Heart of Darkness

 

Since the 2nd of August 1483, on every Lent, the authorities made it an occasion to announce in the churches the sacred duty of informing on suspected heretics. The clergy was instructed to refuse absolution if you hesitated to comply, even if the suspected person might stand in the relation of parent, child, husband or wife. This was the source for the omniscience of the Spanish Inquisition, 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” and “no infidel or heretic could escape discovery” (Llorente, Juan Antonio, 1756 – 1823). Should suspicion fall on you, this could lead to an arrest in the dead of night, when the streets were still.

Masked men would drag you out of your bedchamber, pull a hood over your head, and hustle you to the dungeons for an interrogation behind closed doors and without witnesses. You would disappear from public sight, leaving 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. Every testimony of an informer was kept strictly confidential; every accusation remained anonymous. Even if summoned to testify, none of the witnesses was informed of the subject on whom they were to make their depositions. Instead the first question was held in general terms, “if they had ever seen or heard anything which was, or appeared, contrary to the Catholic faith, or the rights of the Inquisition.” From his personal experience, says the chronicler, he often saw “witnesses who were ignorant of the cause for their citation, recollecting circumstances entirely foreign to the subject, but the examination continued as if this was exactly the object of their subpoena. Such accidental deposition then served as a new denunciation” (Llorente). At the end of such examination the witness was always instructed to sign a waver, never to reveal details of his deposition and of the questions he had been asked.

Two such witnesses, even if testifying to separate facts, were sufficient to summon a suspect. Every discrepancy in the depositions was conferred to a separate accusation, resulting in multiple indictments. In the initial stages of your interrogation you would not know whether you were accused of anything at all, or merely summoned as a witness, not until you were arrested.

All this was in glaring violation of secular law. The charters of the period guaranteed to every burgher one kind of law, stating, “that no burgher can be arrested or held in durance, except for being charged with a crime. No one can testify but a peer. All alienation of real estate must take place in the presence of a judge. If an outsider has a complaint against a burgher, the court of law must arrange it. If either party refuses submission, they must ring the town bell and summon an assembly of all the burghers. Appeals are to be lodged with the sovereign” (Charter of Middleburg). The municipal authorities, the aldermen, bailiffs and judges, were a body of elected magistrates and of the deans of the various guilds. Before such tribunal the defendant had the right to council, the prosecuting party was burdened with the task of collecting proof. No witness of doubtful impartiality was admitted and the denouncer required to personally confronting the defendant. Testimonies of criminals and of people hostile to the defendant were inadmissible. A proven miscarriage of justice could lead to charges – even a murder charge – against the judge himself.

The Inquisition, too, permitted council, the defendant could choose from a list of approved attorneys, but the defendant's nominal advocate was barred from all communication with the prisoner, was not even told his name. He had no powers to procure evidence and as his only source of information was furnished with a paraphrased transcript without any specifics about the defendant and his circumstances. Based on this the advocate could either plead his anonymous client’s innocence or ask the tribunal’s clemency, a mockery of legal forms, aggravating the evident lawlessness of the proceedings. With no accountability to anyone, a bench of clerics arrested on suspicion, ordered torture till confession, and punished by fire. The object of their scrutiny was your mind, not your conduct. The charge, invariably, was heresy, accusing you by penalty of death of something that was entirely made up and framed by the very institution indicting you.

Should you be fortunate enough, after months of interrogation, to be offered a release without penalty, there was still no formal repeal of the charges, which would linger on in the archives for later uses. Instead you were made to sign a waver never to tell what had happened to you. We still have examples of such wavers. Apologetic historians record these as "acquittals."

A prisoner persisting in the avowal of his innocence was finally given a copy of the testimonies against him, although omitting every circumstance, which might reveal the identity of the accuser or of a witness. 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. If you still failed to be forthcoming, the interrogator would show you the instruments of torture and advise you 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 in earnest.

