Tomás de Torquemada

“ In cold blood, and with little interest even for the faith itself, the pope assented; and in May, 1483, appointed the Dominican, Thomas de Torquemada, hitherto prior of a monastery in Segovia, inquisitor-general of Spain. There are certain men who are the embodiment of good or evil sentiments, opinions and principles, and fully illustrate their extremest consequences. Torquemada was the incarnation of the Holy Inquisition with all its devilish malice, its heartless severity, its bloodthirsty ferocity. ”

“ Had Torquemada and a few others possessed heads as clear and calculating as their hearts were resolute and inexorable—a knowledge of human nature as profound as their ambition of divine honours was exalted, they would have taken care not entirely to deprive the Church of food for its passions and energies. ”

“ One of the most important monuments of the city is the church of the Dominican monastery of Santo Tomás (now used as a missionary college) . It was founded in 1478 by Doña Maria Davila, wife of a Viceroy of Sicily, and completed in 1493. Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, interested the Catholic sovereigns in the work, and the cost was met by the confiscated property of Jews and heretics. The cloisters and conventual buildings are devoid of interest. The west front is in a poor late Gothic style, and distinguished{129} by richness rather than beauty. ”

“ And next year came Torquemada: one of the greatest masterpieces of the master poet of our century. The construction of this tragedy is absolutely original and unique: free and full of change as the wildest and loosest and roughest of dramatic structures ever flung together, and left to crumble or cohere at the pleasure of accident or of luck, by the rudest of primæval playwrights: but perfect in harmonious unity of spirit, in symmetry or symphony of part with part, as the most finished and flawless creation of Sophocles or of Phidias. ”

“ In happier time and circumstance that poor novice would have been a great character; but she was one of the countless victims the world knows not of, whose virtues are in silent motives, whose struggles are in the solitary heart.
Of the prince she heard and saw no more. There were times when she fancied, from oblique and obscure hints, that the Dominican had been aware of Don Juan’s disguise and visit. But, if so, that knowledge appeared only to increase the gentleness, almost the respect, which Torquemada manifested towards her. ”

“ Torquemada admits the existence of this tradition among them, and agrees with the Indian historians, who affirm that this was the first woman in the world, who bore children, and from whom all mankind are descended. ”

“ Whatever the simplicity of Torquemada’s life, and whatever his personal humility, it would be idle to pretend that he was not imbued with the pride and arrogance of his office, swollen by the increase of power accorded him, until in matters of the Faith he did not hesitate to dictate to the Sovereigns themselves, and to reproach them almost to the point of 264 menace when they were slow to act as he dictated, whilst it was dangerous for any under Sovereign rank to come into conflict with the Grand Inquisitor. ”

“ When, in December 1484, Torquemada issued his supplementary instructions, he was careful to state that he did so by command of the sovereigns, who ordered them to be observed. So in subsequent instructions, issued in 1485, Torquemada orders the inquisitors to write to him and to Ferdinand about everything that should be reported; the king provides their salaries promises them rewards; if there is anything that the king ought to remedy he is to be written to. ”

“ The young lovers are two of the loveliest figures, Torquemada is one of the sublimest, in all the illimitable world of dramatic imagination. The intensity of interest, anxiety, and terror, which grows by such rapid and subtle stages of development up to the thunder-stroke of royal decision at the close of the first act, is exchanged in the second for an even deeper and higher kind of emotion. ”

“ They argued, consequently, that Saint Dodekanus got the credit for what was really the parroco's notion. And Torquemada, thinking over the day's proceedings, was driven to confess that he was indebted for the suggestion to the fertile brain of the Nicaraguan Representative ”

“ When the period of departure arrived, all the principal routes through the country might be seen swarming with emigrants, old and young, the sick and the helpless, men, women, and children, mingled promiscuously together, some mounted on horses or mules, but far the greater part undertaking their painful pilgrimage on foot. The sight of so much misery touched even the Spaniards with pity, though none might succor them; for the grand inquisitor, Torquemada, enforced the ordinance to that effect, by denouncing heavy ecclesiastical censures on all who should presume to violate it. ”

“ The Court of Spain entertained, as hath been shewn, an Opinion of there being such a Passage from the Time they conquered Mexico; and, agreeable to what Torquemada says, had a certain Account of it, or at least an Account which appeared to the King to be authentick. What that Account really contained we do not know, nor was it consistent that it should be made publick ”

“ The very air that we breathe is tainted with heresy. I sometimes think," added the priest with a sigh, for he was not of a cruel nature, "that nothing will clear it unless we could light again those fires with which Torquemada, the stanch champion of our faith, burnt out the evil for awhile, consuming bodies in the pious attempt to rescue perishing souls."
"I should be sorry for such dreadful punishment to overtake poor Aguilera," said Donna Maria. "He is young, and noble, and brave." ”

“ Torquemada was the first who ascended its bloody throne, who established its statutes, and forever cursed his order with this bequest. Sworn to the degradation of the understanding and the murder of intellect, the instruments it employed were terror and infamy. Every evil passion was in its pay; its snare was set in every joy of life. Solitude itself was not safe from it; the fear of its omnipresence fettered the freedom of the soul in its inmost and deepest recesses. It prostrated all the instincts of human nature before it yielded all the ties which otherwise man held most sacred. ”

“ The growing horror of the gradual vision of history, from Henri the Fourth to his bloody and gloomy son, from Louis the Thirteenth to the murderer and hangman of the Palatinate and the Cévennes, from Louis the Fourteenth to the inexpressible pollution of incarnate ignominy in his grandson, seems to heave and swell as a sea towards the coming thunder which was to break above the severed head of their miserable son.
And next year came Torquemada: one of the greatest masterpieces of the master poet of our century. ”

