three years from 1564 to 1567 the Inquisition at Rome passed III sentences on heretics.

231. History continued.-Philip III. of Spain was early taught the power of the Inquisition; for when, at the beginning of his reign, he was obliged to be present at an auto-da-fé, and could not restrain his tears at seeing two young women, one Jewish and the other Moorish, burnt at the stake, for no other fault than that of having been brought up in the different creeds of their fathers, the Inquisitors imputed to him his compassion as a crime, which could only be expiated by blood: the king had to submit to being bled and seeing his blood burnt by the executioner. The Inquisitors, in fact, were above the king. At autos-da-fé the Grand Inquisitor's throne was more lofty than that of the king. The Inquisitor Tabera kept the arch-priest of Malaga for two years in prison, because that ecclesiastic, whilst carrying the viaticum to a dying person, had not stopped to let the Inquisitor pass.

Philip IV. inaugurated his reign by an auto-da-fé (1632). The Inquisitor-General gave to the show of the auto-da-fé, whose interest began to decline, a new zest by causing the sentence of death against ten marranos to be read to them, while each of them had one hand nailed to a wooden cross.

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The marriage of Charles II. with the niece of Louis XIV. (1680) was celebrated with an auto-da-fé at Madrid. On the 12th April 1869 some workmen, employed in digging up the earth in the chief square of Madrid, came upon a layer of coals and ashes, mixed with bones, which proved to be human bones; moreover, iron collars and other things were found, which left no doubt that the spot had been the scene of the auto-da-fé of 1680, a full account of which was published, by express desire of the king and of the Grand Inquisitor, Valladares, to the honour and glory of Spain," by Joseph del Olmo, who was one of the familiars of the Inquisition. This autode-fé was even a grander affair than that of 1632. There were 118 victims, one-and-twenty of whom were burnt alive in the presence of the young king and queen and the nobility of the court, besides a vast concourse of less exalted spectators. On the previous day the wood-cutters, to the number of 290, had defiled before the royal palace, every one with a log of wood on his shoulder. Their leader stopped at the gate of the palace, where a duke was in waiting to receive the log, which he reverently carried up to the king, who took it from him, carried it to the boudoir of the queen, placed the piece of wood, on which two days after a human being was to be

burnt alive, into her arms, like a baby; he then gave it back to his grace, my lord duke, and, according to the instructions he had received from his father-confessor, the Don Estevan del Vado, Inquisitor of Toledo, sent word to the captain of the wood-cutters, that on the auto-da-fé this log was to be thrown into the flames in the name of the king. On the day of the auto-da-fé the show was not over till half-past nine at night; and, says Del Olmo, "The public went away highly pleased, especially with the conduct of the king, who had stood the heat of the day, and shown that he was not at all weary."

232. Reflections.-Is it possible to realise the horrors of this transaction-a man brought up in the principles of chivalry, and a woman of royal birth, whom one would suppose to be not only noble, but also gentle, witnessing, on their wedding-day, when one would imagine their hearts to be full of joy, and therefore full of good-will towards all men, and especially their subjects, so cruel a spectacle as the burning alive of human beings, burnt, so to say, in their honour? But here we see the effects of evil church government and priestly influence. When the mania of burning every old woman who had a black cat, as a witch, arose, the Inquisition found a new field of labour; and whatever might be the density of mental darkness with which priests and monks covered Europe, they took care there should be plenty of material light, and hence the funeral pyres of human reason and liberty were always blazing. Some of the Molinists, who, under pretext of "Perfect Contemplation," encouraged the most scandalous sexual excesses, were also burnt, not on account of their immoral practices, but because of some so-called heretical notions they propounded.

Under the succeeding kings of Spain general enlightenment and civilisation had made too much progress to allow the Inquisitors to indulge as formerly their frantic rage and fanatical cruelty. During the reign of Ferdinand VI., Charles III., and Charles IV., they obtained only 245 condemnations, of which fourteen were to death. Freemasons and Jansenists were the principal victims. One of the

vilest acts of the Inquisition during the reign of Charles III. was the imprisonment, on the charge of heresy, in 1778, of Count Olivades, the founder of La Carolina, the central city of the Sierra Morena colony, and of other highly beneficial institutions to Spain. His friends enabled him, in 1780, to make his escape to Venice.