Nicolau Aymerich (1320 – 1399) was the Inquisitor General of Aragon. In his primer for the aspiring interrogator, he advises "to introduce to the prisoner one of his former 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. Having thus gained his confidence, he shall visit him in his cell after dinner, and under some pretext shall remain with him till night. He shall then urge the prisoner to tell him the particulars of his past life, having first told him the whole of his own; while spies behind the door listen in and a notary certifies what they overhear." 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. Enveloped in a black robe from head to foot, with his eyes glaring at you through the holes in his hood, the executioner applied water and fire, weights pulleys and screws, to strain the sinews without cracking, crack the bones without breaking, and rack the body till the joints begin to give. Splinters of wood were driven underneath the fingernails and the metatarsals crushed in iron contraptions, the notorious "Spanish boots." Initially there had been restrictions on bruising and drawing blood. Expertly flogging was applied. Soon this seemed not nearly effective enough and therefore on May 15, 1252, Pope Innocent IV made it legal to extract confessions and the betrayal of fellow transgressors on the rack and break resistance with scalding and piercing.

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 of Spain 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, pretending, 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; his parishioners continued asking questions. The Inquisition transferred the prisoner to a more convenient location where he died of ill health before he could be made to confess, in 1566.

Throughout your imprisonment the interrogator would impress on you to “recant,” without telling you what ewxactly it is you were supposed to denounce. Instead you were lured into incriminating yourself and so to provide the inquisitor with even more charges. After months without communication to the world outside, your only hope for getting out of this seemed to repent whatever you were asked to repent and beg for “reconciliation.” Yet the life of a “reconciled” was an incessant and tightly supervised toil. The stipulation for the release of Ponce Roger ordered the penitent on three Sundays in succession, to strip off his clothes for a beating with rods from the gate of the city to the door of his church. With broken bones in the feet this could become a very 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 on every day and vespers on Sundays and festivals. He was to recite service twice a day and pray the pater noster 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 emulated this practice under the term “sippenhaft.”

Confession was followed by execution, often after a long wait on death row, allowing the number of condemned prisoners to accumulate. The auto-da-fé was a solemn spectacle, of which the day would come unannounced for the prisoner. You were dressed in a yellow robe without sleeves, embroidered all over with black figures of demons and leaving the lower body uncovered. 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. 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 executioner would urge you to satisfy your hunger. A gate opened to the public square and you were made to fall in with the procession. A contingent of school children was marching in the lead, followed by you and the prisoners. Then came the magistrates, the nobility, the prelates and dignitaries of the Church with the inquisitors and their staff riding on horseback under the blood-red colors of the "Holy Office." At the scaffold the procession would come to a halt. After preaching a sermon to the assembled multitude, the sentences were read out individually. The clergy would chant the fifty-first psalm, the whole throng uniting in the Miserere: “Have mercy upon me, oh God, I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against you only (sic!), have I sinned and done this evil in your sight: behold in sin did my mother conceive me.” If a priest happened to be among the culprits, now was the time to strip him of the canonicals 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. The reconciled, joining the procession, were now permitted to step aside.

This was the signal for you to mount the scaffold, where the executioner was standing ready to tie you up and kindle the fire. While you were still climbing up, the inquisitor would formally deliver 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 clamp arresting 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. This was not merely an act of senseless vandalism. Even a posthumous sentence opened access to the deceased’s property for confiscation. And yet, one can still hear certain “historians” using terms like "due process" and “cutting edge of the law” for an institution that, if it still had the power, would abolish their privilege of free speech first thing. Due process? The process was the atrocity! Cutting edge indeed!

By carefully misdirecting our attention to periods where the actual numbers of the murdered don’t seem so impressive, and by not so much as mention the years that could spoil this impression, such “experts” want us to believe that the scandal merely lies in the figures – inflated figures as they assure us – and not in the monstrous absence of justice and cause by a vigilante operation that held state and society hostage with religious interdictions. I even read claims that altogether only two people ever had been burned.

A common misunderstanding is to think of the Inquisition as a strictly Spanish thing, a monolithic organization orchestrated from Rome. It was more of a two-tear system, founded locally on the Episcopal inquisitions, headed by the local bishops as the chief inquisitors in their own dioceses. A reliable estimate of the number of people tortured and murdered by those local tribunals would require collating records of townships and local chroniclers from every province and every obscure corner in Europe and the Americas, records that often have suffered the effects of warfare and social upheaval. In some areas, like the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, Spain and Latin America, the records are well kept and brimming with detail; in other places, like Poland and the countries further East, the records are often sketchy, or like in the Scandinavian countries a virtually still untapped source. In Holland they invented an alternative to burning at the stake. The heretic was stripped and flayed from the neck to the navel, and then swarms of bees let loose to fasten upon the bleeding flesh. 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. This did not put an end to the Episcopal inquisitions, but exploited existing facilities, and sometimes, but not always, succeeded to intervene in existing proceedings as the last resource of appeal.

