Sancho’s Dream – the Story of a Nightmare
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By feeding
him in the course of many years a great number of romances of chivalry
and adventure, Sancho Panza
succeeded in diverting from himself his demon, whom he later called Don
Quixote. This demon thereupon set out on the maddest exploits. A free
man, Sancho Panza
philosophically followed Don Quixote on
his crusades and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the
end of his days.
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Franz Kafka
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It is
a little known fact. One of the best lovedbest loved
novels, in fact the mother of all European novels and the father
of literary escapism, was
published under the explicit patronage
of the Spanish Inquisition
Inquisition. In 1608, Don
Bernardo de
Sandoval y Rojas (1546 – 1618), Archbishop of
Toledo, Primate of Spain and
President of the Supreme Council of the
Inquisition, not only prevented the Holy Office from intervening
against
the publication of the 2nd edition
of the Don Quixote, he also
provided
the author with a small pension, virtually the only regular income
Cervantes would
receive in his
final years.
The
Grand Inquisitor did not lend his support entirely out of
human
kindness. Already in 1553, Emperor Charles V had prohibited by
law the
shipping of chivalrous romances into the Americas; five years later the
Cortes
of Castile followed suit for Spain itself and threatened to penalize
any
publication of books of chivalry. With approval, the legislator noted
the
long-standing attack of scholars, preachers and mystics against the
uncounted
adaptations in the vein of Amadis de Gaul.
Yet even among the Spanish grandees many continued to keep this kind of
literature in vogue, and were just as ardent readers as the innkeeper
in the
first part of Cervantes’ novel. After fifty years of dissolutely
prosecuting
novels of knight-errantry, Juan de Silva thought it still worthwhile to
publish
his Don Policisne
de Beocia in 1602. The book was placed
on the
index of forbidden books within days. Three years later appeared the
first part
of the Don Quixote, apparently a
satire on the chivalrous romance, of which the reprint was to receive
explicit
approbation by the highest authority. Hardly a coincidence! De Silva’s
book was
to remain the last of its kind, but the Don
Quixote was not the cause of it. In other
words, Cervantes’ publication
appeared to be
strictly toeing the line of existing law. The satirical gripe was
more
than a frivolous ploy of the author. Yet notice the curate’s defense of
some of
the forbidden books in Part 1, Chapter VI. The Amadis of
Gaul is given a stay of execution, the Palmin of England honorably exiled
to the
upper bookshelf and the curate even praises the History of
the famous Knight Tirante el
Blanco as “a treasury of enjoyment
and a mine of recreation.” Either the chief inquisitor of Spain –
obviously an intelligent man – was in a generous mood, or he already
considered the whole affair as a nonissue, and was willing to overlook
the faux
pas.
Cervantes
himself had a way of referring to his novelistic endeavor with
condescension,
almost negligence; his ambition was to be a playwright, a reformer of
the
stage. So it is not entirely beyond conjecture, that the Don
Quixote might have been started as commissioned work. The
task fell on Cervantes, not only because he was inexpensive.
Cervantes
had every
reason to tread with care. The Inquisition had set her sight on him
since the
year 1580. As
“a soldier for many years and a prisoner
of war for six and a half years, which has taught him patience, if
nothing else” (Cervantes, Exemplary Novellas), Cervantes
was subjected to an inquiry after his return. The capture had occurred in 1575, when he and his
brother embarked on the galley “El Sol.” Pirates boarded the ship and
the
brothers were held for ransom in Algiers. Rodrigo was ransomed in 1577
while
Miguel spent another three years in the slave pens until his family
could raise
500 escudos. He returned to Madrid to a life in poverty and trumped up
accusations in the
typical
fashion of the Inquisition: assuming guilt
before proven innocent.
Cervantes
would not have
been the first prisoner of war, who after years of
imprisonment might have fallen from
the true faith and converted to
Islam.
The name of
the turd framing the
accusation
– Blanco de
Paz
– is still a matter of record. Cervantes was
forced to produce an
elaborate deposition with testimonies of eleven of his fellow
prisoners. Fortunately
he was not arrested.
