Castro arrived in Alcalá on 9 August. He and Carranza left there on the 18th to tour the archbishop’s diocese en route to Valladolid. Soon, in the town of Fuente de Sal, Carranza met his friend Felipe de Meneses, who told him that it was public knowledge in Valladolid that the Inquisition was going to arrest him.108 On Sunday, 20 August 1559 the archbishop came to the small town of Torrelaguna and the scene was set for the denouement.
Two days after Carranza and Castro arrived in Torrelaguna, the inquisitor of Valladolid, Diego Ramírez, reached a spot just two miles outside the town. He was accompanied by a hundred men who hid in the woods on the banks of the River Malacuera. Castro came to consult Ramírez and it was decided to arrest Carranza that evening. For two nights Castro had been plotting with the bailiff of the Inquisition, Hernando Berzosa, who had been in Torrelaguna for four days in disguise; Castro and Berzosa had made twelve residents of the town familiars of the Inquisition (local officials who helped with arrests and collecting evidence), and they were prepared to act.109
That night Ramírez entered Torrelaguna and went to Carranza’s lodgings. Guards were placed at the doors and on the stairs, and Ramírez, Castro and Berzosa went up with around ten armed familiars and hammered on the door to Carranza’s chamber. His page, the monk Antonio Sánchez, called out, ‘Who’s there?’ Those outside responded, ‘Open up for the Inquisition!’ The archbishop hurriedly closed the curtain. His head was resting on his pillow as his enemies burst in and seized him in the candlelight.110
From Torrelaguna there would be no escape; Carranza would be taken under armed guard to Valladolid, there to confront his great enemy Fernando de Valdés in one of the most controversial trials which the Inquisition ever prosecuted.
A CURIOUS consonance developed. Valladolid, home to the royal court, was also the focal point of threats to the Spanish empire. The ruling elite was under attack! Everywhere one turned, there the enemy was. Such was its versatility, could one be surprised if the devil himself was seen dressed in the clothes of these wretched conversos, moriscos and Lutherans? In spite of the difficulties caused by moriscos and the crypto-Jews of Murcia, the real threat came from the Protestants. It had after all always been apparent that Jews and Muslims were dubious, but the Protestant threat came from the very heart of Christianity, and was sewing dangerous discord among the peoples of the Low Countries and Germany.
Matters were increasingly grave. In 1557 the Jeronymite monks of the monastery of San Isidro in Seville had been suspected of Protestantism and had fled to Germany, though eight of them were arrested by the Inquisition in Seville. Then, in the spring of 1558, it was discovered that Lutheran errors were being preached throughout Castile. Moreover, these heresies, as Inquisitor-General Valdés wrote to Pope Paul IV on 9 September 1558, had ‘taken the form of sedition and mutiny among important nobles, clerics and property owners’. This, Valdés said to the pope, meant that the Inquisition could not use the benign procedures which had hitherto been its wont in dealing with the crypto-Jews and the moriscos.111
The letter showed how inquisitorial circles were thinking their way towards bonfires. It must of course be borne in mind that around this time a terrible purging occurred of Protestants in England under Queen Mary and in France under Henry II, where more Protestants probably died in England and France than in Spain in the years after 1558.112 Nevertheless, Valdés’s marshalling of evidence and destruction of victims provides a sobering preview of the way in which persecuting institutions would so often prove capable of securing the convictions which they desired.
While fifth-columnist Lutherans became apparent in Seville in 1557, in Valladolid the first signs of the conspiracy emerged at the same time. One evening the wife of the silversmith Juan García rose discreetly after she had gone to bed and followed her husband, aware that it was his practice to go out after she had retired. She saw him enter a house. Suspecting adultery she followed him inside, hiding herself behind the door of the room where he could be heard talking. Soon she heard the conversation turn to what seemed to her to be Lutheranism. This was enough for her delicate ears.
