by Henry Kamen
The stories and propaganda took on a life of their own, giving rise to purely fictional accounts that aimed simply to entertain their public with descriptions of humans fiendishly tortured and virgins ruthlessly violated. The campaigns in early nineteenth-century Spain during the Napoleonic wars were a fertile source of horrors claimed to have been discovered in the cellars of the now-abolished Inquisition. In one account, published as an appendix to an edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the writer described how the French troops of liberation broke into the secret cells of the tribunal in Madrid, where
they found the instruments of torture, of every kind which the ingenuity of men or devils could invent. The first instrument was a machine by which the victim was confined and then, beginning with the fingers, all the joints in the hands, arms and body were broken and drawn one after another, until the sufferer died. The second [was the water torture]. The third was an infernal machine, laid horizontally, on which the victim was bound: the machine then being placed between two scores of knives so fixed that by turning the machine with a crank the flesh of the sufferer was all torn from his limbs into small pieces. The fourth surpassed the others in fiendish ingenuity. Its exterior was a large doll, richly dressed and having the appearance of a beautiful woman with her arms extended ready to embrace her victim. A semicircle was drawn around her, and the person who passed over this fatal mark touched a spring which caused the diabolical engine to open, its arms immediately clasped him, and a thousand knives cut him in as many pieces.22
Learned scholars were not exempt from the tradition. One of the best examples, a narrative of Spain’s activity in the sixteenth-century Netherlands, could be found in the American John Motley’s brilliant and still authoritative The Rise of the Dutch Republic, first published in London in 1855, which presented a wholly fictitious description of the Inquisition:
It taught the savages of India and America to shudder at the name of Christianity. The fear of its introduction froze the earlier heretics of Italy, France and Germany into orthodoxy. It was a court owning allegiance to no temporal authority, superior to all other tribunals. It was a bench of monks without appeal, having its familiars in every house, diving into the secrets of every fireside, judging and executing its horrible decrees without responsibility. It condemned not deeds but thoughts. It affected to descend into individual conscience, and to punish the crimes which it pretended to discover.
Its process was reduced to a horrible simplicity. It arrested on suspicion, tortured till confession, and then punished by fire. Two witnesses, and those to separate facts, were sufficient to consign the victim to a loathsome dungeon. Here he was sparingly supplied with food, forbidden to speak, or even to sing—to which pastime it could hardly be thought he would feel much inclination—and then left to himself till famine and misery should break his spirit. The accuser might be his son, father, or the wife of his bosom, for all were enjoined, under the death penalty, to inform the inquisitors of every suspicious word which might fall from their nearest relatives. The indictment being thus supported, the prisoner was tried by torture. The torture took place at midnight, in a gloomy dungeon, dimly lighted by torches. The victim—whether man, matron, or tender virgin—was stripped naked and stretched upon the wooden bench. Water, weights, fires, pulleys, screws—all the apparatus by which the sinews could be strained without cracking, the bones bruised without breaking, and the body racked exquisitely without giving up its ghost—was now put into operation. The executioner, enveloped in a black robe from head to foot, with his eyes glaring at his victim through holes cut in the hood which muffled his face, practiced successively all the forms of torture which the devilish ingenuity of the monk had invented. The imagination sickens when striving to keep pace with these dreadful realities.23
