Philip the Second, king of Spain, succeeded to the throne of that
monarchy about the close of the year 1555; but his affairs in England
and the Netherlands long withheld him from visiting his beloved
country, and he did not reach its shores, after a seven years’ absence,
till the twenty-ninth of August, 1559. It may be thought that a public
event of this sort could be little interesting to me, a forgotten
prisoner, immured in the dungeons of the inquisition. The fact was
otherwise. The king was desirous of distinguishing his arrival on
his native soil by some splendid exhibition or memorable event, that
should at once express his piety to God, and conduce to the felicity
of his people: and he could think of nothing that so signally united
these characters as an _Auto de Fé_. The Lutheran heresy, which in the
course of forty years had spread its poison so widely in the different
countries of Europe, had not failed to scatter a few of its noxious
seeds even in this, the purest and most Catholic of all its divisions.
But Philip had early proclaimed his hostility against this innovation;
and, prostrating himself before the image of his Saviour, had earnestly
besought the divine majesty, “that he might never suffer himself to
be, or to be called, the lord of those in any corner of the globe,
who should deny Him the Lord.” Previously to his arrival in Spain,
directions had been given, and arrangements made, respecting the pious
and solemn exhibition he demanded. Formerly those who by the fathers of
the inquisition had been delivered over to the secular arm, had been
executed in the different places where their crimes had been committed,
or their trials been held: but now it was proposed that all those
throughout the kingdom, who were found properly qualified to satisfy by
their deaths the sublime taste of the royal saint, should be divided
into two troops, and sent, the one to Seville, long the capital of an
illustrious monarchy, and the other to Valladolid, which had the honour
to be the birthplace of the present sovereign. The troop destined to
feed the flames at Seville was composed of fifty persons, many of them
distinguished for their rank, their talents, or their virtues. The
troop to be escorted to Valladolid, of which I was a member, amounted
only to thirty: but to compensate this deficiency, Philip himself had
signified his gracious intention to be present, together with the heir
apparent and his whole court, at that exhibition. The Spanish nation,
rejoicing in the approach of a monarch who was born among them, whose
manners and temper happily accorded with theirs, and whom they believed
about to fix his perpetual residence in their land, expected him with
all the longings of the most ardent attachment. We, the unhappy victims
of pious and inquisitorial tyranny, also expected him. Our hearts did
not pant with a less beating quickness; though our anxiety arose from
emotions of a different nature.
Valladolid is distant from the metropolis eighty-four miles. We had
already been some weeks prepared for this journey, and piously directed
to hold ourselves in readiness to take our part in the solemn national
sacrifice. We waited however to receive a previous notice of the day
on which the monarch would enter the place of his birth, since so
great was his royal zeal for the cause of religion and civil society,
that he would not consent to be absent from any part of the spectacle;
and accordingly it was not allowed us to enter the scene of our final
destination, till the king of Spain and the Indies should be already
on the spot, and prepared to receive us. The _auto da fé_ performed at
Seville had the precedence of ours: it took place on the twenty-fourth
of September; and we were indulged with an accurate account of it,
and were present at a public reading of the record of the act, in the
chapel of our prison, previously to our removal from the metropolis.
I will not enter into a minute detail of the scene of this reading,
though the recollection will never be effaced from my memory. Of the
persons present who were destined to suffer capital punishment, eight
were women. Four of them were taken from a single family, being a
grandmother, a mother, and two daughters of the noble house of Alcala.
They had all been beautiful of person, and of a graceful figure; the
youngest of the daughters was in the nineteenth year of her age. Their
crime, together with that of the majority of their fellow-sufferers,
was obstinate and impenitent Lutheranism. The seats of the women were
separated from the rest, and fronted with a close lattice. The men
were twenty-two in number, and their appearance was truly impressive.