Perhaps, indeed, in those sensitive times adultery was almost as bearable as heresy. No doubt she had felt for some time that her marriage was nearing a crisis, and heresy was the final straw. She determined to turn her back on their shared lives and on any sense of mutual responsibility. She left, and the following day went to denounce him to the Inquisition. Two years later, García the silversmith was relaxed to the secular arm.113
Quickly, the chain of denunciations reached the nobility. In April 1558 Ana Enríquez – known as the ‘beautiful maid’ – the daughter of the marquess of Alcañices, told Inquisitor Gulielmo that the Dominican friar Domingo de Rojas had brought her a book in her mother’s orchard written by Luther and declared his doctrines to be holy. Rojas had also convinced the nuns of the convent of Belén, and they had begun to read Luther’s works. The marquis of Alcañices’s servant Cristóbal de Padilla was said to be another important dogmatist, as was the Italian Carlos de Seso. The canon of Salamanca, Agustín de Cazalla, was said to be behind the spread of Lutheran doctrines, and the Lutheran conventicle met in the house of Cazalla’s mother Leonor de Vibero. Another noble involved was Francisca de Zúñiga, the daughter of the royal accountant Alonso de Baeza.114
Here was an ever-growing web of connections, contacts, sedition. All the heretics were communicating with one another. The conspiracy was much greater than had ever been dreamt possible. By 1558 the inquisitorial jails were heaving with prisoners, and Inquisitor-General Valdés noted how ‘each day new witnesses arrive . . . some suspects have not been seized, since there are no cells to keep them in’.115
The case of the Italian Carlos de Seso was if anything more pathetic. Seso had been born in Verona and by 1554 was the chief magistrate of the town of Toro. There was no question that Seso had picked up some controversial ideas in Italy and had begun to talk about them to a small circle of his intimates; yet this did not mean that he was a Lutheran. Seso was sentenced to burn in the auto of 8 October 1559, and the night before his death he made a declaration, stating, ‘I believe that which the Apostles believed and the doctrine of the Holy Mother Catholic and Apostolic Church’. He was, he stated, dying because he had said that ‘Jesus Christ our Lord had saved his chosen ones through his passion and death and that he was the only one to make peace between God and ourselves’. The story goes that the following day, as he was dragged through the streets of Valladolid in the auto, he saw Philip II and asked him how he could let him be burnt, to which the king replied, ‘I would bring wood to burn my own son if he was as bad as you’.117
There were two autos in Valladolid in 1559, in which twenty-five Lutherans were relaxed. They were given this sentence in spite of their confessions and penitence – contrary to the usual procedure of the Inquisition – after special papal dispensation requested by Valdés.118 Eight days before the first auto, on 21 May, a preacher declared that everyone should attend the ceremony, and people flocked from all over Spain so that over 100,000
crammed into the squares, peering from windows and specially erected stages at the macabre spectacle.119 So great was the audience that two days before the auto it was impossible to walk the streets, and when the fourteen condemned prisoners were taken out of the city to be executed they had to be guarded by four hundred troops.120 At the auto of 8 October there were said to be 300,000 people in attendance – all the townsfolk for forty leagues (c. 125 miles) around had come to Valladolid. This was indeed a ‘spectacle as strange as ever had been seen’.121
In Seville, meanwhile, thirty-two Lutherans were relaxed in 1559 and 1560.122 A further eighteen were relaxed in 1562 (when three moriscos perished as well), with another sixteen burnt in statute.123 Six more died in 1563124 and another six in 1564.125 As late as 1577 three people were relaxed, two of them being English, while seven of the nine Lutherans tried that year were tortured.
Something of the atmosphere of permanent threat that coursed through Spain during these years is revealed by the list of prisoners in the inquisitorial jail of Seville in 1580:
Englishmen, accused of a plot – 19.
Scotsmen, accused of a plot – 23.
Moriscos, accused of a plot – 6.