The money to run the operation was to be confiscated from the victims’ property, a strong incentive to establish “guilt” in every conceivable way, especially since the bureaucratic running costs turned out to be high – apparently the monarchies were quick to express support but slow in providing funds, in fact, as in the case of the Knights Templar, considered the Inquisition as a mere means of extortion.

The papal tribunal was first introduced in France, persecuting the Albigensians and later the Knights Templar, and was successively adopted in Italy and Germany. Additional provisions were framed on the synod of Tarragona and in Aragon in 1242. If a city 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 established headquarters in a public building and proclaimed a "period of grace." Those who reported during this period could not be punished with death, prison, or loss of property, while their testimonies would weave the net of suspicion. Driven to desperation Jean Textor pleaded that he was a full-blooded Catholic sinner: "Gentlemen, listen: I am not a heretic, for I have a wife and I sleep with her, I have sons, I eat meat, and I lie and swear, and I am a faithful Christian. So don't let people say things about me, for I truly believe in God. They can accuse you as well as me, you know!" The interrogator didn't take kindly to the threat and Textor was burned alive. The dubious legality of these proceedings was immediately noted. In a letter to the pope a local nobleman complained about “interrogating witnesses behind closed doors, refusing legal assistance, putting the dead on trial and spreading such fear that the terrified citizen denounces the innocent" (Count Raymond, 1234). Guillaume Pelhisson in his Chronicle has preserved for us the memory of August 4, 1234. An old woman received in her home the Cathar's last rites, the "consolamentum." The local Bishop heard of it over dinner. Right away he and his curates went to the house of the dying woman. Called to convert, she refused. She was still breathing when the cassocked thugs transported her on her bed to the scaffold and threw her into the flames. Then the jeering clerics returned to their dinner. Yet when in May 1242 the inquisitors paid a visit to the little town of Avignonet, the designated victims refused to cooperate.

The friars Guillaume Arneaud, Etienne de St. Thibery, Raymond Scriptor and their staff, suddenly found themselves cornered in the dormitory. A group of masked men armed with axes chased them through the room, furiously hacking at defensively raised elbows. There was no escape. Years later, a local aristocrat passed around Arneaud's broken skull as a drinking cup.

In 1483 Pope Sixtus IV empowered the Inquisitor-General of Aragon, Thomas de Torquemada (1420 – 1498), to delegate his inquisitorial faculties to other Inquisitors of his own choosing and settle appeals made to the Holy See. Torquemada established 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. He convened a general assembly of Spanish inquisitors at Seville, and in 1484 presented an ordinance of twenty-eight articles for their guidance: The 6th article barred the “reconciled” from all honorable employments, article 7 asserted that voluntary confession would not exempt from the confiscation of property, the 15th article prescribed torture for denying allegations, and if the defendant recanted a confession extracted under torture, he was to be tortured again. Article 20 demanded the exhumation and burning of dead heretics and the confiscation of their property.

By now Torquemada had advanced to the position of Grand Inquisitor of Castile and Aragon. During the eight years of his tenure at the tribunal of Toledo, no less than 10,220 people were convicted and burnt in person, 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 general misery brought upon the orphaned families, whenever the Inquisition confiscated the breadwinner’s property. Torquemada had become 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 shared the same disregard for human life and the same cowardice in the face of real danger. Both were well educated and of a strict catholic upbringing and both held the same racist prejudice of “limpizza de sangre:” pure blood.