The anti-Spanish attitudes are sometimes referred to as a “Black Legend,” but no such notion existed in the sixteenth century or even later. The term was invented in 1914 by a Castilian nationalist writer, Julián Juderías, who felt that Protestant foreigners and progressive Spaniards had systematically been defaming his country; in defense, he sought a label to pin on their attitudes.24 Persistent employment of the label for ideological ends in order to rebut any criticism of Spain’s imperial record has made it both unsuitable to use and inaccurate. In any case many of Spain’s actions, as with imperial powers today, were all too real and no “legend.” Montano’s famous book attacking the Inquisition, for example, was in good measure a factually accurate account. In the same way, accounts of military atrocities committed by Spain in the Netherlands and Italy were usually based on fact. At all times, imperial nations tend to suffer—justly or unjustly—in the arena of public opinion, and Spain was no exception, becoming the first victim of a long tradition of polemic that picked on the Inquisition as the most salient point of attack. Visual images made a particularly powerful contribution, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ranging from informative prints about autos de fe to fictitious and salacious images of young virgins tortured and ravished. Until the period of the Cortes of Cadiz, all such images were produced exclusively outside the peninsula and are consequently marginal to our narrative here.25
During the nineteenth century we encounter the final and historically the most enduring “legend,” one created not by foreigners but by Spaniards themselves. When the British fleet under Nelson defeated the French and Spanish naval forces at Trafalgar in 1805, one of the mortal victims on the Spanish side was the naval commander Dionisio Alcalá Galiano. His infant son Antonio ended up as a leading Liberal politician, opponent of absolutism, and eventually (after eleven years as a political refugee, seven of them in London) prime minister of his country. In 1828 when in exile in London he was appointed to the first teaching post in Spanish language ever established in England, at University College. He devoted his inaugural lecture to attacking the Spanish Inquisition, which he accused of having repressed liberty of thought and crushed all intellectual initiative. No history, he said, had been written in Spain since the middle of the seventeenth century, when thanks to the Inquisition his country had entered into “absolute mental darkness.”26 For Spaniards it was to be a period when the Liberal myth of the Inquisition was first systematically presented to them, but the tone of Alcalá Galiano’s message would not have surprised his Protestant audience. Already, the English-speaking world had played some part in preparing the downfall of the Holy Office.
In 1788, the year preceding the French Revolution, a priest from the Canary Islands, Antonio José Ruiz de Padrón, found himself in the city of Philadelphia. His ship from Spain, originally bound for Cuba, had been diverted by a storm to the safety of that port. During his brief stay he made contact with other clergy, who told him of conversations they were having at the house of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a man of unfixed religious opinions, as well as being a Freemason, and Padrón found himself drawn into the active discussions. His English was fragmentary, but he also managed to take part in subsequent talks over religion at the house of George Washington. During the conversations he was driven to admit that the Holy Office was an iniquitous body that deserved abolition. Washington pressed him to speak his mind more openly, so Padrón repeated his opinion the following Sunday from the pulpit of the local Catholic church in Philadelphia.27 His sermon was in Spanish but did not fall wholly on deaf ears for, as he informed the Cortes of Cadiz two decades later:
There were present all the Spaniards of the frigates of war Hero and Loreto besides the crews of eight or ten vessels from Florida which were at the moment in port. As the result of a petition from the congregation my sermon was translated into English and on the octave practically the same things were said by Father Beeston, one of the two curates of the parish. The gathering of all who came to hear this sermon was so great that I myself had barely chance to occupy a narrow place in the sanctuary which I owed to the sincere friendship of the priests of the church. The Protestant ministers wished without doubt to undeceive themse
lves as to the sincerity with which a Spaniard would dare to talk on the Inquisition. They certainly obtained their wish. My sermon was the first ever preached in our language in that part of the country.28
When he returned to Spain, he was determined to work further for the abolition of the Inquisition. He managed to get elected as a deputy for the Canaries to the Cortes of Cadiz in 1812, and took a leading part in the debates the following year, with an impassioned speech attacking the tribunal, which he declared to be unnecessary to the Church, inimical to the state and contrary to the spirit of the gospel. His speech, delivered in January 1813, was decisive in winning votes for abolition. In the same period that Padrón began his campaign in the Cortes, in the city of London a Liberal exile, the Catalan writer Antonio Puigblanch, published a virulent attack on the celebrated tribunal.
