CHARLES III. succeeded his brother Ferdinand on the 10th of August, 1759, and died on the 17th of November, 1788. The inquisitors-general during this reign were Don Manuel Quintano Bonifaz, archbishop of Pharsala; Don Philip Bertran, bishop of Salamanca, and Don Augustin Rubin de Cevallos, bishop of Jaen. The characters of these persons were humane, compassionate, and inclined to benevolence; qualities which caused a remarkable decrease in the number of public autos-da-fé. If the reign of Charles III. is compared with that of Philip V., his father, they appear as if they had been separated by a period of several centuries. The progress of knowledge was very rapid under this prince; even the provincial inquisitors, though the laws of the Inquisition had not been altered, adopted principles of moderation, which were unknown under the Austrian princes. It is true, that from time to time great severity was shown towards unimportant offences; but among the trials of this reign, I have seen several which were suspended, though the proofs were much more conclusive than many which were sufficient to condemn the criminal to relaxation, under Philip II.
Yet, though the system was comparatively moderate, the number of trials was still immense, because all the denunciations were received. The witnesses of the preparatory instruction were examined immediately, in order to discover some charge, which the prejudices of the age rendered serious. If out of an hundred trials which were begun ten had been concluded, the number of persons subjected to penances would have been greater than under Ferdinand V.; but the tribunal was no longer the same. Almost all the trials were suspended before the decree of arrest was issued. The denounced was sometimes induced to repair to the tribunal on the pretext of business, and then informed of the charges against him; he replied to them, and returned home, after having promised to return a second time when summoned. Sometimes the proceedings were abridged, and the criminal was only condemned to a private penance, which might be performed without the knowledge of any person but the commissary of the tribunal.
Several trials which were commenced against persons of rank, were not proceeded in after the preliminary instruction; such were those of the Marquis de Roda, minister secretary of state, of grace and justice; of the Count de Aranda, president of the Council of Castile, and captain-general of New Castile, who was afterwards ambassador to Paris, and lastly, prime-minister; of the Count de Florida Blanca, then fiscal of the Council of Castile for civil affairs, afterwards successor to the Marquis de Roda, and prime-minister; of the Count de Campomanes, fiscal for criminal affairs, and afterwards governor of the same council; of those of the Archbishops of Burgos and Saragossa, and of the Bishops of Tarazona, Albarracin, and Orihuela, who had composed the council extraordinary, in 1767, for the expulsion of the Jesuits. The trials of all these distinguished men had the same origin.
The Bishop of Cuença, Don Isidro de Carbajal y Lancaster, highly respectable from his family, which was that of the Dukes of Abrantés, and from his dignity, his irreproachable conduct, and his charity to the poor, was less acquainted with the true principles of the canonic law than zealous for the maintenance of the ecclesiastical privileges. Influenced by this motive, he was so indiscreet as to represent to the king, that the Church was persecuted in its rights, property and ministers, and drew a picture of the reign of Charles III., which would have been more applicable to that of the Emperor Julian. The king commissioned the Council of Castile to examine if the complaint was just, and to propose measures to repair the injury, if any had taken place. The two fiscals of the council both made learned replies, in which the ignorance of the bishop, and the consequences of his imprudent zeal, were exposed. These answers, and the other papers belonging to the proceedings, were printed by the king’s order, and though they were generally approved, some priests and monks, who regretted the inordinate power once possessed by the Church, denounced several propositions contained in them, as Lutheran, Calvinistic, or defended by other parties inimical to the Roman Church.