“ Juan de Torquemada, Provincial of the Franciscans in Mexico from 1614-1617, spent more than fifty years of his life in the country, during which time he amassed an immense collection of ancient pictures, writings, and original manuscripts, besides the information, often legendary and contradictory, which he obtained from the Indians. Of his Monarchia Indiana Clavigero says that one must seek jewels among the rubbish. It was first published in Madrid in 1614, and again in 1724. ”

“ Torquemada, not often a Pyrrhonist where the honour of the faith is concerned, rejects these tales as irreconcilable with the subsequent silence of Cortés himself, as well as of Alvarado, who would have been loud to proclaim an event so long in vain desired by them. (Monarch. Ind., lib. 4, cap. 70.) The criticism of the father is strongly supported by the fact, that neither of the preceding accounts is corroborated by writers of any weight, while they are contradicted by several, by popular tradition, and, it may be added, by one another. ”

“ The youth, in pointing them out, said that God did not yet wish her to pass the river, which could never be recrossed, but to wait and bear testimony to the faith coming with these men, who were destined to wage great wars with her people and become their masters. The lamenting bones were her forefathers — 'who had not received the faith,' is the uncharitable term used by Torquemada — suffering for their evil deeds, and the house building was to hold the bones of those slain in battle by the fair-faced crews. She must return to earth, await these men, and guide her people to baptism. ”

“ Since the beginning of the frightful work of Torquemada, in 1483, it had been diligently searching out and destroying every germ of free thought and manly character that gave the smallest sign of fruitfulness in the kingdom; and the crushing of the Santa Junta may be said to have left few in Spain who deserved a better fate than the political, the religious and the intellectual servitude under which the nation sank. Persecution of the Spanish Moriscoes. ”

“ The net which Torquemada cast was of the very widest; the meshes of that net were of the closest, so that no man, however humble, could account himself safe; its threads were of the strongest, so that no man, however powerful, could be sure of breaking through were he once brought within its scope.
What, then, but terror could Torquemada and his grim machinery inspire? It is not difficult to believe the sometime secretary of the Inquisition when he assures us that the Holy Office was not favourably viewed in Spain. ”

“ Torquemada himself, who has been execrated through the ages as the red-handed protagonist of the appalling tragedy, hardly deserves his great reputation. There is little originality in his crime. He was not more cruel, but only more conscientious, courageous, and consistent than millions of the men of his generation and creed. When in the nineteenth century we find Cardinal Newman—an English gentleman and scholar—preaching that “To spare a heresiarch is a false and dangerous pity. ”

“ But Torquemada had not forgotten them. Working on the pride of Ferdinand, on the conscience of Isabella, he persuaded them to sign the celebrated Edict of Exile. They were to leave Spain in three months. They were to take neither silver nor gold with them. If it pleased God to change their hearts, the church would most willingly receive them. ”

“ It was up to the man doing the work to devise such means as would loosen the tongue, break the will. The hangman himself was punished for not getting at the truth, or was praised by his superior for his success. Torquemada called a particular man from Madrid to accompany him to Grenada, as he alone knew how to apply the "Test" to the glory of the Almighty and of Jesus Christ. ”

“ Tezcuco was entirely out of Cortés’ route, and the narratives of the march show that no such detour could have been made. Torquemada, who contradicts himself about the visit, describes with some detail the reception at this capital, where the population kneel to adore the Spaniards as children of the sun. They are entertained at the palace, and discover in one of the courtiers, named Tecocoltzin, a man of as fair a hue as themselves, who became a great favorite. ”

“ Sanche had used as a lever on that occasion an iron cross which hung upon the tottering wall. 'O ciel! ils sont damnés!' exclaims Torquemada, when he hears this. In his view the lovers are now condemned to eternal perdition, but in order to save their souls he sends their bodies to the stake. It need scarcely be said that the author, in ascribing honesty and other characteristics to the bloodthirsty Inquisitor, gives a more exalted view of him than is taken by impartial history. ”

“ The sovereigns saw that wealth was beginning to flow in to the new tribunals by means of fines and confiscations; and they obliged Torquemada to take as assessors five persons who would represent them in all matters affecting the royal prerogatives. These assessors were allowed a definite vote in temporal matters but not in spiritual, and the final decision was reserved to Torquemada himself, who in 1483 was appointed the sole inquisitor-general over all the Spanish possessions. ”

“ It is not a simple European view which makes honest Doubt worth a dozen of the Creeds. And it is in direct opposition to the noted writer who holds that the man of simple faith is worth ninety-nine of those who hold only to the egotistic interests of their own individuality. This dark saying means (if it mean anything) , that the so-called moral faculties of man, fancy and ideality, must lord it over the perceptive and reflective powers,—a simple absurdity! It produced a Turricremata, alias Torquemada, who, shedding floods of honest tears, caused his victims to be burnt alive ”

“ But what cared Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, that mortal wounds should be inflicted on the noblest instincts of human nature? or what cared his tools in Aragon? Crushed, broken-spirited men would be all the easier to handle—all the easier to plunder or destroy.
Montoro de Diego had been one of the deputation sent by the Cortes to the fountain-head, as it was then believed, of all truth and mercy and justice, to implore release from the new infliction ”

“ That such a bull should have been solicited gives us yet another glimpse of the terrible rancour against the Jews which fanaticism had kindled in the soul of Torquemada. Had his aim been merely, as expressed, to weed the tares of heresy from the Catholic soil of Spain, the self-imposed exile of those wretched fugitives would fully have satisfied him, and he would not have thought it necessary to hound them out of such shelter as they had found abroad that he might have the satisfaction of hurling them into the bonfire he had kindled. ”