Puigblanch, born in the seaport of Mataró, went to Madrid to complete his studies, and obtained a chair at the University of Alcalá. His remarkable scholarship was matched only by his profound concern for reform in Church and state. Caught up in the politics of the Cortes that opened at Cadiz in 1810, in the following year he published his influential The Inquisition Unmasked (La Inquisición sin máscara).29 The preface stated his purpose clearly: “My intention is to destroy the Inquisition from its foundations.” Without the advantage of access to the documents of the Holy Office, Puigblanch made use of a broad range of published sources to demonstrate that the existence and the methods of the Inquisition (that is, its trial procedure, its rigor, its secrecy, its use of torture, its control of censorship) were against the rules of the Church and of civil society. His substantial volume of some five hundred pages, amply backed up by hundreds of footnotes and quotations in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French, had an undeniable impact on readers. Political events dictated that he become an exile in England, to which he fled in 1815 and where in 1816 he published an English translation of the book. Apart from a brief return to Spain, he made England his permanent home.
Puigblanch’s work was the first serious Spanish attack on the Inquisition since the sixteenth-century book by González Montano. It still makes for interesting reading, though its value is somewhat limited because it habitually chooses to employ invective rather than solid evidence. Puigblanch wrote, for example: “As befitted a tribunal created in the centuries of darkness, the laws on which it was founded are a stack of ravings of a sick mind. Perfidious in its words and villainous in its acts, it only felt itself happy when it had victims to condemn.”30 At one point, he accuses the tribunal of blighting all “science” in Spain, but the only scientist he identifies is the Italian Galileo. Uninformed invective continued to be the main weapon employed by most opponents of the Inquisition in those years.
The Liberal campaign took concrete form in the period associated with the Cortes of Cadiz. The “patriots” who took part in the debates over abolishing the Inquisition knew virtually nothing about the subject but were not put off by that. Some may have been guided by Puigblanch, but the most concrete source of information available was Juan Antonio Llorente. Llorente, from Aragon, was a priest who worked with the Inquisition in Logroño and in 1789 became one of its secretaries in Madrid. In 1809, when the French king of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, abolished the Inquisition, he asked Llorente to prepare a history of the tribunal. With all the archives of the Holy Office at his disposal, Llorente managed to publish in Madrid in 1812 his Annals of the Inquisition of Spain, in two volumes, and the Historical Memoir on National Opinion in Spain about the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The latter served as the main source of information for the deputies in the Cortes of Cadiz when they carried out their own abolition of the tribunal.31 When the pro-French officials of Joseph were forced to leave the country with the king, Llorente accompanied them, and published in French in Paris his great work in four volumes, A Critical History of the Spanish Inquisition (1817–18).
It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of Llorente’s achievement. With a rare impartiality (not found, for example, in Puigblanch), and a deep commitment to the seriousness of the task he had undertaken, Llorente attempted to put together from his rich harvest of papers a solid account of what the mysterious tribunal had been busy doing. Subsequently both his personal character and historical accuracy were assailed, primarily by his own countrymen, but this was the normal fate of all historical research that dared to overturn old prejudices. There were inevitably weaknesses in a work so vast that it would normally have taken several years and several scholars to produce, but Llorente’s Annals and History were the first fully documented accounts of the Inquisition to have seen the light of day in over three hundred years. They opened up and exposed to public view hitherto darkened corners of Spain’s history, and for those who doubted his account the author published not only details of his sources but also pièces justificatives to confound criticism. The History became a best seller in French, selling four thousand copies within less than a year, with plans for translation into German, English and Italian; but it also provoked opposition in conservative circles and led to him being expelled back to Spain, where he died of poor health shortly after his arrival.32
For a very long time, Llorente’s account dominated the field; and even today his work is recognized as a classic.33 In the process, he and his contemporaries also laid some foundations of the myth that still dominates popular thinking. The preface to an abridged English translation of his work, published in London in 1827, has the following conclusion on the impact of the Inquisition: “The horrid conduct of this Holy Office weakened the power and diminished the population of Spain, by arresting the progress of arts, sciences, industry and commerce, and by compelling multitudes of families to abandon the kingdom; by instigating the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors; and by immolating on its flaming piles more than three hundred thousand victims.”34
Historians today would find Llorente’s conclusion bizarre. We know that the Holy Office had no impact on population growth, played no perceptible role for or against industry and science and executed little more than 1 percent of the number of victims stated by Llorente. However, Liberals were anxious to identify those responsible for the travails of their country, and who could be more convenient to blame than the Inquisition?
