The Last Look: A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition, Page 4

  CHAPTER FOUR.

  SIGNS OF DANGER.

  Two years had passed away. Leonor de Cisneros had become the wife ofAntonio Herezuelo, the advocate; they had settled at Toro, butoccasionally made visits to Seville and to Valladolid, where theyenjoyed the society of other Protestants--many of them illustrious, bothby birth and talents, among the nobles of Spain.

  The year 1558, fearfully memorable in Spain, at length commenced.Philip was about to return to his paternal dominions. Charles the Fifthwas in his retirement in the convent of Saint Juste. TheInquisitor-general, Valdes, became more than ever certain that heresywas extending. Herezuelo and Dona Leonor were at Valladolid. They wereat their lodgings in that city when a certain Juan Garcia, a goldsmith,was announced. He was well-known there as a sincere Protestant. It washis office to summon the brethren to meet together for prayer andsermon. The advocate, who knew him to be a true man, welcomed himcordially, and promised to attend the meeting. It was to be held at thehouse once occupied by Dona Leonor de Vibero, the mother of DoctorCazalla. She herself had been dead for some few years, as were severalof her children; but her house had been continued to be used, as it nowwas, as a meeting place for Protestants. Juan Garcia had a good deal ofinformation to communicate with regard to the progress made byProtestant principles. He was very sanguine as to the success of thecause; and as the members of the Church had so long evaded the lynx eyeof the inquisitors, he had every reason to hope that they would continueto do so. In his rounds he encountered Julian Hernandez, thepersevering Bible importer. A warm greeting passed between the twofriends. Julianillo was on the point of starting on another expedition,and could not attend the meeting that night. His heart would be withhis co-religionists, and his prayers would ascend with theirs as hefollowed his mules over the sierra.

  "The time may come, ere long, when we may worship together in public,and the books which I now bring in small numbers with difficulty anddanger, may arrive in shiploads and be sold openly," he added, as heshook his friend's hand.

  The goldsmith shook his head.

  "That time is, I fear, a long way off," he answered; "yet it behoves us,nevertheless, to pray for it."

  Juan Garcia, having performed his duties, returned to his home. He wasnot happy there. His wife, Maria Vallanegra, did not entertain hisopinions. Now, it could have mattered very little what Maria thought onthe subject, had she not gone to confession, where, not content withconfessing her own sins, she took upon herself, at the instigation ofthe priest, to confess her husband's also. What the priest said to herit is not necessary to repeat. She had had the same sort of things saidbefore, and had not been shocked. He now, however, before he allowedher to depart, brought the enormity of her conduct fully before her, andtold her that he could not afford her absolution, because she wasmarried to one who held heretical notions, unless she could manage toget him duly punished. She had made her confession; but, after all, shehad to go home without receiving absolution. She had observed that herhusband was away from home occasionally for some hours, and not engagedin business; also, he occasionally remained out at night for aconsiderable time, and declined telling her where he had been. She hadmade a statement to that effect to the priest, together with hersuspicions that Lutheranism had something to do with the matter.

  "Then obtain all the information you can; and if you discover anythingof importance, not only shall you receive absolution for all your yetunpardoned sins, but you shall receive a handsome reward, and a plenaryindulgence for the future," answered the confessor. "Exert your woman'swit. Think of the indulgence you will obtain, and if your husband is,as you suspect, a heretic, he is utterly unworthy of your consideration.You cannot wish to associate with him in this world; and in the next,if you go to heaven, you must be ever separated from him."

  Thus exhorted, the wretched Maria returned to her home. She knew thather husband had a secret, and she resolved to discover it. If he shouldprove to be a Lutheran, it would be a pious act for her to deliver himup to justice. She procured a mantilla, such as is worn occasionally bytradesmen's wives, and even ladies when going to confession, of amanufacture different from that which her husband was accustomed to seeher wear. To throw him off his guard, she lavished on him far moreaffection than was her custom, and pretended to forget that she had evercomplained of his leaving home without telling her where he was going.More than once she put on her mantilla to follow him, but before he hadgot far she lost sight of him in the crowd. At length, one evening,when the weather was rainy, and there were fewer people abroad thanusual, she saw he was preparing to go out; and managing to leave thehouse before him, she concealed herself within an archway, whence shecould watch which way he went. He came out; she followed himstealthily, but quickly. He called at several houses, she noted themcarefully; then he went on till he came to the mansion of the Cazallafamily. He was admitted at a side door. She took up her post at a spotwhence she could watch the door. Her labours were to be rewarded.Scarcely had her husband entered than several other persons arrived, andthen more and more, by twos and threes. Many of them she saw by theirdress and carriage, as the lights their servants carried fell on them,were evidently persons of rank. She wished that she could venture tofollow them into the house, to learn more about the matter. Still, theinformation she had gained might prove of the greatest value. The nextmorning she hurried off to inform her father confessor of her discovery.He told her to keep secret what she had seen; and the next time herhusband went out at that hour, to come instantly and let him know.