Their persons were neglected, and their figures emaciated; their eyes
were sunk and ghastly, and their complexions of a sallow and death-like
white. Most of them were crippled by their long confinement and the
severities they had endured, and were supported to their seats, upon
an elevated scaffolding with benches raised one above another, by two
apparators, one on each side of the condemned heretic. God of mercy
and benevolence! is it possible that this scene should be regarded
as thy triumph, and the execution destined to follow, as a sacrifice
acceptable in thy sight? If these papers of mine are ever produced to
light, may it not happen that they shall first be read by a distant
posterity, who will refuse to believe that their fathers were ever
mad enough to subject each other to so horrible a treatment, merely
because they were unable to adopt each other’s opinions? Oh, no! human
affairs, like the waves of the ocean, are merely in a state of ebb and
flow: “there is nothing new under the sun:” two centuries perhaps after
Philip the Second shall be gathered to his ancestors [he died in 1598],
men shall learn over again to persecute each other for conscience
sake; other anabaptists or levellers shall furnish pretexts for new
persecutions; other inquisitors shall arise in the most enlightened
tracts of Europe; and professors from their chair, sheltering their
intolerance under the great names of Aristotle and Cicero, shall
instruct their scholars, that a heterodox doctrine is the worst of
crimes, and that the philanthropy and purity of heart in which it is
maintained, only render its defenders the more worthy to be extirpated.
What were the ideas and reflections of my fellows, seated on the
benches above, below, and on either side of me, I am unable to affirm;
my own could not fail to be pungent and distressing. I understood
continually more and more of the mysterious and unuttered history, of
the stranger who died in the summer-house of the lake of Constance: I
found that I was only acting over again what he had experienced before
me. His legacies had served to involve me in the bitterest and most
unheard of miseries, but were wholly destitute of ability to rescue
from the evils themselves created. Unbounded wealth I found to have
no power to bribe the dastard slaves of religious bigotry; and the
elixir of immortality, though it could cure disease, and put to flight
the approaches of age, was impotent to repel the fervour of devouring
flames. I might have been happy----I was happy when the stranger found
me. I might have lived to a virtuous and venerable old age, and have
died in the arms of my posterity. The stranger had given me wealth, and
I was now poorer than the peasant who wanders amidst polar snows. The
stranger had given me immortality, and in a few days I was to expire in
excruciating tortures. He found me tranquil, contented, in the midst
of simple, yet inestimable pleasures; he breathed into me the restless
sentiment of ambition; and it was that sentiment which at length
had placed me on high in the chapel of the prison of the Catholic
Inquisition.
Our progress to Valladolid was slow and solemn, and occupied a space of
no less than four days. On the evening of the fourth day we approached
that city. The king and his court came out to meet us. He saluted
the inquisitor general with all the demonstrations of the deepest
submission and humility; and then, having yielded him the place of
honour, turned round his horse, and accompanied us to Valladolid. The
cavalcade that attended the king broke into two files, and received us
in the midst of them. The whole city seemed to empty itself on this
memorable occasion; and the multitudes that crowded along the road,
and were scattered in the neighbouring fields, were innumerable. The
day was now closed; and the procession went forward amidst the light
of a thousand torches. We, the condemned of the inquisition, had been
conducted from the metropolis upon tumbrils; but, as we arrived at the
gates of Valladolid, we were commanded, for the greater humiliation, to
alight and proceed on foot to the place of our confinement, as many as
could not walk without assistance being supported by the attendants. We
were neither chained nor bound; the practice of the inquisition being
to deliver the condemned upon such occasions into the hands of two
sureties each, who placed their charge in the middle between them; and
men of the most respectable characters were accustomed from religious
motives to sue for this melancholy office.
Dejected and despairing I entered the streets of the city, no object
present to the eyes of my mind but that of my approaching execution.
The crowd was vast; the confusion inexpressible. As we passed by the
end of a narrow lane, the horse of one of the guards who rode exactly
in a line with me, plunged and reared in a violent manner, and at
length threw his rider upon the pavement. Others of the horse-guards
attempted to catch the bridle of the enraged animal. They rushed
against each other. Several of the crowd were thrown down, and trampled
under the horses’ feet. The shrieks of these, and the loud cries and
exclamations of the bystanders, mingled in confused and discordant
chorus. No sound, no object could be distinguished. From the excess
of the tumult a sudden thought darted into my mind, where all, an
instant before, had been relaxation and despair. Two or three of the
horses pushed forward in a particular direction. A moment after they
resiled with equal violence, and left a wide, but transitory gap. My
project was no sooner conceived than executed. Weak as I had just now
felt myself, a supernatural tide of strength seemed to come over me. I
sprung away with all imaginable impetuosity, and rushed down the lane
I have just mentioned. Every one amidst the confusion was attentive to
his personal safety, and several minutes elapsed before I was missed.