If
an inquisitor wanted
to have more than just a word with you, masked men would force
entrance into your house, in the dead of night when the
streets are
still, pull a hood over your head and drag you from your bedchamber to
the
dungeons for an interrogation behind closed doors and without
witnesses. You
simply disappeared from public sight, keeping your family in the dark
about
your whereabouts, sometimes for years. The procedure was calculated to
create a
pervasive climate of anxiety and mutual incrimination in the community.
A bench
of clerics executed decrees without appeal, owing neither allegiance
nor
accountability to the secular authorities. The charge, invariably, was
heresy,
and the terms of this accusation were invented and framed by the
Inquisition.
Arresting on suspicion, torturing till confession, and punishing by
fire, the
Inquisition scrutinized and condemned what was on your mind, not what
you did.
Every
testimony was
kept strictly confidential; two witnesses, even if testifying to
separate
facts, were sufficient to summon you as a suspect. Every
discrepancy in the witness
statements was conferred to a separate charge, thus
multiplying
the indictments. In the initial stages of an interrogation you
were not
even informed of the accusation.
All
this was in glaring violation of secular law. The penal codes of the
period
gave the defendant the right to council, burdened the prosecuting party
with
the task of collecting proof, and excluded witnesses whose impartiality
was
doubtful. It also required that the denouncer confronted the defendant.
There
was still no such thing as a public prosecutor. Instead, the judge
presided
over the trial as the representative of the sovereign. No testimony
from
criminals and people openly hostile to the defendant was admissible and
there was a right of appeal. A proven miscarriage of justice
could
lead to charges, even a murder charge
against
the judge himself. Under the influence of the Inquisition, this was
about
to change!
Accusations
were admitted
without limitation, anonymous as well as signed. A secretary
took
down the testimony and after reading it back had it confirmed. Council
was
permitted but the parties not allowed to confer. The defendant's
nominal advocate
was not permitted to communicate with the prisoner, and was furnished
neither
with documents nor with power to procure evidence, a mere puppet,
aggravating
the evident lawlessness of the proceedings by the mockery of legal
forms.
A
prisoner persisting in
the avowal of his innocence was finally informed of the testimony
against him,
but never confronted with the witnesses, nor told their names. The
accuser
might be his son, father, or the wife, for all were enjoined, under
penalty of
death, to inform the inquisitors of every suspicious word which might
fall from
their nearest relatives. Since the 2nd of August 1483,
edicts were
published annually on the first two Sundays of Lent, enjoining as
sacred duty
to everybody to report on people suspected of heresy. The clergy was
instructed
to refuse absolution to everybody
hesitating to comply, even if the suspected person
might stand in the relation of parent, child, husband or wife. No
wonder
the Inquisition
seemed
omniscient, since the whole country was infested with “venomous familiars
who glided through every chamber and coiled themselves at every fireside.” The Holy Office knew the “secret details of
each household in the realm,”
says a former functionary of the Inquisition, and “no
infidel or heretic could escape discovery” (Juan Antonio Llorente, 1756 – 1823). The sudden
hush when a
stranger listens into the conversation became habitual.
If
you failed to be
forthcoming, the
interrogator would show you the instruments
of torture
and then
lock you away to think it over. Sparingly supplied with food, forbidden
to
speak or even to sing, you were left to stew in your own juices until
deemed
ready to be examined. Nicolau Aymerich (1320 – 1399) was the
Inquisitor
General
of the Inquisition of the Crown of Aragon. In his manual he instructed the interrogator
"to introduce to the prisoner some one of his accomplices,
or any
other converted heretic, who shall feign that he still persists in his
heresy,
telling him that he had abjured for the sole purpose of escaping
punishment, by
deceiving the inquisitors. Having thus gained his confidence, he shall
go into
his cell some day after dinner, and, keeping up the conversation till
night,
shall remain with him under pretext of its being too late for him to
return home.
He shall then urge the prisoner to tell him the particulars of his past
life,
having first told him the whole of his own; and in the meantime spies
shall be
kept in hearing at the door, as well as a notary, in order to certify
what may
be said within." If the result still was not to
the inquisitor's
satisfaction they moved on to the
rack, the rope and the pulley. Torture
took place at midnight, in the light of torches.
