribunal of Catalonia is beyond question.67 No proper visitations were made here by the inquisitors during the early sixteenth century. In the second half of the century sixteen visitations in all were made, but they were always partial visits done in rotation, and limited to the major towns. These towns might be visited once every ten years. The people out in the countryside, by contrast, were lucky if they managed to see an inquisitor in their entire lives. There were large areas of the principality that had no contact with the Inquisition throughout its three centuries of history. The one thousand Catalans prosecuted by the Inquisition in the years 1578–1635 came overwhelmingly from the two main cities, Barcelona and Perpignan.68 Even in Castile, the evidence for the Inquisition of Toledo is identical. The activity of the tribunal, in short, was restricted to the principal city (where its influence was in any case notoriously small). Out in the countryside it had neither activity nor influence. In any of the three areas that historians have studied with respect to visitations (see above, chapter 10)—Catalonia, Toledo and Galicia—the degree of social control was negligible.69
After generations of living with the Holy Office the people accepted it, because it had almost no contact with their daily lives. Apart from politically motivated regional protests in Aragon and Catalonia, no demands for its abolition were made before the age of Enlightenment. In the few centers where it existed, the Inquisition might even be positively welcomed, for it offered a disciplinary presence not often found in the society of that time. People with grudges or complaints, particularly within families and within communities, could take their problems to the tribunal and ask for a solution. In our world, complainants go to the police; in Spain, they went to the Inquisition. “You watch out,” an angry housewife in Saragossa screamed at her innkeeper husband (in 1486), “or I’ll accuse you to the inquisitor of being a bad Christian!”70 A wife of forty in Manresa (Catalonia, 1665) was periodically beaten by her husband, who also refused to give her money for housekeeping; the climax came when he went to the inquisitors, showed them a statue of Christ with its head and legs broken, and accused her of doing it. They dismissed the case. A mother in the village of La Bisbal (Catalonia, 1677) had a row with her twenty-year-old son and encouraged friends to denounce him to the Inquisition.71 A court of this type, ideal for domestic quarrels, could conceivably be welcomed by some Spaniards even in the twentieth century.72 Acceptance was probably greater in the cities, where the numerous clergy gave it active support in their sermons and where the tribunal from time to time put on autos de fe to reaffirm its role. But even in the unexplored countryside it could sometimes have a positive role to play. The documents record very many cases of village conflict and tension that in the last resort looked for a solution to one or other of the disciplinary tribunals in the nearby city.
It would be unrealistic to assume that a sporadically active body such as the Holy Office had any lasting impact on the religion of the people, and two hundred years after its foundation the Spaniards could be as irreligious as ever. In a scene that could have come from a film by the anticlerical film director Luis Buñuel, we have the story in 1676 of Manuel Sánchez, police officer of the town of Pastrana, who went out for a country picnic one August day with his friends the town butcher and tailor, their wives and other friends. After lunch they came to a chapel one league outside the town, where Sánchez and his two friends dressed up in the church vestments and celebrated a mockery of the mass, “laughing and joking while the women there laughed at them.” After saying mass the three left the altar, “laughing a great deal, and threw the vestments down on the cases with utter contempt.”73 When the case came up for attention by the Inquisition two years later, the three principals were directed to leave the town for a year, though the likelihood is that they ignored the order, since they themselves were the men of substance in the town and the Holy Office had no jurisdiction there.
Hostility to the tribunal at a popular level was commonplace. Very broadly, there were three main reasons for it. First, the Inquisition was a policing body, and therefore (like the police today) resented by ample sectors of the population. Its disciplinary duties were modest, but excited the hostility of those who by definition did not like police intrusion. In moments of anger, such people could not refrain from cursing the Holy Office. Where possible, the Inquisition tried to protect its reputation against them. The archives contain hundreds of statements expressing rage or contempt, ample material with which to prove the hostility of the Spanish people. “I don’t give a damn for God or for the Inquisition!” “I care as much for the Inquisition as for the tail of my dog!” “What Inquisition? I know of none!” “I could take on the whole Inquisition!” “The Inquisition exists only to rob people!” The multitude of oaths in the documents, however, no more prove hostility than the absence of such in the late eighteenth century proves support. Enmity to the tribunal was common, but most oaths were uttered out of habit or when drunk or in moments of anger or stress. The brawling and the swearing demonstrate a lack of respect, but otherwise prove little more than that Spaniards have never inertly accepted the political or religious systems imposed on them.
