History of the Inquisition of Spain. Henry Charles Lea

that the greater portion of the rufianes and malefactors of the kingdom wore the tonsure; when arrested by the secular officials the spiritual courts demanded them and enforced their claims with excommunication, after which they freely discharged the evil doers. This complaint was re-echoed by almost every subsequent Córtes, with an occasional allusion to the stimulus thus afforded to the evil propensities of those who were really clerics. The kings in responding to these representations could only say that they would apply to the Holy Father for relief, but the relief never came.[48] The spirit in which these claims of clerical immunity were advanced as a shield for criminals and the resolute firmness with which they were met by Ferdinand and Isabella are illustrated by an occurrence in 1486, in Truxillo, where a man committed a crime and was arrested by the corregidor. He claimed to wear the tonsure and, as the officials delayed in handing him over to the ecclesiastical court, some clerics who were his kinsmen paraded the streets with a cross and proclaimed that religion was being destroyed. They succeeded thus in arousing a tumult in which the culprit was liberated. The sovereigns were in Galicia, but they forthwith despatched troops to the scene of disturbance; severe punishment was inflicted on the participants in the riot, and the clerics who had provoked it were deprived of citizenship and were banished from Spain.[49] Less serious but still abundantly obnoxious were the advantages which these tonsured laymen possessed in civil suits by claiming the privilege of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. To meet this was largely the object of the laws in the Ordenanzas Reales described above, and these were supplemented, in 1519, by an edict of Charles V forbidding episcopal officials from cognizance of cases where such so-called clerics engaged in trade sought the spiritual courts as a defence against civil suits. A similar abuse, by which such clerics in public office evaded responsibility for wrong-doing by pleading their clergy, he remedied by reviving an old law of Juan I declaring them ineligible to office.[50] Thus the royal power in Spain asserted its authority over the Church after a fashion unknown elsewhere. We shall see that, so long as it declined to persecute Moors and Jews, Rome could not compel it to do so. When its policy changed under Isabella it was inevitable that the machinery of persecution should be under the control, not of the Church, but of the sovereign. We shall also see that, when the Inquisition inflicted similar wrongs by the immunities claimed for its own officials and familiars, the sovereigns customarily turned a deaf ear to the complaints of the people.

      DISPUTED SUCCESSION

Such was the condition of Castile when the death of the miserable Henry IV, December 12, 1474, cast the responsibility of royalty on his sister Isabella and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. The power of the crown was eclipsed; the land was ravaged with interminable war between nobles who were practically independent; the sentiment of loyalty and patriotism seemed extinct: deceit and treachery, false oaths—whatever would serve cupidity and ambition—were universal; justice was bought and sold; private vengeance was exercised without restraint; there was no security for life and property. The fabric of society seemed about to fall in ruins.[51] To evolve order out of this chaos of passion and lawlessness was a task to test to the uttermost the nerve and capacity of the most resolute and sagacious. To add to the confusion there was a disputed succession, although, in 1468, the oath of fidelity had been taken to Isabella, with the assent of Henry IV, in the Contract of Perales, by which he, for the second time, acknowledged his reputed daughter Juana not to be his. He was popularly believed to be impotent, and when his wife Juana, sister of Affonso V of Portugal, bore him a daughter, whom he acknowledged and declared to be his heir, her paternity was maliciously ascribed to Beltran de la Cueva, and she was known by the opposite party as La Beltraneja. Though Henry had been forced by his nobles to set aside her claims in favor of his brother Alfonso in the Declaration of Cabezon, in 1464, and, after Alfonso’s death, in favor of Isabella, in 1468, the latter’s marriage, in 1469, with Ferdinand of Aragon so angered him that he betrothed Juana to Charles Duke of Guienne, brother of Louis XI of France, and made the nobles of his faction swear to acknowledge her. At his death he testified again to her legitimacy and declared her to be his successor in a will which long remained hidden and finally in 1504 fell under the control of Ferdinand, who ordered it burnt.[52] There was a powerful party pledged to support her rights, and they were aided on the one hand by Affonso of Portugal and on the other by Louis of France, each eager to profit by dismembering the unhappy land. Some years of war, more cruel and bloody than even the preceding aimless strife, were required to dispose of this formidable opposition—years which tried to the utmost the ability of the young sovereigns and proved to their subjects that at length they had rulers endowed with kingly qualities. The decisive victory of Toro, won by Ferdinand over the Portuguese, March 1, 1476, virtually settled the result, although the final treaty was not signed until 1479. The Beltraneja was given the alternative of marrying within six months Prince Juan, son of Ferdinand and Isabella, then but two years old, or of entering the Order of Santa Clara in a Portuguese house. She chose the latter, but she never ceased to sign herself Yo la Reina, and her pretensions were a frequent source of anxiety. She led a varied life, sometimes treated as queen, with a court around her, and sometimes as a nun in her convent, dying at last in 1531, at the age of seventy.[53]

Isabella was queen in fact as well as in name. Under the feudal system, the husband of an heiress was so completely lord of the fief that, in the Capitulations of Cervera, January 7, 1469, which preceded the marriage, the Castilians carefully guarded the autonomy of their kingdom and Ferdinand swore to observe the conditions.[54] Yet, on the death of Henry IV, he imagined that he could disregard the compact, alleging that the crown of Castile passed to the nearest male descendant, and that through his grandfather, Ferdinand of Antequera, brother of Henry III, he was the lawful heir. The position was, however, too doubtful and complicated for him to insist on this; a short struggle convinced his consummate prudence that it was wisdom to yield, and Isabella’s wifely tact facilitated submission. It was agreed that their two names should appear on all papers, both their heads on all coins, and that there should be a single seal with the arms of Castile and Aragon. Thereafter they acted in concert which was rarely disturbed. The strong individuality which characterized both conduced to harmony, for neither of them allowed courtiers to gain undue influence. As Pulgar says “The favorite of the king is the queen, the favorite of the queen is the king.”[55]

      FERDINAND’S CHARACTER

Ferdinand, without being a truly great man, was unquestionably the greatest monarch of an age not prolific in greatness, the only contemporary whom he did not wholly eclipse being Henry VII of England. Constant in adversity, not unduly elated in prosperity, there was a stedfast equipoise in his character which more than compensated for any lack of brilliancy. Far-seeing and cautious, he took no decisive step that was not well prepared in advance but, when the time came, he could strike, promptly and hard. Not naturally cruel, he took no pleasure in human suffering, but he was pitiless when his policy demanded. Dissimulation and deceit are too invariable an ingredient of statecraft for us to censure him severely for the craftiness in which he surpassed his rivals or for the mendacity in which he was an adept. Cold and reserved, he preferred to inspire fear rather than to excite affection, but he was well served and his insight into character gave him the most useful faculty of a ruler, the ability to choose his instruments and to get from them the best work which they were capable of performing, while gratitude for past services never imposed on him any inconvenient obligations. He was popularly accused of avarice, but the empty treasury left at his death showed that acquisitiveness with him had been merely a means to an end.[56] His religious convictions were sincere and moreover he recognized wisely the invaluable aid which religion could lend to statesmanship at a time when Latin Christianity was dominant without a rival. This was especially the case in the ten years’ war with Granada, his conduct of which would alone stamp him