Torture to extort confession of guilt was legalized by the legislators of various countries, and a few hundred years ago was all but universal; but the civil law discharged the prisoner who persevered in denial. The Inquisition, being “holy”, condemned him to perpetual imprisonment or sent him to the galleys.
        When the Cortes of Spain confirmed the abolition of the Inquisition in Madrid and threw open its doors, there was found among the score of prisoners one under sentence of “death by the pendulum”. That method of inflicting capital punishment is thus described by Juan Antonio Llorente, the great authority for the history of the Spanish Inquisition: The condemned is fastened in a groove upon a table, on his back. Suspended above him is a gigantic pendulum, the ball of which has a sharp edge on the lower part, and the pendulum is so constructed as to lengthen with every stroke. The victim sees this engine of destruction swinging to and fro a short distance from his eyes. Momentarily the keen edge comes nearer. At length it cuts the skin of his nose, and gradually cuts deeper, until life is extinct. The church was employing this lever for the exaltation of the faith as late as the year of grace 1820.
        The compound, “auto-da-fe”, will be used many times in this history. The term signifies an “act of faith”. It is the name the Inquisition gave to those festival occasions when heretics who had been “relaxed” to the secular arm for punishment paid the penalty prescribed by the Holy Office.
        Perhaps the fullest description of an auto that has been preserved, or that was ever written, is the one by Doctor Don Pedro Jose Bermudez. The auto which Bermudez reports took place in 1736, at Lima, Peru, whither the Inquisition had followed the Spanish conquest. In 1639 the Lima Inquisition had burned the Judaizing millionaire, Manuel Bautista Perez, and his wealthy coreligionists as heretics. A little less than a century later, when opulent heretics were few and the Holy Office had come at last to the base use of burning voodoo doctors and negro witches, another auto was held at Lima. The inquisitors at that time were Gaspar Ibanez de Peralta, Don Cristobal Sanchez Calderon, and Don Diego de Unda y Mallea. It may be stated that Calderon was subsequently convicted as a thief and that De Unda suffered a fine on conviction of robbery - of which events the only features that need surprise us are the convictions. Thieving and robbery were the business.
        The subjects of the auto in 1736, described by Bermudez, were to be Madame Castro, sentenced to be burned as a witch, and ten other women condemned to punishment for similar offense. Forty days before the time fixed for the ceremony the Inquisitor Unda, in his capacity as fiscal of the Inquisition, repaired to the palace, Nov. 13, for the purpose of inviting in person the viceroy, Villagarcia, to attend. He also invited the resident archbishop, Escandon. At the same time the secretary of the secret tribunal invited the judges of the Royal Audience. These invitation to royalty and quality having been delivered, public notification of the approaching celebration was then made by the inquisitors, who, mounted on horseback, and with the din of fife and kettledrum, paraded the streets, publishing the proclamation and inviting the populace to the entertainment by placards, which were read aloud, as follows:
        “The Holy Office of the Inquisition makes known to all faithful Christians, inhabitants of the city of the kings, and others that on the 23d of December of this present year, 1736, an auto-da-fe will be celebrated for the exaltation of our Holy Catholic Faith in the principal square of this city, so that all the faithful assisting by their presence may gain the privaledges and indulgences granted by the Sovereign Pontiffs to all who assist, accompany, and aid the said auto, which is ordered to be published and proclaimed that it may be known to all.”
        Observe that is was all for the exaltation of the faith, and that attending, or “assisting”, as witnessing the auto was termed, secured to the attendant certain privileges granted by the pope. The inquisitors could scarcely have foreseen that the day would come when apologists for the church would arise to deny that the pope or the faith was concerned in the conduct of the discredited Inquisition.
        Due notice having been given to the treat in store for all the inhabitants of Lima, the theatre of the auto, the great square of Lima, was decorated appropriately for the gala occasion it was to be. Two weeks in advance the inquisitors demanded of the Consulate and other public and private persons the use of their balconies in which to place seats for the wives of the judges, members of the town council, and other functionaries of the colonial staff. For the viceroy and the archbishop and their families, the ecclesiastics, the Jesuits, and the communities of regulars (the members of which were at that time counted by hundreds) there were reserved special seats, placed in the order as to precedence that had been established at horse shows and other exhibitions in the square. Expenses were met by contributions, the town council and the University subscribing six hundred dollars and the consulate four hundred. The Inquisition itself had pleaded poverty in its official letter soliciting funds to pay for the auto, and we may conclude that it contributed nothing, although its treasure chests were full of the confiscated wealth of the heretics.
        At the centre of the square the inquisitors erected their throne. In the midst was the mound of the penitents, surmounted by a green cross, the symbol of the Inquisition, which was to be seen on days of punishment covered by a black veil in token of the church’s mourning over the festivities she is providing for the diversion of the faithful. On one side of the mound was placed a pulpit from which would be preached a sermon, while the opposite there was a cage to hold the condemned. The viceroy, on the day of doom, occupied a seat between the two inquisitors, Peralta and Calderon, an inevitable reminder of the one who was lifted up between two thieves. The secretaries, notaries, constables, familiars, and other assistants to the executioners, with the sponsors of the condemned, had seats at an altitude which established their precedence over the laity.