The
prisoner – man,
matron, and virgin – was stripped naked and stretched upon the wooden
bench. Water, weights, fires, pulleys and screws were applied to strain
the
sinews without cracking, crack the bones without breaking them, and
rack the
body short of dying. Splinters of wood were driven underneath the
fingernails
and the metatarsals crushed in iron contraptions, the notorious
"Spanish
boots." The executioner was enveloped in a black robe from head to
foot,
with his eyes glaring through the holes in his hood.
The
period during which torture might be inflicted was unlimited in
duration. It
could only be terminated by a confession, making the scaffold a refuge
from the
rack. King Philip II was not one of the squeamish by any account, yet
even he attempted to curb the use of torture by
strictly
prohibiting the repeated use on the same charge. The inquisitors
sidestepped the decree by pretending, after the first infliction, that
the
procedure was merely suspended, not terminated. We
know of individuals who have borne torture and dungeon for many years.
On
August 22, 1559, the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé
Carranza, was arrested on suspicion of being a Lutheran sympathizer. He
was a popular cleric; six years after his disappearance his
parishioners continued asking questions. The Inquisition hustled the
prisoner to another country and to a more discrete setting for the
tribunal. The prisoner died of exhaustion before he could be convicted,
in 1566.
And
should
you, after months and sometimes years of interrogation, be fortunate
enough to
be offered a
release,
there was still no formal repeal of the charges. At the release you
were to
sign a waver
never to divulge anything of what had happened to you. We still have
examples
of such wavers. Apologetic historians
record these as
"acquittals."
Throughout
your imprisonment the interrogator would impress on you to
“recant,” initially without telling you what it is you were supposed to
denounce. After months of neglect and duress, with no communication to
the
world on the other side of the prison wall, your only option may have
seemed to
give up all hopes of proving your innocence and beg for
“reconciliation.” Yet life
for a “reconciled” was a toil under incessant supervision. The
release of Ponce Roger
stipulated to have the penitent stripped of his clothes and his priest beat
him
with rods from the gate of
the city to the door of his church, for three
Sundays in succession. With broken
bones in the feet this could be
a long
stretch. The reconciled was not to eat meat for the rest
of his
life, he had to keep three
Lents a year, and abstain
from fish, oil, and wine, for three days
in the
week. His only dress was a religious garb with
small crosses embroidered on
each side of the chest. He had to attend
mass wherever possible on every day and
vespers on Sundays and festivals. He was to recite
service twice a day and pray the pater
noster for seven times in
the morning, ten times at sunset, and
twenty times
at
midnight. All his possessions
fell to the Inquisition. The
penal provisions extended even to the family. Children from the
mother's side, and the grandchildren of the
father were
prohibited from
holding office in the Privy Council, courts
of justice, or functions in the
municipalities. The Nazis would have called it “sippenhaft.”
Failure to comply was punished with immolation as a
relapsed heretic.
Confession
was followed by execution, but death row could become a
stretch, since the number of condemned prisoners was allowed to
accumulate. The
auto-da-fe was a solemn festival. On the appointed morning, the
convicted was
attired in a yellow robe without sleeves, embroidered all over with
black
figures of demons. A large conical paper miter was placed upon your
head, with
a picture on it of a man surrounded by flames. They would prey open
your mouth
and arrest your tongue with a wooden clamp, that prevented you from
opening or
shutting your mouth. At this point a breakfast was carried in and
placed before
you, the best food you had seen for a long time. With ironical
politeness, the
executioners would urge you to satisfy your hunger. Then the gates
opened to
the public square and you were made to fall in with the procession,
headed by
school children. Behind you and your fellow convicts came the
magistrates and
nobility, the prelates and dignitaries of the Church. The inquisitors
and their
staff followed on horseback, with the blood-red flag of the "sacred
office" waving above them. After reaching the scaffold a sermon was
preached to the assembled multitude. Then the sentences were read out
individually to the convicts. The clergy would chant the 51st psalm,
the whole
throng uniting in the Miserere. If a priest happened to be among the
culprits,
he was stripped of the canonicals only now, and in plain sight, while
his
hands, lips, and shaven head were scraped with a bit of glass: it was
supposed
to remove the oil of consecration. Up to this point the reconciled had
been
joining the procession of the convicted and were now permitted to step
aside.