233. Abolition of the Inquisition.-Napoleon, on the 4th December 1808, whilst encamped at the village of Chamartin,

a short distance from Madrid, summoned the authorities of Madrid to surrender. The Grand Inquisitor refused. Napoleon wrote on a piece of paper: "The Inquisitors are to be made prisoners. The Holy Office has ceased to exist. Its revenues are confiscated." Colonel Lumanuski, acting under the immediate orders of Marshal Soult, was sent to seize the palace of the Inquisition at Madrid. The building was surrounded by a strong wall, and guarded by 400 soldiers. The Fathers were summoned to open the gates, instead of which they shot the herald. The order to attack was given immediately. The Spanish soldiers were protected by their walls, the French troops were exposed, in an open plain, to their fire, and had no ladders. Some trees were cut down, turned into battering-rams, and soon a breach was made in the wall, through which the French entered the building. Then the priests left their cells, pretending to be surprised at the garrison having offered any resistance to their friends, the French! But Lumanuski, not to be deceived, ordered them to be closely guarded; the soldiers were all made prisoners. The French then examined the building; they found splendid halls and rooms, but no prisons, torture rooms, or any of the horrors usually associated with the dread tribunal. Lumanuski was about to retire, when Colonel di Lilla suggested that the marble floor of the ground floor should have water poured on it, to see if it would flow off anywhere. Speedily it was seen to disappear through a crack between two slabs of marble. In trying to raise one of the slabs a soldier touched a hidden spring, and the slab rose up, revealing a staircase, descending which the French first came to a large hall, the judgment hall, with appropriate furniture; then they discovered a number of cells, in some of which bodies of men, in various states of decay, were found-prisoners who had been left to die in solitary confinement. In others they found prisoners still alive, men, women, and children, all perfectly naked, and numbering about one hundred persons. These, of course, were clothed, the soldiers giving them their cloaks or coats, and restored to liberty. All the cells having been visited, the French next came upon the torture chambers, containing all the diabolical instruments invented for racking human bodies. At this sight the fury of the French soldiers was not to be restrained; they declared that the holy fathers should themselves undergo the tortures they had inflicted on their victims; and Lumanuski states that he saw the torture applied in four different ways on as many of the Inquisitorial

fiends—a very slight retribution for all the evil they had done.

234. Restoration and Final Abolition.-But Ferdinand VII. on his restoration-alas! with the help of England-in 1814, re-established the Inquisition, and appointed Francis Thiéry Campilla, Bishop of Almeria, its forty-fifth InquisitorGeneral. Immediately the prisons, galleys, and penal colonies were filled with prisoners, Freemasons forming a preponderating number amongst them. But in 1820 all the Spanish provinces combined again in a general insurrection, broke the bonds of Absolutism, again crushed the Inquisition and its familiars, set free its prisoners, demolished its palaces and prisons, and burnt its instruments of torture. But in 1823 a fresh reaction set in; French troops, led by the Duke of Angoulême, restored Ferdinand VII. to the throne, and the king, at the "earnest desire of his subjects," set up the Inquisition once more; and "if the Spanish nation was anxious for its restoration," as Dr. Brück, the apologist of Absolutism, both political and priestly, in his "History of the Secret Societies of Spain" observes, "it is a proof that this tribunal was neither cruel nor unpopular." But the tribunal was unpopular, and the feeling was so strongly expressed, that the English ambassador, Sir Henry Wellesley, siding with the nation, threatened to leave Spain if the Inquisition were re-established with all its former authority. But though shorn of its once absolute power, the institution was still strong enough to send people to the scaffold: in 1826 it burnt a Jew; and a schoolmaster, accused of Quakerism, was hanged at Valencia on the 31st July of the same year. True, the last victim did not wear the san benito, but his own clothes; the Inquisitors could no longer render their prisoners ridiculous; and the barefooted Carmelite friar, who accompanied the Quaker, could not, even at the last moment, win him for the heaven he promised him if he recanted. The Quaker died impenitent.

The Inquisition still exists in Portugal, though in a modified form. It also still exists at Rome: its palace stands to the left of St. Peter's, but its dungeons are empty, and the once murderous Inquisition is now merely a tribunal of clerical discipline.

235. The False Nuncio.-I have in the foregoing account spoken of the Inquisition chiefly as it existed in Spain. It was, however, not confined to that country; its fearful octopus arms embraced every nation it could reach. The way it was introduced into Portugal was peculiar, and worthy

of that tribunal. In 1539 there appeared at Lisbon a papal legate, who declared to have come to Portugal, there to establish the Inquisition. He brought the king letters from Pope Paul III., and produced the most ample credentials for nominating a Grand Inquisitor and all other officers of the sacred tribunal. This man was a clever swindler, called John Perés, of Saavedra, who was an adept at imitating all kinds of writing and forging signatures and seals. He was attended by a magnificent train of more than a hundred servants, and to defray his expenses had borrowed at Seville enormous sums in the name of the Apostolic Chamber at Rome. The king was at first surprised and angry that the Pope should send an envoy of this description without previous notice, but Perés haughtily replied, that in so urgent a matter as the establishment of the Inquisition and the suppression of heresy the Holy Father could not stand on points; and that the king was highly honoured by the fact that the first messenger who brought him the news was the legate himself. The king dared complain no more; and the false nuncio the same day nominated a Grand Inquisitor, set up the Holy Office, and collected money for its working expenses. Before news could come from Rome, the rogue had already pocketed upwards of two hundred thousand ducats. But he could not make his escape before the swindle was discovered, and Perés was condemned to be whipped and sent to the galleys for ten years. But the best of the joke was, that the Pope confirmed all the swindler had done; in the plentitude of his divine power, Paul III. declared the slight irregularities which attended the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition not to affect its efficacy or moral character, and that, now it was established, it should remain so.

236. The Inquisition in various Countries.-Other countries where the Inquisition was established were the Spanish Netherlands, the Spanish colonies in America, in the East Indies, the Papal States, Venice, Germany, where for some time it raged with particular ferocity; the Dominican fiends had scarcely been three years at Strasbourg when they burnt eighty Waldenses, and the demon, Konrad von Marburg, travelled up and down the country burning heretics with diabolical joy. He met with a well-merited reward by being killed by Count Sayn, near Marburg. In some of the countries named above the Inquisition was abolished before it ceased to exist in Spain and Italy. In 1557 an attempt was made to introduce the Inquisition into England, but, fortunately for this country, unsuccessfully. But, even without its help, Bloody