Moriscos, accused of another plot – 12.
Moriscos, accused of still another plot – 3.
Moriscos, accused of a still further plot – 3.
Moriscos, accused of one more plot – 2.
Cases of prisoners accused of no plot – 32.126
THE LANGUAGE ISthat of a society which perceives threats everywhere.
The concentration of terror in the years 1558 and 1559 was no accident; Philip II, the new king, needed to show that there was no power vacuum and that he was an adequate successor to his father.127 There is no question that some of the people imprisoned or executed did profess beliefs anomalous to Catholic doctrine, but at the same time there can be little doubt that these differences were exaggerated by the inquisitorial procedure – as the evidence of Domingo de Rojas attests. In fact much of what these people held to be true was little different from old Erasmian beliefs.128. Moreover, far from eradicating heresy, the fires of the Inquisition often encouraged it. Many people forced to flee from Seville in the 1560s to northern Europe survived by becoming proselytizing Protestants and circulating terrible stories of Catholic Spain.129 Paranoid Catholicism therefore created targets of which it could genuinely be afraid.
The greatest proof of this creation of the enemy within came from Portugal, where there was no reason for there to be any less infiltration by Lutheranism than in Spain. Yet here there were very few Lutheran trials at this time, apart from one or two show trials like that of the royal chronicler Damião de Goes.130 This was not because that there was any greater danger of Protestantism in Spain than in Portugal, but rather because in Portugal, where the Inquisition had only just been founded, persecution was still being channelled towards the first major targets, conversos. There was no need to create a Lutheran threat when the original converso enemy was still being dealt with.
CARRANZA’S ARREST, so carefully orchestrated by Valdés, was intimately related to the events in Valladolid. At some time in the 1550s Carranza appears to have had one meeting with the prisoner Carlos de Seso, during which he had tried hard to convince Seso of the error of his beliefs, but he had not denounced Seso to the Inquisition.131 This was taken as a sign of guilt by the inquisitorial prosecutor even though Carranza, with his long experience of the Inquisition, would have known if a denunciation had been appropriate. Moreover, the hapless Domingo de Rojas who had once been Carranza’s servant, arraigned in the torture chamber on 10 April 1559 and casting around desperately for some means of survival, claimed that Carranza had subscribed to some of the ideas which he was said to have propagated.132 These connections were crucial to Carranza’s arrest.
Not surprisingly, the archbishop of Toledo plunged into depression once he was incarcerated in Valladolid. He suffered from chronic insomnia and did not sleep for nineteen days.133 Then he set about proving that Inquisitor-General Valdés was his enemy and could not be relied on to judge him objectively. In this at least he was successful, and Valdés was removed from responsibility for the case. But none of this sped the trial along.
Carranza spent his years in prison in Spain in terrible conditions. He occupied a cell so cut off from the outside world that when a fire devastated Valladolid on 21 September 1561, burning over 400 houses and lasting for a day and a half, he knew nothing about it and did not find out until years later when he was in Rome.134 His cell had no ventilation and he and his servants had to perform their bodily functions there, which meant that they all fell ill. It was so dark that Carranza sometimes had to light candles at nine in the morning. His jailer, moreover, was Inquisitor Diego González, who had arrested him in Torrelaguna. González humiliated him by bringing his food on broken plates and fruit on the covers of books, and by forcing the archbishop to use his sheets as a tablecloth.135
After over seven years in the jail in Valladolid Carranza was transferred to Rome on the insistence of the new pope, Pius V. Here vast numbers of court papers had to be translated into Italian before the case could proceed, which was not completed until 1570. Even then Carranza’s ordeal was not over. Pius V died and his successor, Gregory XIII, came under intense pressure from Philip II to declare Carranza guilty. On 14 April 1576, almost seventeen years after his first arrest, Carranza was sentenced to abjure heresy and sixteen Lutheran propositions of which he was deemed suspected.136 As his sentence was read in the Vatican, the archbishop shed floods of tears. He died eighteen days later, unable to pass water.137 The repression had come full circle.