For
you this was the signal to mount the scaffold, where the executioner
was standing ready to tie you up and kindle the fire. While you were
climbing over the pile of firewood, the inquisitor formally delivered
you into the executioner’s hands with the ironic request “to
deal with you
tenderly, and without bloodletting or injury.” If you were one of
the steadfast,
you received a slow
roasting on green faggots, a "sweet
savor to the Lord" (Exodus
29:18; Ezekiel. 20:41).
If you renounced in this last extremity and kissed the crucifix – but
how
are you supposed to do that with this gag in your mouth – they
mercifully
strangled you before throwing you on the flames. Recanting without the
kiss earned
you a layer of dry, more quickly burning wood under your feet. Such was
the
Spanish Inquisition, according to the biographer of Philip the Second,
a
"heavenly remedy, a guardian angel
of Paradise, a lions' den in which Daniel and other just men could
sustain no
injury, but in which perverse sinners were torn to pieces" (Luis Cabrera
de Córdoba, 1559 – 1623, Felipe II Rey de España,
1619). Even
the
cemeteries offered no refuge. The inquisitors rifled the graves for the
remains
of dead heretics. The corpses were exhumed, mutilated and burned,
sometimes in
effigy, when the digging unearthed only a pile of dirt. And
yet, even in our day and age, one can still hear certain “historians”
defend as
"due process" and “cutting edge of the law”
the sinister
machinery of an institution, that, if it still had the power, would
abolish their
privilege of free speech first thing. Due process? The process is the
atrocity!
Cutting edge indeed!
By carefully
misdirecting our attention to periods where comparably few had actually
been
burned and not even so much as mention the years that would spoil these
statistics, such “experts” want us to believe that the scandal lies
only in the
numbers and not in the miscarriage of justice. I even have read the
claim that
altogether only two people ever had been burned.
A
common misunderstanding is to think of the Inquisition as a strictly
centralized organization. It was more of a two-tear system, resting on
the
Episcopal Inquisitions with a local bishop as the head inquisitor in
his own
see. This goes back a long way. Then, in 1233, Pope
Gregory IX
issued the founding charter of the papal inquisition,
putting
its execution exclusively into the hands of the Dominican order.
The
money to run the operation was to be taken from the victims’
confiscated property,
a strong motive to establish “guilt” in every conceivable way. The
tribunal was
introduced first in France to persecute the Albigensians
and successively adopted in Italy and Germany. Additional
provisions were
framed on the synod of Tarragona and in Aragon in 1242.
If a city in France
or Germany had the misfortune to draw on itself the Inquisition's
unwanted
attention, a sizable train of people would knock at the gate: investigators,
notaries, secretaries, scribes and the enforcers: soldiers,
bailiffs,
prison guards. The newcomers would establish headquarters in a public
building
and proclaim a "day of grace." Those who reported during this period,
could not be punished with death, prison, or loss of property, but still
be penalized, while their
testimonies
would weave the net of suspicion. The dubious legality of the
operation
was immediately noted. A local nobleman complained to the
Pope about
“interrogating
witnesses behind closed doors, refusing legal assistance, putting the
dead on
trial and spreading such fear that the terrified citizens denounce the
innocent. The
inquisitors upset the country,
and because of their abuses the population is turning against the
monks and clerics" (Count Raymond, 1234). The
situation was rife with frictions between the local inquisitions and
Rome.
Thomas de
Torquemada was the son of a converted Jewish mother. He became the Spanish
Inquisition's
Heinrich Himmler. The similarities are more than superficial. The same
anal
retentive nature of a micromanaging bureaucrat, the same hypochondria,
the same
foxy superstition – only in
Torquemada's case it was not about Valkyries and "lebensborn," but
transubstantiation and reliquaries
– both were well educated and of a strict catholic
upbringing and both held the same racist prejudice of “limpizza de sangre:”
pure blood. Both
shared the
same disregard for human life and the same
cowardice in the face of real danger.
Torquemada did not
always please his superiors in Rome and was repeatedly arraigned
by the pope to
account for his actions.