The second reason for hostility was when jurisdictions clashed. No other tribunal in all Spanish history provoked so much friction with every other authority in both Church and state. The conflicts were particularly intense in the realms of the crown of Aragon. In Catalonia the inquisitors complained more than once, and apparently with good reason, that the Catalans wanted to get rid of them. But, despite all the fury, its opponents never once questioned the religious rationale of the Holy Office.
In ancien régime Spain, no popular movements attacked the Inquisition and no rioters laid a finger on its property. The exceptions, to be found principally in the eastern provinces of Spain, are notable. In 1591 the tribunal of Saragossa intervened rashly (as we have seen) in the Antonio Pérez affair and was directly attacked by the angry mob. In 1619 in Valencia the inquisitors had to take refuge when rioters protested against decrees prohibiting the cult of a popular local saint, Jeroni Simó.74 In 1628 the inquisitors of Barcelona reported in desperation to the Suprema: “the people of this land are insolent, rebellious and totally opposed to the Inquisition, and make particular efforts to do everything they can against it, and the nobility and other persons do the same in every way possible.”75 In the revolutionary Barcelona of 1640 the mob, informed that Castilian soldiers were lodged in the Inquisition, burst into the building, smashed down the doors, threatened the inquisitors and took away documentation. An inquisitor reported:
They tried to break into several other parts of the palace in order to find the hideout where they said the Castilians were. They leveled insults at us, among them that it would be fitting to hang the inquisitors by their feet and flog them till they confessed. On Christmas Day they came back and continued the riot. They went through all the files and took away a large quantity of papers.76
Not only in Catalonia but in all the peripheral realms of the peninsula, including Valencia, Navarre, the Basque country and Galicia, the tribunal never ceased to be regarded as a foreign institution because of its identification with Castilian hegemony.
The third reason for hostility was the evidently alien character of the tribunal. The inquisitors were Castilians, unable to speak the languages or dialects of the rural communities into which they intruded. They were city men, unwelcome in the quite different environment of country villages. Their visits, we have seen, were very ra
re indeed. In contrast to the welcome they usually gave to wandering preachers, villages were seldom pleased to see an inquisitor. In sixteenth-century Galicia, a parish priest begged his congregation to be deaf and dumb when the inquisitors visited. “Let us be very careful tomorrow,” he said, “when the inquisitor comes here. For the love of God, don’t go telling things about each other or meddle in things touching the Holy Office.”77 In seventeenth-century Catalonia the parish priest of Aiguaviva publicly rebuked the comisarios of the Inquisition when they came to check the baptismal records in order to carry out a proof of limpieza. “He told them not to write lies, and that it would not be the first time they had done so, by falsifying signatures and other things.”78
As we have seen, the effective contact of the tribunal with the people was at all times, outside the big towns, marginal. In sixteenth-century Mexico, “95 percent of the population never had any contact with the Inquisition.”79 A similar situation can be found in much of Spain. In Catalonia, “in over ninety percent of the towns, during more than three centuries of existence, the Holy Office never once intruded.”80 We have seen already that the rarity of visits through the countryside by inquisitors in effect cut off much of Spain from contact with the Inquisition. In Galicia the tribunal was almost unknown, functioning in the diocese of Ourense “for a total of only 16 months during the entire seventeenth century.”81 In the heartland of Castile, by contrast, communications were better and contact more effective. But even in the tribunal of Toledo townspeople denounced to the inquisitors outnumbered peasants by five to one,82 testimony to the difficulties of contact with the much larger rural population. Though the Inquisition was singularly effective in its initial campaign against alleged judaizers in Andalucia in the 1480s, therefore, there is good reason to conclude that it failed when it turned to matters that were not directly questions of heresy, and it never attempted at any time to impose social control over the people of Spain.