The two archbishops, and the three bishops, already mentioned, who had voted for the requisition addressed to the Pope for the expulsion of the Jesuits, were also denounced, as suspected of professing the impious doctrines of philosophism, which, it was said, they had only adopted to please the court. They were commissioned to take cognizance of several affairs relating to the Jesuits, and only accidentally spoke of the Inquisition, and expressed opinions contrary to its system. The inquisitors were all creatures of the Jesuits, without even the exception of the inquisitor-general: it is not therefore surprising that they received so many denunciations. The exclusive right possessed by the Court of Rome to try bishops, never prevented the inquisitors from secretly examining witnesses against them, because it gave them a pretence to write to the Pope, and request permission to carry on the proceedings; and though it was the custom of the holy see to transfer the trials of bishops to Rome, the Supreme Council of Spain always put forward its fiscal, in order to justify its conduct in prosecuting bishops: this was the case in the affair of Carranza.
The denunciations had not the effect expected by the enemies of the prelates, because no singular and independent proposition, opposed to true doctrine, was proved to have been advanced. In a less enlightened age, these prelates would have been exposed to great mortification from this attack; but at this time the Inquisition found it dangerous to be too severe, because the court had adopted the system of vigorously opposing all the ancient doctrines which favoured the pretensions of the ecclesiastics at the expense of the royal prerogatives; and on the occasion of the publication of some conclusions on the canonical law, which were entirely favourable to the Pope and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, a royal censor was appointed for each university, without whose approbation no conclusion could be published or maintained.
The perseverance of the government in the new system prevented the inquisitors from venturing to sentence the prelates of the extraordinary council: they however thought proper to endeavour to avert the storm, and applied to Don Fray Joachim de Eleta, the king’s confessor. This man was an ignorant Recollet, and known for his blind attachment to the Court of Rome. The prelates declared that they condemned several propositions advanced by the two fiscals in their work called An Impartial Judgment of the Monitory of Parma, which was written by the king’s order, because they thought they tended to the infringement of the privileges of the church. After this declaration, the prelates used every means to make the confessor persuade Charles III., that the printed copies ought not to be published, and that the work should be reprinted, after the suppression of several propositions. The inquisitor-general and the Supreme Council being informed of this circumstance, the affair took another turn, and the faction of the Jesuits became more calm.
These events exposed to great danger a person who had entered into them without being aware of it. M. Clement, a French priest, treasurer of the cathedral of Auxerre, and afterwards bishop of Versailles, arrived at Madrid in 1768, at the time when the event above mentioned occupied every mind. He held several conversations on this subject with the Marquis de Roda, the fiscals of the council, and the Bishops of Tarazona and Albarracin [77]. The zeal of this theologian for the purity of doctrine on all points of discipline induced him to say, that the good dispositions of the Court of Madrid ought to be taken advantage of, and proposed three measures. The first was to place the Inquisition under each bishop, who should be the chief, with a deliberative vote, with the addition of two inquisitors with a consultive vote; the second, to oblige the monks and nuns to acknowledge the bishop as their chief, and to obey him as such after renouncing all the privileges contrary to this arrangement; the third to abolish the distinct schools of theology, under the titles of Thomists, Scotists, Suarists, or others, and to have only one system of theology for the schools and universities, founded on the principles of St. Augustin and St. Thomas.
It is sufficient to be acquainted with Spain, and the state of the monks at that period, to foresee the persecution which the author of such a plan would incur. The confessor of the king and the inquisitor-general were informed of it by their political spies, and several monks denounced M. Clement to the holy office, as a Lutheran, a Calvinistic heretic, and an enemy of the regular orders.
M. Clement suspected the existence of this intrigue, from some expressions made use of by a Dominican, with whom he was intimate. The inquisitors, who saw that M. Clement was received at court, did not dare to arrest him, but they requested their chief to oblige him to quit the kingdom. The treasurer of Auxerre imparted his fears to the Count de Aranda, and the Marquis de Roda; who being, from his connexion at court, acquainted with all that had passed, advised him to depart, but without informing him of what it was useless for him to know. M. Clement followed his advice, and though he had intended to go to Portugal, he returned immediately to France, to avoid the Sbirri of the holy office, who might have arrested him on his return from Lisbon, if the system of the court was changed. In fact a great number of charges were brought against him after his departure, but they were not made public, and he wrote his travels without knowing anything of the plots against him.