Wisely,
Torquemada
decided not to
show and instead sent his delegates. Pope
Alexander VI was a compulsive
serial killer with a nasty habit of mixing poison into the food
of his
guests and then confiscate their
properties; he sired 61 children
and lived in incest with his oldest daughter.
His son became the prototype for
Machiavelli’s Prince. In 1494 this
pope appointed
four coadjutors to look over Torquemada's shoulder. By then
Torquemada
had advanced to the position of Grand Inquisitor of Castile and Aragon
and delegated his
inquisitorial
faculties to other inquisitors of his own choosing, assuming
authority over appeals originally made to
the Holy See. He set
up
tribunals at
Valladolid, Seville, Jaen, Avila, Cordova, and Villarreal, and, in
1484, at
Saragossa. He instituted a High Council, consisting of five members,
whose
chief duty was to assist him in the hearing of appeals. During the
eight years
of Torquemada's tenure at the tribunal of Toledo, no less
than 10,220 people were convicted and burnt, 6860
burnt in effigy, and 97,321 of
the accused were "reconciled" – we know by now what
this really means. The figure gives
an idea of the orphaned
families’ misery after the Inquisition had
confiscated all their
property.
Nevertheless,
many
of the
reconciled were afterwards sentenced as relapsed and immolated
as well.
Not
surprising, Emperor Charles
V began to appreciate the value of the Inquisition as a means to secure
his
grip on his extended possessions. The Habsburgs were an incestuous and
degenerate
lot wielding their authority like a New York mobster. It was not beyond
these
“aristocrats” of the bluest blood to write out a contract on their
opponents.
King Phillip II, a small-minded bureaucrat by nature, was stupid enough
to
leave a paper trail connecting him with the assassinations of Floris of Montigny
and Prince
William of Orange. First cousin marriages kept their gains within the
family
and gradually the Habsburgs managed to impose their protection racket
virtually
on every European principality with only the dynasties in France and
England
begging to differ.
In
1522, Charles V
appointed Francis van der Hulst
as Inquisitor-General of the Netherlands with the full authority to
cite,
arrest, imprison and torture heretics and to have his sentences
executed
without appeal, although at this point his authority was not yet
superseding
those exercised by the bishops in their own dioceses. Only two years
later the
Emperor demoted Van der Hulst
from his office on charges of fraud and in 1525 left it
to Pope
Clement VII, another of the Emperor’s ill chosen creatures, to appoint Buedens, Houseau
and Coppin as the
successors of Van der Hulst.
In 1531, Ruard Tapper and Michael Drutius
replaced the deceased Coppin. By 1545, the
papal
inquisitors became entirely independent of the Episcopal Inquisition
even acquired
jurisdiction over bishops and archbishops, arresting
and
imprisoning them with impunity.
The
inquisitors also
exercised the privilege of appointing deputies of their own choosing.
The most
notorious among these deputies were Barbier,
De
Monte, Titelmann, Fabry, Campo de Zon,
and Stryen. They had authority “to
summon all subjects of his Majesty, whatever their rank, quality, or
station, and to compel them to give evidence, or to communicate
suspicions.”
A refusal to provide such deposition carried the death penalty. The
imperial
edict from April 26, 1550, instructed the presidents, judges, sheriffs,
and all
other judicial and executive officers to render all possible assistance
to “the inquisitors and their familiars in their
holy and pious inquisition, whenever required to do so,” by
arresting and
detaining every person suspected of heresy, “notwithstanding
of privileges or
charters to the contrary.” In short, the inquisitors were not
subject
to the civil authority, but the civil authority to them. The imperial
edict
empowered them "to chastise,
degrade, denounce, and then deliver heretics to the secular judges for
punishment; to imprison and make arrests without ordinary warrant, but
merely
with notice given to a single counselor, who was obliged to give
sentence
according to their desire, without application to the ordinary judge."