The Liberal myth was given added force by the famous Caprichos of the painter Francisco de Goya. As a solid, believing Catholic and official court artist, Goya had no reason to fall foul of the Church. However, his friends tended to be ministers who had little sympathy with the Inquisition and its political role. In the 1790s from time to time he included in his work satirical references to the Holy Office and the clergy. Among his Caprichos, for example, two (nos. 23 and 24) are explicitly critical of the Inquisition. Goya’s appointment as chief painter to the king gave him protection against malicious critics, but when some of the Caprichos were denounced to the Inquisition he decided to avoid further fuss by donating the whole series to the king. There was no doubt about his opinions. Liberals were influential in the session of the Cortes that met in 1812 at Cadiz, where they led the parliamentary debate over abolishing the Inquisition. Goya’s contribution to the proceedings was to paint a powerful satirical work (usually dated to between 1812 and 1819) depicting the tribunal.
The painting, together with various etchings on the same subject, represents an exceptional moment because it is the only occasion that any Spanish painter in four hundred years took enough interest to dedicate a substantial work of art to the theme. Unfortunately, both art and artist have become victims of an urge to produce romantic history. The artist has been depicted—in studies, novels and even in films—as target of a tribunal that was in fact all but dead and could not have represented any threat to him. And his painting Auto de Fe of the Inquisition,35 truly an imaginative and savage expression of anticlerical rage, has been constantly and on no evidence whatever invoked as evidence of how Spaniards perceived the Holy Office. The work, a satirical collage of an imaginary event, depicting several wholly unrelated ele
ments, portrays no auto de fe that could ever have taken place. Goya wished to attack, and did so with his unique genius; but in the end his paintings were creative fantasy rather than historical testimony.36
The sum total of the Liberal contribution to the image of the Inquisition was to strengthen even further the idea that the tribunal had been an enemy of the human race. We can judge of the opinion widely held among educated and progressive Spaniards through the presentation given by José Amador de los Ríos in his pioneering Historical Studies on the Jews (1848). Amador declared that under Philip II the tribunal:
extended its terrible rule more and more. Till then it had punished dangerous tendencies, and persecuted crimes of sacrilege and belief with the greatest severity and determination. Through its triumph, the Inquisition aspired to rule consciences, it wished to hold the key to human understanding, launched its anathemas against those who would not bow their neck to its projects, and welcomed into its prisons all who dared doubt the legitimacy of its law. So it was that, in a century of achievement for the name of Spaniard, when the Castilian flag flew from one end of Europe to another, while the arts and letters were cultivated by geniuses who rivaled the glories of Italy, there was hardly a single man of learning who was not thrust into the prisons of the Holy Office, victim of the envy and spite of the inquisitors.37
In the period that Amador de los Ríos was writing, scholars began to reassess the relation between Jews and the Inquisition. This development seems to have first taken place in England in the 1830s. Historians and novelists, conscious of the movements for emancipation of Catholics and Jews in England, began to use fifteenth-century Spain as a paradigm for the birth of a nation based on racial and religious homogeneity.38 They were influenced by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, notably his Ivanhoe, which had a Jewess as its heroine. American works such as Washington Irving’s imaginative Conquest of Granada (1829), and Prescott’s masterly History of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837) were also influential. The public, which had hitherto thought of the Inquisition only in terms of the persecution of Protestants, was able through such publications to appreciate the key role of the Jews in Spain.