ed.
Men and women, churchmen and laymen, persons of all ranks and
professions, were hurried from their homes, and lodged in the secret
chambers of the Inquisition. Yet these could not furnish accommodations
for the number, and many were removed to the ordinary prisons, and even
to convents and private dwellings. In Seville alone eight hundred were
arrested on the first day. Fears were entertained of an attempt at
rescue, and an additional guard was stationed over the places of
confinement. The inquisitors were in the condition of a fisherman whose
cast has been so successful that the draught of fishes seems likely to
prove too heavy for his net.[437]

The arrest of one party gradually led to the detection of others.
Dragged from his solitary dungeon before the secret tribunal of the
Inquisition, alone, without counsel to aid or one friendly face to cheer
him, without knowing the name of his accuser, without being allowed to
confront the witnesses who were there to swear away his life, without
even a sight of his own process, except such garbled extracts as the
wily judges thought fit to communicate, is it strange that the unhappy
victim, in his perplexity and distress, should have been drawn into
disclosures fatal to his associates and himself? If these disclosures
were not to the mind of his judges, they had only to try the efficacy of
the torture,--the rack, the cord, and the pulley,--until, when every
joint had been wrenched from its socket, the barbarous tribunal was
compelled to suspend, not terminate, the application, from the inability
of the sufferer to endure it. Such were the dismal scenes enacted in the
name of religion, and by the ministers of religion, as well as of the
Inquisition,--scenes to which few of those who had once witnessed them,
and escaped with life, dared ever to allude. For to reveal the secrets
of the Inquisition was death.[438]

At the expiration of eighteen months from the period of the first
arrests, many of the trials had been concluded, the doom of the
prisoners was sealed, and it was thought time that the prisons should
disgorge their superfluous inmates. Valladolid was selected as the
theatre of the first _auto da fe_, both from the importance of the
capital and the presence of the court, which would thus sanction and
give greater dignity to the celebration. This event took place in May,
1559. The Regent Joanna, the young prince of the Asturias, Don Carlos,
and the principal grandee