After the infamous decree in March 31, 1492, Jews refusing the baptism were forced to leave Spain or suffer death. On the walls the posters called for vigilance: "If you see that your neighbors are wearing clean and fancy clothes on Saturdays, they are Jews. If they clean their houses on Fridays and light candles earlier than usual on that night, they are Jews. If they eat unleavened bread and begin their meal with celery and lettuce during Holy Week, they are Jews. If they say prayers facing a wall, rocking back and forth, they are Jews." Many fleeing Jews were murdered en route; in 1497, by orders of King Manuel, the Portuguese seized and forcibly baptized all Jewish children under the age of fourteen. In Spain, however, there were more converted Jews than in any other country, and the frequent intermarriages resulted in an obsession with “limpizza de sangre,” pure Christian blood. Torquemada – himself the son of a converted Jewish mother – made it his mission to sniff out the Marraños: converted Jews passing themselves off as good Catholics, but secretly holding on to their own religion. Over the centuries the Marraños (originally a term of contempt meaning "swine"), developed their own form of Judaism. They celebrate only two holidays, Passover and Yom Kippur and gave up circumcision and the taboo on pork. Their secrecy has continued to this very day. In 1989, in a press interview, a Marraño said: "People keep asking why we continue to stay hidden, after all, we don't have to worry about the Inquisition hunting us now, do we? They don't understand that Marraños never feel it is safe to come out. Those of us who fled to Holland in the early 1500's, stayed hidden there for four hundred years. In 1920 they finally decided it was safe to come out into the open as Jews. Twenty years later nearly all were killed in the Holocaust."

In 1494 Torquemada began collecting evidence against two clerics of the top echelon, both known to be of Jewish descent: Bishop Don Juan Arias Davila of Segovia and Bishop Don Pedro de Aranda of Calahorra. When the pope heard of this, he appointed four coadjutors to look over Torquemada's shoulder. For Don Juan Arias Davila this came to late, he died during the preliminary interrogations. Torquemada thought to exhume and burn the corpse as a heretic, yet the pope accepted whatever gifts the son of the deceased was carrying and cleared the father’s name of all charges. Pope Alexander VI was a compulsive serial killer with a nasty habit of mixing poison into the food of his guests before confiscating their properties; he sired 61 children and he and his oldest son shared in incest the bed with his oldest daughter. This son became the model for Machiavelli’s Prince. Yet even this pope thought the mounting avalanche of petitions from Spain was a tad disturbing, and he summoned Torquemada no less than three times to Rome to answer for his actions. Each time Torquemada wisely sent his deputy Antonio Badoja to deflect the heat.

So, it should not surprise us, to see Count Charles II of Holland – better known as Emperor Charles V (1500 – 1558), King of Spain, Sicily, and Jerusalem, Duke of Milan, Emperor of Germany, autocrat and ruler of the better part of the West Indies – appreciating the value of the Inquisition as a means to secure his grip on his extended possessions, especially in the Netherlands, which were still reeling from being “dissimulated” out of the “Great Privilege,” the Dutch Magna Charter from February 11, 1477. The Habsburgs of that period were not different from a family of New York mobsters. It was not beyond such “aristocrat” of the bluest blood and with the jaw of an ass to put out a contract on his opponents. Charles’ son, King Phillip II was stupid enough to leave a paper trail connecting him with the assassinations of Floris of Montigny and Prince William of Orange (1533 – 1584) – the Dutch prototype of George Washington. Gradually the Habsburgs managed to impose their protection racket virtually on every European principality with only some electors in Germany and the House of Valois and the Tudors begging to differ. First cousin marriages kept it all in the family with the inevitable toll of mental instability and hereditary deformities. In 1522, Emperor Charles V appointed Francis van der Hulst as Inquisitor-General of the Netherlands with the full authority to subpoena, arrest, imprison and torture heretics and execute the sentences without appeal, although this authority did not yet supersede the jurisdiction of the local bishops.

Only two years later the Emperor demoted Van der Hulst 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 had acquired full jurisdiction over the Episcopal inquisition and could arrest and imprison even bishops and archbishops with impunity.

