470 History of the Spanish Inquisition. [ Noy. 
twelfth, the giving,.of burial to heretics... The. thirteenth, the refusal to 
take oaths on the trials of heretics. The fourteenth, the having died a 
heretic, the body was to bedug up and burnt, the property confiscated, 
and the name declared infamous. The fifteenth, the conversion of 
papists by Moors or Jews. 
From those laws the Popes and their officers, and bishops, were, 
except in certain cases, exempt; but kings were liable. 
_ It would be a waste of time to go into the long and now well-known 
detail of the forms of this tribunal: they may be told in. two .words— 
tyranny and secresy.. The accused was hurried away from his family se- 
cretly, secretly examined, secretly dungeoned, secretly tortured, or put to 
death, or secretly left to wear out a life of agony in his cell. The only 
interruption of this frightful secresy was in the instances when the 
tribunal wished to strike public terror, show that it was not rich and 
powerful for nothing, or intended to receive the Spanish sovereign with 
a peculiarly loyal and grateful pomp. Then they brought out their 
victims, male or female, old and young, erected piles of faggots in the 
principal square, and burned their human sacrifice in the face of a 
miserable tyrant, a degraded people, and a triumphant priesthood. 
The accused were allowed no legal adviser, no presence of friends, no 
sight of the accuser, no witnesses, often no knowledge of the charge. 
They were brought before the Inquisitor—they were asked a variety of 
questions constructed to embarrass them. They were first exhorted to 
acknowledge themselves guilty, and told that this plea was their only 
hope. Their acknowledgment thus won—and the tortured and terrified 
prisoner must have been often eager to make any confession, true or 
talse—was turned against him, and he was the author of his own ruin. 
After the extinction or flight of the few Waldenses who had been 
established in Spain, the Inquisition fell upon the Jews. Many of 
those had, under fear of death, assumed papistry. But the tribunal 
determined to have them in its grasp, let their disguise be what it 
might. On the 4th of November 1481, two hundred and ninety-eight 
proselytes were burned in Seville; in other parts of Andalusia, two 
thousand were burnt; a still greater number were burnt in effigy, which 
implied banishment and ruin; and one thousand seven hundred suffered 
different tortures. The frequency of those murders made a peculiar 
scaffold necessary. One, called the Guemadero, or place of burning, 
was erected near Seville, and four figures of the “ Prophets” were fixed 
on it, to which the victims were bound in the flames. 
In 1483, the appointment of Torquemada as Grand Inquisitor-gene- 
ral gave an additional stability to this tribunal. A royal council of the 
Inquisition was formed; subaltern tribunals were appointed; and 
Torquemada had the guilty distinction of being the new-founder, and 
the fiercest murderer, in the annals of the Inquisition of this bigotted 
and degraded country. a 
His agency was upon a scale commensurate fo his ambition, He 
was the chief instrument of banishing the Jews from Spain. eel 
The Jews, in order to avert the danger which threatened them, offered to 
supply Ferdinand with thirty thousand pieces of silver to carry, onthe ,war 
against Grenada; they promised to live peaceably, to comply with the regula- 
tions formed for them, in retiring to their houses in the quarters assigned to 
them before night; and in renouncing all professions which were reserved for 
the Christians. Ferdinand and Isabella were willing to listen to these proposi- 
