ho had
established the institution. After the procession came the rabble. When
all had reached the neighborhood of the scaffold, and had been arranged
in order, a sermon was preached to the assembled multitude. It was filled
with laudations of the inquisition, and with blasphemous revilings
against the condemned prisoners. Then the sentences were read to the
individual victims. Then the clergy chanted the fifty-first psalm, the
whole vast throng uniting in one tremendous miserere. If a priest
happened to be among the culprits, he was now stripped of the canonicals
which he had hitherto worn; while his hands, lips, and shaven crown were
scraped with a bit of glass, by which process the oil of his consecration
was supposed to be removed. He was then thrown into the common herd.
Those of the prisoners who were reconciled, and those whose execution was
not yet appointed, were now separated from the others. The rest were
compelled to mount a scaffold, where the executioner stood ready to
conduct them to the fire. The inquisitors then delivered them into his
hands, with an ironical request that he would deal with them tenderly,
and without blood-letting or injury. Those who remained steadfast to the
last were then burned at the stake; they who in the last extremity
renounced their faith were strangled before being thrown into the flames.
Such was the Spanish inquisition--technically--so called: It was,
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." It was a tribunal superior to all human law, without appeal, and
certainly owing no allegiance to the powers of earth or heaven. No rank,
high or humble, was safe from its jurisdiction. The royal family were not
sacred, nor, the pauper's hovel. Even death afforded no protection. The
holy office invaded the prince in his palace and the beggar in his
shroud. The corpses of dead heretics were mutilated and burned. The
inquisitors preyed upon carcases and rifled graves. A gorgeous festival
of the holy office had, as we have seen, welcomed Philip to his native
land. The news of these tremendous autos-da fe, in which so many
illustrious victims had been sacrificed before their sovereign's eyes,
had reached the Netherlands almost simultaneously with the bulls creating
the new bishoprics in the provinces. It was not