All that passed on the occasion of the apostolical prohibition of the catechism of Mesengui was made public: Charles III. had ordered that it should be made use of in the religious instruction of Charles IV.; and the inquisitor-general was openly and justly blamed, for having published the brief of prohibition, without waiting to obtain the consent of the king. This proceeding was the cause of the exile of the inquisitor-general. His disgrace might have rendered him more prudent, but in his reply to the king, in 1769, concerning some measures taken by the extraordinary council of five prelates, he advanced, as certain, several propositions concerning the Inquisition, which might have been proved to be false, if the Marquis de Roda had consulted the registers of the Supreme Council. He said that the Inquisition had met with nothing but opposition from the beginning; that it was conspired against in the most cruel manner; that all the proceedings of the council were made public, except the trials for heresy, but that even those were always submitted to his Majesty; and that the charge against it of acting with entire independence was not just, he concluded with saying, that his Majesty might appoint an ecclesiastic as his secretary to attend the council, and inform him of all that passed.
It is impossible to find a reason for the necessity here imposed upon the king to have a priest for his secretary, since the inquisitors employed seculars in their offices, who were permitted to see the trial, though obliged to take an oath of secrecy, and two members of the Council of Castile also attend the Supreme Council. Yet neither an ecclesiastic nor a layman could prevent fraud: the same may be said of the members of the Council of Castile, because in case of any intrigues, for example, in a conflict for jurisdiction, the counsellors assembled at the house of the inquisitor-general, and their chief sealed their papers with his private seal.
The most decisive proof of the entire independence of the Inquisition, exists in two laws of Charles III., concerning bigamy and the prohibition of books; they were insufficient to restrain the inquisitors within their jurisdiction.
Yet though these abuses and many others were still continued, I do not hesitate to say that the inquisitors of the reigns of Charles III. and his successors were men possessed of extreme prudence and singular moderation in comparison with those of the time of Philip V. and the preceding reigns. This is confirmed by the very small number of autos-da-fé celebrated under the two kings, a period of twenty-nine years; only ten persons were condemned, four of whom were burnt, and fifty-six individuals subjected to penances. All the other trials were terminated by individual autos-da-fé; the condemned was taken into a church to hear his sentence read, when it was confirmed by the Supreme Council, without waiting for other prisoners to form a particular auto-da-fé. Other trials are concluded by a lesser auto-da-fé in the audience-hall of the tribunal; another mode, which was the least severe, was to celebrate the auto-da-fé in the presence of the secretaries of the Inquisition alone; no greater indulgence than this could be shown.
The individual auto-da-fé was decreed in two famous trials of the reign of Charles III. Of the first, that of Olavide, an account has been given in Chapter 26. The second was that of Don Francisco de Leon y Luna, a priest and knight of the military order of St. Jago. He was condemned as violently suspected of having fallen into the heresies of the Illuminati and of Molinos, for having seduced several women, for communicating several times with the consecrated wafer from superstitious motives, and for preaching a false and presumptuous mysticity to several nuns and other women who were the dupes of his error and their own weakness. Leon was imprisoned for three years in a convent; he was then banished for seven years from Madrid, and forbidden to exercise the ministry of a confessor. The council of the orders requested the king to deprive Leon of his cross and knighthood, according to the statutes which ordain that measure towards all who commit a crime which incurs an infamous punishment. But the council ought to have known that the suspicion of heresy was not sufficient, since the tribunal always declares, if the condemned desire it, that this sort of sentence does not prevent them from attaining offices and dignities.
At Saragossa the Marquis d’Aviles, intendant of Aragon, was accused before the holy office of having read prohibited books; but this denunciation, and that of the Bishop of Barcelona for Jansenism at Madrid, and several others of the same nature, were passed over without further notice.