Everywhere
functionaries of
the inquisition traveled the land, alone or accompanied by a notary,
and collected
written information concerning every person in the district, whether
merely
"infected or vehemently suspected"
of heresy. Whenever the inquisitor was satisfied of your heresy, he was
to
order your detention by the local judge. A judge refusing to comply
made himself
an accessory to heresy. If you were suspected but not convicted, the
inquisitor
could proceed with your chastisement at "the discretion of
a counselor or some other expert." Should the
suspect be a man of the cloth, the inquisitor was to deal with him
summarily
"without noise or form in the
process.” In conclusion, the Emperor ordered the "inquisitors
to make it known that they were not doing their own work,
but that of Christ, and to persuade all persons of this fact."
These
instructions were renewed and confirmed by Philip II on November 28,
1555.
Nevertheless,
despite all
this administrative muscle and solemn spectacle, the Inquisition would
hardly
have been able to sustain her stranglehold without the victims’
psychological
disposition to yield.
Peter
Titelmann executed his function as inquisitor in Flanders, Douay,
and Tournay, the most thriving and populous portions of the
Netherlands. The
chronicles depict him as some grotesque goblin, traveling the country
by night and
day, most of the time alone, on horseback, dragging suspects away from
their
families, and imprisoning, arresting, torturing, strangling, burning
them, with
hardly the shadow of a warrant, information, or process. There was a
kind of
grim humor about the man. When asked how he could "venture
to go about alone, or at most with an attendant or two,
arresting people on every side,” he answered that he had nothing to
fear,
since he seized "only the innocent
and virtuous, who make no resistance, and let themselves be taken like
lambs."
When
Titelmann summoned one
of these lambs, the schoolmaster Geleyn de
Muler, of Audenarde,
before him, the man
thought he knew his rights and demanded, if he were guilty of any
crime, to be
tried before the judges of his town. "You
are to
answer to me and none other," said Titelmann, and proceeded to
catechize the prisoner and soon satisfied himself of the schoolmaster's
heresy,
commanding immediate recantation. The schoolmaster refused. "Do
you not love your wife and children?"
said Titelmann – a fair question, coming to think of it – and
then passed his sentence. The man was strangled and thrown into the
flames. Titelmann’s next victim was a
Thomas Calberg,
tapestry weaver, of Tournay. He was burned alive without the mercy
strangling.
On the same occasion a fellow convict was hacked to death with seven
blows of a
rusty sword. His wife was made to watch it. Taken by a seizure, she
died on the spot. Her cousin Walter Kapell was the next to follow. He
was a man of some property, and the poor loved him
for his generous
charity. During Kapell’s slow death, there
was
commotion and outcries. With the words, "ye are bloody
murderers; that man has done no wrong; but has given me
bread to eat," one of these people rushed forward and threw himself
headlong into the flames, to be rescued by the officers only with
difficulty. Two
days later, the same man, still badly burned, carried on his shoulders
Walter Kapell’s
charred corpse from the place of execution to the townhall, where the
magistrates were sitting in session. With his load forcing his way into
their
presence he
cried: "There, you animals! Ye have
eaten his flesh, now eat his bones!" It has not been recorded what
became of him afterwards.
A
velvet manufacturer, Bertrand le Blas was condemned for heresy, chained
to a piece of fence and dragged to the marketplace. An iron gag closed
the
mouth while his right hand and foot were burned and twisted off between
two
red-hot irons. After tearing out his tongue by the roots the iron gag
was again
applied, because Bertrand still endeavored to call upon the name of
God. With
his limbs fastened together behind his back, he was then hooked by the
middle
of his body to an iron chain, and made to swing to and fro over a slow
fire until
he was entirely roasted. He remained conscious almost to the end. At
Bergen-op-Zoom, Simon the huckster, neglected to prostrate himself
before the
host when it was carried by in procession and was immolated the same
day. There
are multiple instances of the same offence on record, leading to the
same
punishment. In this particular incident the sheriff overseeing the
execution
was so much affected by the courage of the victim, that he went home,
became
delirious and died, "notwithstanding
the monks at his bed trying to console him.”
On
his arrival in Ryssel, in Flanders, Titelmann arrested one Robert Ogier together with his
wife and
sons. Their crime consisted in not going to mass and instead practicing
private
worship at home. When asked what rites they observed, the younger of
the two
boys said: "We fall on our knees,
and pray to God that he may enlighten our hearts, and forgive our sins.