There may be some who, remembering Carranza’s zeal in burning the Protestants of England, find it difficult to feel sympathy for such a man. Yet it must be remembered that this was a time of religious warfare in Europe. What his case reveals is not so much a righting of wrongs as the way in which power had adopted an agenda which was utterly its own. Valdés had used hypocrisy, lies and torture to ruin a man who, by the standards of his time and country, was a holy person. If the primate of all Spain could be convicted of heresy, no one could be thought free of suspicion.138 Fear could reap its bitter crop among all the classes of Spain.
The mentality that triumphed in these conditions was conservative, hierarchical and dogmatic, afraid of all novelty. Melchor Cano, who preached at the auto of 21 May 1559 in Valladolid to consolidate his position in the new order, held that the great dangers of translating the scriptures out of Latin could be seen ‘among women and idiots’.139 The secrets of faith were only safe with wise men, people rather like Cano, in fact.
Yet isolation and persecution of the enemy within was not a contradiction to the golden age in Spain; it was in many ways of a piece with the country’s imperial destiny, the counterpoint at home to the global power exerted by Spain in the 16th century. Enemies were focuses for unity as well as violence in both America and Europe, and while the targets were the easily identifiable ‘others’, the crypto-Jews and the moriscos, the tactic worked brilliantly and Spain continued to advance. But the crackdown on the Protestant enemy within marked a turning point. When Philip II continued his father’s policy of imposing the Inquisition on the Low Countries, where there was no Jewish or Moorish ‘problem’, this precipitated rebellion. The Dutch United Provinces seceded from the empire, and came to present one of the major challenges to Spanish power in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.140
Thus in overreaching itself and stretching the concept of the enemy so that it had the potential to cover everyone, the Inquisition and the inquisitorial state of mind helped to sew the seeds of the rebellions which ate away at Spanish power and its role in the world. Yet the institution failed to appreciate the self-destructiveness which was a necessary condition of its existence. Even as the Dutch were launching their first rebellion against the Spanish in the late 1560s, the decision was taken to export the Inquisition to America. With fear pursued – but n
ever vanquished – on all sides at home, it was perhaps inevitable that it would come to be pursued in the same way abroad.
Chapter Six
TERROR ENVELOPS THE WORLD
. . . he swore that if she did not return to God and the Virgin, he would kill her himself . . .
Mexico 1568–1583
ON 12 SEPTEMBER 1572 the ten members of the newly inaugurated Tribunal of the Inquisition of Mexico arrived on the coast at Veracruz. Chief among them was Inquisitor Pedro Moya de Contreras. As soon as he arrived Contreras appointed the members of the inquisitorial infrastructure. He established commissaries in every town where there was a bishop, not only in Mexico but also in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. By 1600 no important settlement of the captaincy of Guatemala would be without its inquisitorial commissary.1
Already in 1572 the first cases were pending; it was as if some had been itching for the opportunity to condemn. The Genoese Niccolo Boeto was in jail in Nicaragua for erroneously interpreting what God had prohibited to Adam in paradise. And in León in northern Mexico Hernando Sánchez was arrested for declaring that ‘simple fornication was not a sin, provided that you paid for it’.2 Criticism and opprobrium were so much easier to develop than love. Thus the export of the Inquisition’s peculiar brand of terror and hypocrisy had begun.
Though the Inquisition had been active in Mexico before, this had been under the auspices of the bishops – the old episcopal Inquisition – and without the infrastructure and powers of the new tribunals which had spread across Spain after 1478. On top of the cases of the Amerindians,*1 some foreign Protestants had been tried by these earlier authorities. One of the biggest cases had been in 1559, when the Englishman Robert Thomson had been arrested for Lutheranism and forced to do penance in the cathedral of Mexico City with an Italian.