  The next prayer-meeting took place, and Maria gave timely notice of itto her father confessor, Fre Antonio Lobo. Had he been addicted togiving expression to his feelings, he would have rubbed his hands withsatisfaction; he merely cautioned Maria to be silent as the grave as towhat she had told him, and immediately set off to give the longwished-for information to his superiors. The Chief Inquisitor, thestern Archbishop, three other dignitaries appointed by the Holy Fatherthe Pope to assist him in the extirpation of heresy by the destructionof heretics with fire and sword, and several other high officers, wereseated in the council hall of the Inquisition when Father Antonio Loboappeared among them. Some of them, like anglers, who, having been longunsuccessful in their attempts to hook their finny prey, declare thatthere are no fish in the lake, had inclined to the opinion that theircountrymen were too staunch adherents of the Pope ever to be led astrayby the doctrines of Luther.

  "It may be as you suppose, Fre Ignacio," observed the Grand Inquisitorto one of his assistants, who had made a remark to that effect. "Butremember that it is our duty to seek diligently for all who may beopposed to our order and system, and to destroy them withoutcompunction, with their wives and children, so that none of the viper'sbrood remains to sting us."

  The stern expression visible on the countenances of those he addressed,as the light from the brass lamp which hung from the vaulted roof fellon them, showed that they were fully ready to carry out his advice tothe extreme. A grim smile played over their features when Fre Antoniomade his report.

  "I knew that before long we should gain the tidings we desired,"observed the Chief Inquisitor. "In capturing a few we must take carethat the rest do not escape us. Officers must be placed to watch allthose who come forth from the Cazalla palace, and they must be followedto their homes and never again lost sight of. Meantime, messengers mustbe despatched forthwith throughout the kingdom, and all theramifications of this most accursed heresy traced out, so that on agiven day all the heretics which exist in it may be seized together andbrought to punishment. We must surround the whole brood with our nets,and let not one escape."

  The proposal was thoroughly in accordance with the wishes of most of thecouncil. No time was lost in carrying out the proposed plan. Throughthe assistance of the artful Maria, who continued, in spite of hiscaution, to worm out some important secrets from Juan Garcia, everyProtestant in Valladolid was discovered and marked for destruction.Officers and familiars of th
e Inquisition were also placed on thehighways leading to the frontiers, so that any suspected personattempting to escape from the country might be captured.

  The Protestants, meantime, continued to preach the truth, and hold theirmeetings as before, not, however, without a sense of the danger in whichthey were placed. How the feeling came on them they were not aware.Still it did not make even the most timid wish to abandon theirprinciples, but rather drew them nearer to God, and made them more andmore sensible of their entire dependence on Him. The difficultiesencountered by those attempting to escape from the country were verygreat. Few persons experienced greater than did the monks of SanIsidoro, near Seville. Nearly all the convents in its neighbourhood hadbeen leavened with the reforming principles. They had been originallyintroduced into that of San Isidoro by the celebrated Doctor Blanco, whoafterwards for a time abandoned them, or rather, it may be said that atimid disposition made him conceal them. He taught his brethren thattrue religion was very different from what it was vulgarly supposed tobe; that it did not consist in chanting matins and vespers, or inperforming any of those acts of bodily service in which their time wasoccupied, and that if they desired to have the approbation of God, itbehoved them to have recourse to the Scriptures to know His mind. Aftera few years a still more decided change took place in the internal stateof the monastery. An ample supply of copies of the Scriptures, and ofProtestant books in the Spanish language having been received, they wereread with avidity by the monks, and contributed at once to confirm thosewho had been enlightened, and to extricate others from the prejudices bywhich they were enthralled. In consequence of this, they and theirPrior agreed to reform their religious institute. Their hours ofprayer, as they were called, which had been spent in solemn mummeries,were appointed for hearing prelections on the Scriptures; prayers forthe dead were omitted, or converted into lessons for the living; papalindulgences and pardons, which had formed a lucrative and engrossingtraffic, were entirely abolished; images were allowed to remain, as theycould not have been removed without attracting notice, though theyreceived no homage; habitual temperance was substituted in the room ofsuperstitious fasting; and novices were instructed in the principles oftrue piety, instead of being initiated into the idle and debasing habitsof monachism. By their conversation also abroad, and by the circulationof books, these zealous monks diffused the knowledge of the truththrough the adjacent country, and imparted it to many individuals whoresided in towns at a considerable distance from Seville.