We pray
for our sovereign, that his reign may be prosperous, and his life
peaceful. We
also pray for the magistrates and others in authority, that God may
protect and
preserve them all." The father and the older son were condemned to
burn. The following week Ogier’s wife and her youngest, too, were made
to clamber on the firewood pile and immolated before a silent crowd.
As
a farewell gift to the good people of Ryssel, Titelmann forced entry
into the house of John de Swarte, seizing him, his wife and four
children, “together with two newly-married couples, and
two other persons.” He convicted the lot of covertly reading the
Bible
and had
them immediately burned. The register of municipal expenses at Tournay, has preserved the costs of these accomplishments.
Under the entries for
June 1549 we read: "To Mr. Jacques Barra,
executioner, for having tortured, twice, Jean de Lannoy,
ten sous. To the same,
for having executed, by fire, said Lannoy,
sixty sous. For having thrown his cinders
into the river, eight sous." Men,
women, and children were burned, and
their "cinders" thrown away for not kneeling to a wafer, or for
thoughts to which they had never given utterance, but which, on
inquiry, they
were too honest to deny. There was comparatively little difficulty in
ferreting
out the "vermin," to use
the expression of a Walloon historian of that age: "To
speak without passion," he says, "the inquisition well
administered is a laudable institution, and not
less necessary than all the other offices of spirituality and
temporality
belonging both to the bishops and to the commissioners of the Roman see."
When however, at Valenciennes two popular clerics, Faveau
and Mallart, were condemned to burn in 1561, the commotion in the
streets held up their execution for almost seven months. Day and night
the
crowds
hurled threats and defiance at the authorities and through the prison
windows
encouraged the prisoners, promising to come to their rescue.
On
April 27, 1562, Faveau and Mallart were at
last taken from their jail and yanked to the marketplace, where the
stake was
waiting for them. The executioner was binding Simon Faveau
to the stake, when a woman in the crowd took off her shoe and threw it
at the
pile of firewood. This was the signal. Suddenly men in great numbers
rushed
forward and seized and scattered the burning fagots. The executioner
was
prevented from carrying out the sentence, but the guards managed to
hurtle away
the culprits back to prison.
The
magistrates discussed what to do next. The inquisitor was for putting
the prisoners to death in prison, and tossing their heads to the crowds
in the
street. The assembly had still not reached a decision, when a vast
throng of
people began approaching the prison. "You
should have seen this vile populace," says an eyewitness, "moving, pausing, recoiling, sweeping
forward, swaying to and fro like the waves of the sea when it is
agitated by
contending winds." Despite the previous exchanges of harsh
language,
the authorities had not expected such fierce demonstration. The
prisoners were
rescued, and succeeded in making their escape from the city. The day
would live
on in memory as the "day of the
ill-burned" (Journee des mau-brulez).
One of the escapees, however, Simon Faveau,
was
apprehended again and, as the chronicler cheerfully noted, was "burned well and finally" in the
same place from which he had been rescued before.
The
authorities were stumped. They just could not believe that the same
people who previously had allowed to be slaughtered like lambs would be
capable of such determined resistance. The imperial government at
Brussels responded with rage. On April 29, the regiment of the Duke of
Aerschot arrived in Valenciennes. All over town, men and women were
arrested for their actual or suspected participation in the recue of
the prisoners. The orders were clear. On May 16, the executions
commenced. The numbers of the immolated and beheaded were frightful. "Nothing was left undone by the magistrates,"
says our eyewitness, with great approbation, "which could
serve for the correction and amendment of the poor people."
(Collect.
Gerard, Histoire des choses les plus memorables qui se sent passees
en
la ville et Compte
de
Valenciennes depuis le commencement des
troubles des
Pays-Bas sons le regne de Phil. II., jusqu' a l'annee
1621.
Manuscript of the Royal Library at La Hague. Its author was a citizen
of
Valenciennes, and a personal witness of most of the events. He appears
to have
attained to a great age, as he minutely narrates, from personal
observation
many scenes, which occurred before 1566, and his work is continued till
the
year 1621. The anonymous author was a very sincere Catholic.)
© -
9/1/2008 - by michael
sympson, 5,500 words, all rights reserved