2 9 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the courtyard were swept up into a white cloth. He was 

 chained hand and foot, maintaining a sullen silence and refusing 

 to answer questions. 



The affair, of course, excited the utmost horror. The young 

 king, Philip IV, then only five months on the throne, sent his 

 favorite, Count Olivares, to ascertain for him the facts, and the 

 papal nuncio eagerly sought the details to report them to Rome. 

 The archiepiscopal vicar, Diego Vela, was at first disposed to take 

 a rationalistic view of the matter : he asserted the insanity of 

 his prisoner, and proposed to discharge him, doubtless thinking 

 it wiser to assume that no Spaniard in his senses could be ca- 

 pable of an offence so heinous. He was soon, however, made to 

 understand that this would not be allowed, and it came near 

 bringing him into trouble. The Holy Office asserted its jurisdic- 

 tion over a case of heresy so flagrant ; on the 23d Vela surren- 

 dered Benito to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, and he 

 was sent to the tribunal of Toledo (for as yet there was none in 

 Madrid), with orders that his trial should be pushed with all ex- 

 pedition an urgency that was soon after twice repeated, with 

 the significant addition that the king took special interest in the 

 matter and desired to know its progress. 



The Toledan inquisitors were prompt and zealous. The dila- 

 tory and cumbersome forms of procedure were hurried as rapidly 

 as the traditions of the tribunal would permit, and in exactly 

 two months, on November 23d, they were ready to pronounce sen- 

 tence. Yet the end was still far off. In his examinations Benito 

 had been made to give the details of his life. He was forty -three 

 years old, born at Camprodon of an Old Christian father and a 

 mother who had Jewish blood in her veins a fact which told 

 heavily against him. His father, who was a cloth- shearer, took 

 him, at the age of thirteen, to Montserrat and placed him with 

 an uncle, a chaplain in the monastery, who in six months sent 

 him back to his father in Barcelona. For some time he served 

 as page to persons of quality, and finally Don Bernardo Terres 

 took him to Flanders, when the Cardinal Archduke, Albert of 

 Austria, went thither in 1595. There he had a succession of 

 masters, with one of whom he returned through France to 

 Catalonia. Filled with desire for a religious life, in 1603 he en- 

 tered the Barefooted Carmelite convent of Mataron as a novice, 

 but was expelled in about six months. After vainly seeking to 

 join the Carthusians of Monte Alegre and the Jeronymites of 

 Murta, at last the Observantine Franciscans of Barcelona gave 

 him the habit, but deprived him of it in about eight months. 

 Then two years were spent in study at Tarragona, which he left 

 in 1606, and since then he had led a wandering life in pious pil- 

 grimages. He had offered his devotions at the shrine of his 