The inquisitors also exercised the privilege of appointing deputies of their own choosing. The most notorious were Barbier, De Monte, Titelmann, Fabry, Campo de Zon, and Stryen. They had authority by pain of death “to subpoena all subjects of his Majesty, whatever their rank, quality, or station, and to compel them to give evidence, or to communicate suspicions.” The imperial edict from April 26, 1550, instructed the presidents, judges, and bailiffs to render all possible assistance to “the inquisitors and their staff in their holy and pious inquisition,” and to arrest and detain 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 and deliver heretics to the secular judges for punishment, and to arrest and imprison without a warrant, by merely giving notice to a counselor, obliging him to ratify the procedure." Everywhere functionaries of the inquisition traveled the land, often alone, and collected written information whether a suspect was "infected or vehemently suspected" of heresy. Whenever the inquisitor was satisfied of your guilt, he ordered your detention by the local judge. Failing to comply made the judge an accessory to heresy. If you were suspected but not convicted, the inquisitor could inflict chastisement at "the discretion of a counselor or some other expert." Should suspicion fall on a man of the cloth, the inquisitor was to deal with him summarily "without noise or form in the process.” 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 sustained her stranglehold without cooperation of the victims.

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 a grotesque goblin, being on the road by night and day, arresting, imprisoning, torturing, strangling, and burning with hardly the shadow of a warrant, information, or process. When asked how he could "venture to go about alone, or at most with one 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."

One of these lambs, the schoolmaster Geleyn de Muler, of Audenarde, thought he knew his rights and demanded, if he were guilty of any crime, to be tried before the judges of his town. "You answer to me and none other," said Titelmann and proceeded to catechize the prisoner. Soon satisfied of the man's heresy, he commanded immediate recantation. The schoolmaster refused. "Do you not love your wife and children?" said Titelmann – a fair question, coming to think of it – and passed his sentence. The man was strangled and thrown into the flames. Titelmann’s next victim was a Thomas Calberg, a tapestry weaver of Tournay. He was burned alive without the mercy of 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 property, and the poor loved him for his charitable generosity. During Kapell’s slow death, the crowd became restless. With the words, "ye are bloody murderers; that man has done no wrong; but has given me bread to eat," a man rushed forward and threw himself headlong into the flames. The bailiffs rescued him with difficulty. Two days later, the same man, still badly burned, carried on his shoulders Walter Kapell’s charred corpse to the town hall, where the council was sitting in session. With his load forcing his way into their presence, he cried: "There, you animals! You 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 and dragged to the marketplace, chained to a piece of fence. An iron gag closed the mouth while his right hand and foot were burned and twisted off with tongs of red-hot iron. 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 then was hooked to an iron chain by the middle of his body, 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 a procession. He was immolated the same day, only one of several instances of the same offence, always leading to the same punishment. In this particular incident the bailiff 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.”

In Ryssel, in Flanders, Titelmann arrested Robert Ogier together with his wife and two sons. Their crime was not going to mass and instead worship at home in private. When asked what rites they observed, the younger of the 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 them all." The father and the older son burned the same day. The following week, Ogier’s wife and her youngest, too, clambered on the firewood pile and were burned alive before a silent crowd. Before his departure from 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 to burn for covertly reading the Bible.

The registers of municipal expenses have left us the paper trail of Titelmann’s exploits. At Tourney, under the entries for June 1549 we read: "To Mr. Jacques Barra, executioner, for torturing twice Jean de Lannoy, ten sous. To the same, for executing by fire said Lannoy, sixty sous. To the same for throwing Lannoy’s 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. To ferret out the "vermin," to use the expression of a Walloon historian, was not at all difficult: "The inquisition well administered is a laudable institution," he said, "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 promised the prisoners 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 still 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 rushed forward in great numbers and seized and scattered the already smoldering fagots. The executioner was prevented from carrying out the sentence, but the guards managed to hurtle away the culprits back to prison. The inquisitor demanded the city council to put the prisoners to death in prison and then toss their heads to the crowds in the street. The assembly was still debating what to do, when a vast throng of people approached the prison. "You should have seen this vile populace," says an eyewitness, "moving, pausing, recoiling, sweeping forward, swaying to and fro like the the sea when it is agitated by contending winds."

Despite the posturing and 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 until recently had allowed to be slaughtered like lambs, should be capable of such determined resistance. The imperial government at Brussels responded with alarm and outrage. On April 29, the regiment of the Duke of Aerschot arrived in Valenciennes. All over town, men and women were arrested for their suspected participation in the rescue of the prisoners. On May 16, the immolations and beheadings commenced. The numbers were frightful. "Nothing was left undone," says our eyewitness with approval, "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.)

© – 9/1/2009 – by michael sympson, 5,950 words, all rights reserved