It is only by an abuse of language that the proceedings before the Inquisition can be called a trial, for the tribunal, as has well been said, was nothing but a Board of Conviction. The fate of the victim was decided before his arrest, and unless there was intervention too powerful to be safely ignored he went from the dungeon to the tribunal, from there to the torture chamber, and thence to his doom as inevitably as a boat set adrift in Niagara river goes over the falls.
        Belief that the church would some day be reformed and primitive Christianity restored was heresy. In 1623, with funds furnished by Geronimo de Villanueva, a Benedictine convent was founded at Madrid. The family of Dona Teresa de Silva contributed to the furnishing of the convent, and the lady was elected abbess. She had a confessor named Calderon, and him Villanueva appointed spiritual director. An epidemic of demonical possession or prophetic mania broke out among the nuns; they prophesied a new dispensation for the church, with eleven nuns as apostles. One of the nuns was to be a reincarnation of St. Peter, another of St. Paul, and Spiritual Director Calderon would represent Christ. The Inquisition took the matter up, charging Calderon with "illuminism" and sentencing him, after three rigorous tortures, to a living death in a cell in the convent, while the nuns, after undergoing examination, were separated and sent away. Dona Teresa got four years in a convent. It appears that she was Villanueva's mistress. As evidence that the discipline of the convent was not strict, the fact came out in the course of the judicial proceedings that Villanueva was accustomed to sit in Don Teresa's lap while she removed the parasites from his head and hair. Villanueva secured an acquittal, but the Inquisition later reversed itself, sentenced him to expulsion from Madrid and Toledo for three years, and cut of communication between him and his nuns. Appealing to the pope, he underwent persecution until near the time of his death in 1653, and the dispute between Spain and Rome over jurisdiction, which had been kept up for thirty-two years, was not ended for another year. His offense had consisted in inquiring about the future and believing the responses of the demons made through his nuns. This, according to the Edict of Faith, was divination, which infers denial of free-will, and is therefore forbidden as heretical.
        There was heresy in inquiring of demons as to the future, but not in extracting from them intelligence about the past. In 1698, King Carlos of Spain, who was not strong, heard of information imparted to some possessed nuns concerning the origin of his ailment. The matter was investigated, and from a demon who had his habitation in a nun at Oviedo it was learned that he had been bewitched at the age of fourteen to render him impotent. The charm producing this unhappy result, the demon stated, was certain members of a dead man, administered to Carlos by his queen-mother, in a cup of chocolate. The remedy, communicated by the demons at the same time, was the use of blessed oil, purging, and separation from the queen. Carlos was duly stripped, anointed, purged, and prayed over, but while the medicines failed of effect in the way expected, the proceeding proved a disturbance to his mind and greatly weakened his body. It was easy to get from the demon new and different directions which Carlos followed, so at this time "the destinies of Spain were made to hand on the flippant utterances of hysterical girls who unsaid one day what they had averred the day before". Meanwhile Carlos got no better, and the queen took on an angry mood. The upshot of the experiment was that the royal confessor, Froilan Diaz, who had brought the advices of the demon to the king, got into trouble with the Inquisition; he lay in jail, incommunicado, for four years, and the outside world did not know whether he was dead or alive. King Carlos died in 1700, and his successor, Philip, took Diaz out of pawn and protected him until his death in 1714.
"When the prisoner has been impeached of the crime of heresy, but not convicted," directs the inquisitor's handbook by Eymerich, "and he obstinately persists in his denial, let the inquisitor take into his hands the proceedings, or any other file of papers, and, looking them over in his presence, let him feign to have discovered the offense fully established therein, and the he is desirous he should at once make his confession. The inquisitor shall then say to the prisoner, as if in astonishment, 'And is it possible you can still deny what I have here before my own eyes?' He shall then seem as if he read, and to the end that the prisoner may know no better, he shall fold down the leaf, and after reading some moments longer, he shall say to him, 'It is just as I have said; why, therefore, do you deny it, when you see I know the whole matter?' " If the prisoner is deceived by this trickery, he is lost; if he detects it, his fate is not bettered. Invoking the name of Christ, the inquisitor delivers the sentence of torture.
        The chief methods of torture are of three kinds - by pulley, by rack, and by fire - with such variations as the ingenuity of the inquisitors may enable them to invent. They proved themselves fully abreast of the best inventive geniuses of their time, and that in barbarity they had nothing to learn of savages.
In the torture pulley, the tackle was fixed to the roof of the chamber, usually situated underground, that the outcries of the subject might not reach other parts of the building. The executioners stripped the victim to the waist, shackled his feet, and attached weights to his ankles. The rope descending from the pulley being made fast to his wrists behind his back, he was lifted high in the air and lowered by jerks. At each stage of descent the judges, standing by, admonished him to reveal the "truth". Flogging was added to this mode of torture.
        When subjected to the torture of the rack, the heretic was stretched upon a wooden horse or frame, with rungs like those of a ladder, and bound thereto in such a manner as to leave no room for movement of feet, hands, or head. The rack was so constructed that, according to Puigblanch, quoted in Mason's History of the Inquisition, "in this attitude he experienced eight strong contortions in his limbs, namely, two on the fleshy parts of the arms above the elbows, and two below; one on each thigh, and also on the legs." Bound thus, the heretic, in the name of the most merciful Christ, could be subjected to other forms of torture for the exaltation of the faith. There was the "water cure", where water was dropped upon a ribbon or piece of silk laid on his mouth, the cloth, by the weight of the water, being carried into his throat and producing all the agonies of suffocation and drowning. Or a piece of linen was laid upon his face, and the water falling upon it prevented him from breathing.
        Torture by fire was effected by seating the heretic upon the ground, with his feet in the stocks, which were tow pieces of timber clamped together, over and under, across his legs above the ankles. The soles of his feet then having been greased with lard, a blazing brazier was applied to them, and they were first blistered and then fried. At intervals a board was interposed between the fire and his feet, to be at once removed if he disobeyed the command to confess himself guilty of that with which he was charged. Being more painful, but less fatal than racking, this was the torture most in vogue when the subject chanced to be of the female sex. It was also favored in cases where children were to be persuaded to testify against their parents.
        Lesser tortures, such as binding a piece of iron to a limb and putting a twister in the rope to force it to the flesh, or pressing the fingers with rods between them, or removing a nail from finger or toe, were practiced upon persons of not sufficient strength to support the pulley, rack, or fire.
        The rules allowed that torture might be extended over an hour, and while it could not be repeated, yet provided it was suspended under the hour, it might be continued. The torture on another day could thus be viewed as a continuation of the preceding one, and the victim be tormented indefinitely.