        The 23d of December fell on Sunday, the date having been piously chosen in commemoration of the foundation of Jerusalem by Judas Maccabeus. On the evening before the auto green wood for the burning had been carried to its place in solemn procession. The night was one of fictitious alarm, for they were only going to burn and old woman and flog ten or twelve coloured persons. Nevertheless the garrison of the city was kept under arms, part of it at the gate of the great square, other companies at the houses of their respective captains, and the cavalry gathered at the place of execution. As though the town were in danger, a general marched up and down the streets at the head of numerous patrols. The dawn was ushered in by the blare of military instruments.
        A reason for choosing Sunday on which to burn heretics is given by Doctor Pena, a commentator on the Manual of Inquisitor Eymerich, who thinks that “it is better to celebrate the auto-da-fe on feast days, it being advantageous that much people should be present to witness the punishment and atonement of criminals, that fear may keep them from crime. From this motive, without doubt, the tribunals of Spain determined to celebrate the autos-da-fe on feast days, and to solemnize them with the attendance of the town councils, audiences, and other persons in authority. This spectacle will infuse terror into the hearts of the beholders, and, presenting to them the awful image of the final judgment, will leave in their minds a salutary effect and produce tremendous results.” Thus the auto combined the festive with the edifying.
        In accordance with a custom established at Saragossa - when under Inquisitor Perez there were on occasions a hundred or more heretics to be concremated at a slow fire in one day - the spectators at Lima began to assemble at daybreak. At the same time the condemned were marched forth from their cells in the order and dress prescribed by Torquemada, the first inquisitor-general of Spain, in his “Instructions”. Each wore a sanbenitor, a sort of shroud, yellow in colour, girdled at the waist and painted with devils and reptiles; a “coroza” or cap of derision, the same, we are told, as the conical caps still used by the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre. Their backs bore figures of the cross of St. Andrew, and in their hands they carried candles of green wax, which in their several parts symbolized the three theological virtues: the wick, faith; the wax, hope; the flame, charity. It would seem that the inquisitor who first detected the symbolism of the penitential candle possessed a sense of sardonic humor.
        There could be little pecuniary profit in burning an old woman and flogging a dozen others, but the financial deficit had been made good in the usual manner by exhuming the bones of heretics posthumously condemned and providing effigies “of those who could not come in person, having been prevented by flight”. The property of all these, their heirs and assigns, was acquired by the Inquisition through the process of condemnation and confiscation. Thus while the living victims afforded the spectacle, the dead ones furnished the business.
        The effigies of the fugitives and the bones of the dead - “wretched spoil of the narrow sepulchre”, writes Bermudez finely, “from whose sad and awful bosom, before they were reduced to dust, they were taken to become the unprofitable (?) Ashes by the violence of the impetuous flames, caused by the conflagration of the burning pile” - carried for a device the sanbenito and the other penitential garments. Upon the images could be read the names of the fugitives whom they represented, conspicuously labeled on their breasts, and certificated accompanied the boxes containing the ghastly remains.
        The procession of the condemned having arrived, the viceroy took his seat, but before doing so, standing with his head uncovered and his hand on the Gospels, as the king whom he represented would do and had done in the same circumstances, he pronounced in a loud voice, the oath imposed on him by the grand inquisitor acknowledging the supremacy of the Inquisition. After the viceroy, the royal audience took the oath of respect for the supreme jurisdiction of the Holy Office, and then a notary, called the “reader”, arose and administered a like oath to the who concourse of people that crowded the square. (See p. 55) After this followed the sermon, the honor of preaching which on the present occasion fell to the Franciscan father, Juan de Gacitua. It occupied some hours in its delivery, and contained “innumerable barbarous and mongrel Latin phrases.” Don Benjamin Vicuna Mackenna, who wrote a book on the Inquisition in South America, testifies that the “patient and orthodox Don Mariano Egana himself,” after examining the fifty pages over which Father Juan’s sermon extends, “could not restrain himself from writing upon the margin these words of natural but not very Christian-like (why not Christian-like?) exasperation: ‘How much more did this great rogue deserve the fire!’
        On the heels of the “divine word”, as Gacitua’s harangue is termed in the annals, came the burning of the witch of Toledo, Ana de Castro, otherwise known as “The Flyer”, who was carried from the square to the burning-place by the bridge over the river Rimac (the stream that runs past Lima), where the inquisitors, having delivered her to the secular arm, formed a circle about the blazing pile that reduced her body to ashes. There were burned in that same fire, besides effigies and disinterred bones of the various heretics, the remains of a merchant named Obando, of Santiago, Chile, whose property the Inquisition had sequestrated, but who cheated the Holy Office of a spectacle by dying in his dungeon.
        An intermission followed the burning of the Flyer at the bridge and the return of the populace to the great square, during which the viceroy, the inquisitors, and the other functionaries, civil and ecclesiastical, adjourned to the palace for refreshments; and it is not to be presumed that the spectacle of a human being, and a woman at that, perishing at the stake, impaired either their appetite or their thirst, or that the propinquity of her hissing flesh prevented them from eating and drinking heartily.
        The event of the day had passed off, but there remained the dozen wretched women who, accused of witchcraft and sorcery, were to sustain the floggings, the public infamy, and other punishments named in the sentences read to them from the seat of the viceroy and the inquisitors. An ages woman named Maria Hernandez, for the crime of being a “witch”, received two hundred lashes, which number of stripes appears to be the minimum prescribed by the Inquisition.