A History of the Inquisition of Spain (Vol. 1-4). Henry Charles Lea
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Office. The woman was not dead but was in Valencia, where the tribunal was busily collecting evidence; to hand Muñoz over to the secular judges for trial and execution would incur the same irregularity as sentencing him; the case would be tried by the Suprema, which had a wide range of suitable penalties that did not infer irregularity; meanwhile Muñoz would be safely guarded and he trusted that the king would not set so pernicious an example.
When Philip rejected this appeal and repeated his order, a learned and elaborate argument was prepared to show that he had no power to interfere. It took the ground, to which we have already referred, that the temporal jurisdiction of the Inquisition over its officials was a grant from the papacy; it was exclusive and unlimited and no secular ruler could deprive the Holy Office of it; the pope had power to make this grant and the king had none to remove this or any other case from its cognizance, for he was not supreme over the ecclesiastical and papal jurisdiction—the truth being that the papal commissions to the inquisitor-general conferred power to remove and punish subordinates but said nothing as to its being exclusive, and equally fallacious was the citation of three authorities whose utterances had no bearing on the question at issue.[1178] This audacious reliance on the ignorance of Philip and his secular advisers was successful. Philip made one or two efforts more, but Arce y Reynoso held good. A memorial, in 1648, on the general subject, from a member of the Council of Castile, tells the king that his repeated commands in the case of Muñoz had been disobeyed and that, although the criminal had so long been in the hands of the inquisitors, he had not yet been sentenced, which he held to be clear proof that their aim was to defend their officials from the royal justice and not to punish them.[1179]
CASTILE
How liberal was the construction placed on this term of titular official was illustrated when, in 1622, at Toledo, the corregidor arrested the butcher of the tribunal for intolerable frauds on the public. The inquisitor demanded the prisoner and the papers, published the corregidor in all the churches as excommunicate, seized the alguazil and apparitor who had made the arrest, cast them into the secret prison, tried them as if for heresy, shaved their heads and beards and banished them and refused to their families any evidence that would preserve their posterity from infamy. There was danger of a rising in Toledo against the Inquisition, but it was averted; the Council of Castile protested and a junta was held which adopted measures to prevent a repetition of such outrages but, as usual, no attention was paid to them.[1180]
It would be superfluous to multiply examples of the perennial struggle which was distracting the energies of the government and weakening the respect for law in every quarter of Spain. Each tribunal contributed its share, and there was an unending stream of cases pouring into Madrid for settlement. Each side blamed the other for this anomalous condition. In 1632, the Suprema, in defending the tribunal of Valencia for its protection of criminal familiars, bitterly complained that the object of the Concordias was the relief of the tribunals, the punishment of offenders, the quick despatch of cases, and the diminished oppression of pleaders, but that this had been converted into perpetual strife, regardless of forms and rules of procedure.[1181] For this it was itself primarily to blame, for though there were doubtless faults on both sides, the cases recorded in the reports and the arguments of the Inquisition show that it was the chief offender. Its aggressive powers were too much greater than those of its adversaries, and its methods were too sharp, for the secular authorities often to risk the consequences of being in the wrong.
THE SPIRITUAL COURTS
There was another direction in which the Holy Office sought to interfere with the administration of justice. So complete is the independence of secular authority claimed by the Church for those in holy orders, that a licence from a bishop is held to be necessary before a cleric can obey a summons to appear as a witness in a lay court, even in civil cases.[1182] The Inquisition included this among the exemptions of all connected with it, whether lay or clerical, and even extended it to familiars. The privilege seems generally to have been conceded, as respects the salaried officials but, as applied to familiars, it was too grotesque not to excite opposition. The Concordia of 1568, as we have seen, provided that familiars should testify before secular judges without requiring licence from inquisitors and that the latter should not prohibit them from so doing, which infers that it was an abuse requiring correction and also that officials were conceded to enjoy the exemption. The power to summon a witness necessarily includes that of coercing him to testify, and this was exercised by imprisoning recalcitrants, which came to be regarded as an infraction of privilege. In 1649, in the case of Claudio Bolano, a familiar imprisoned for refusing to give evidence, the tribunal of Valencia formed a competencia, pending which he was released under bail to both jurisdictions. The question was of difficult solution and the competencia dragged on for ten years without settlement. Then, in 1659, the same thing occurred and another competencia was formed, in which the most that the Inquisition would concede was that, when the evidence was indispensable, a notary should be sent to the familiar’s house to take it in secret, basing this upon the danger to which witnesses were exposed in the violent factions of the time.[1183] The question, however, was settled, in 1699, in the case of Felipe Bru. At Játiva, on August 14, 1698, Don Luis Salzedo, Lord of Pamis, was shot and killed when standing at a window of his house. Don Vicente Monserrat, judge of the Audiencia of Valencia, found Bru, who was a familiar, a contumacious witness. He was first given the town as a prison, then his house, and finally was confined in chains. He appealed to the tribunal, which ordered his release within three days, under pain of excommunication and five hundred ducats. A competencia was formed which, in November, 1699, was decided in favor of the royal jurisdiction. It was probably in consequence of this discussion that, on July 15th, a royal decree was issued compelling familiars to give evidence in secular courts. Even this did not abate the pretensions of the Inquisition for when, in 1702, Joseph Pérez of Montesa, a familiar, was ordered, under penalty of a thousand ducats, not to leave that town because a deposition was wanted from him, he appealed to the tribunal of Valencia which, with the usual threats, commanded the revocation of the order. On this being refused, Pérez went to Valencia and had himself incarcerated in the secret prison, where he was inaccessible. The Audiencia pursued the matter, there was considerable correspondence and preparations for a competencia, but finally the affair was settled by sending Pérez to the house of the regent of the Audiencia, where he made his deposition. To the end, however, the tribunal maintained the position that, if any constraint was used, it would resist and protect the familiar unless a competencia decided to the contrary.[1184]
It was not the secular courts alone that had these perpetual conflicts with the Inquisition. Like Ishmael, its hand was against every man and every man’s hand was against it—but, in fact, this was to a great extent the case between all the different jurisdictions among which the various classes of society were parcelled out by their several privileges and exemptions. Next to the royal courts ranked the spiritual courts in the number and complexity of debatable questions with the Inquisition. With these there were two sources of contention, for they not only claimed by prescriptive right exclusive jurisdiction in all temporal matters over all who wore the tonsure, but there was a broad field for discussion in the somewhat hazy delimitation of spiritual offences justiciable by one or the other. This latter subject will engage our attention hereafter; at present we are concerned only with the questions arising from the personnel of the Holy Office. Notoriously lax as were the episcopal courts with offenders of the cloth, the Inquisition had the reputation of still greater indulgence with those who were under its protection; clerics who were also officials therefore preferred its tribunals, giving rise to frequent quarrels in which the inquisitors treated their clerical opponents as remorselessly as they did the secular officials and judges. The episcopal Ordinaries, provisors and vicars-general contended that they had, except in cases of faith, exclusive jurisdiction over all clerics; that the temporal jurisdiction of the Inquisition was a royal grant which could not supersede the canon law and that the papal commissions only gave faculties for punishing official malfeasance. To this unanswerable argument the inquisitors paid little heed and the prelates were worse off than the judges for these at least had the Councils of Castile or Aragon to struggle for them, but the Councils admitted that they had no standing in ecclesiastical quarrels. The natural recourse of the prelates for protection was to Rome, but this was a subject of intense jealousy, traditional in the Spanish monarchy, and Philip III, in a cédula of January 21, 1611, addressed to all the prelates of his dominions, told them that they