Charles V proved a vacillating monarch. He was in favor of the Inquisition, but he wanted the money of the wealthy New Christians, and he seems to have been in some doubt whether it was not better to take it directly from them for protection or by selling them offices, than to allow the Inquisition to confiscate and auction off their property, and take the chance of getting his share of the proceeds.
        The influence of Charles's High Chancellor, Jean le Sauvage, was for sale in the market-place, and the New Christians purchased it. They gave him ten thousand ducats in hand and promised him as much more when it should go into effect, to draw up a series of instructions to the officials of the Inquisition which would restrict their powers for persecution. These instructions prohibited that the salaries of inquisitors would be dependent on the fines and confiscations imposed by themselves, or that grants should be made to them from confiscated property or benefices of those whom they condemned, or that sequestrated property should be granted away before the condemnation of the owners; they prohibited that inquisitors and officials abusing their positions should be merely transferred to other places instead of being duly punished; or that those who complained of the tribunals should be arrested and maltreated; or that those who appealed to the Suprema should be persecuted; or that inquisitors should give information to those seeking grants as to the property of prisoners still under trial; or that prisoners under trial should be debarred from hearing mass and receiving the sacraments; or that those condemned to perpetual imprisonment should be allowed to die of starvation.
        These instructions show plainly enough what abuses existed in the administration of the Inquisition, and how a tribunal existing for the alleged purpose of maintaining and exalting the Catholic faith, was in fact little more than a vast engine of oppression and robbery for the benefit of public and private mercenaries, secular and religious. King Charles recognized the reality of the evils, and once expressed the private wish that the inquisition might not be used by men who thought more of the acquisition of property than of the salvation of souls; but he did not put his signature to the instructions prepared by Chancellor Sauvage, who shortly died, and the officials of the Inquisition continued to enrich themselves with the proceeds of the fines and confiscations they pronounced.
        About 1520, a formal proposition was made to King Charles to buy out his interest in the Inquisition. Responsible persons offered, if he would relinquish his rights therein, with those of his descendants forever, to pay him four hundred thousand ducats - one hundred thousand down, and the remained in three annual payments. (A ducat was worth a little more than $1.40). the parties went further and agreed, on condition that a bull be obtained from the pope prohibiting confiscations and pecuniary fines and penances, that they would defray all the rents, costs, and salaries of the Inquisition on a basis to be defined by Charles. Charles rejected the offer; evidently he estimated the worth of the Inquisition to him as above the proffered $560,000; or he may have been incapable of fulfilling the conditions. Two years later the offer was raised to seven hundred thousand ducats (nearly a million dollars) if confiscations should be abandoned, but the proposal was turned down, and the atrocities of inquisitorial procedure experienced no modification. It is notable that nobody proposed the abolition of the Inquisition altogether; the Spaniards were Catholics and they believed in the extirpation of heresy; they only asked that the orthodox might be protected from persecution and the loss of their fortunes to enrich a gang of bloodthirsty mercenaries.
        In 1526 Granada was separated from Cordova and provided with a tribunal of its own for the purpose of subjecting the Moriscos to the Holy Office. Here the inhabitants had something worse than confiscations to complain of, and they petitioned Charles to do away with the secrecy that gave opportunity for abuse. "They pointed out that a judge, if licentiously disposed, had ample opportunity to work his will with the maidens and wives brought before him as prisoners, and even with those merely summoned to appear, whose terror betrayed that they would dare to offer no resistance. In the same way the notaries and other subordinates, who were frequently unmarried men, had every advantage with the wives and daughters of the prisoners." All this, the petition recounted, was so generally understood that the positions of judges, notaries, and familiars to the Inquisition were sought by evil-minded men in order to gratify their propensities. The inhabitants of Granada offered to pay Charles fifty thousand ducats ($70,000) for the abolition of secrecy from the proceedings and prisons of the Inquisition, and assured him that the other provinces of Spain would pay like sums for the same object. Charles replied that "the faith would suffer by any change," which meant that if judges and subordinates could not have their way with Morisco wives and maidens the cause of religion would suffer; and since the faith must be maintained and exalted at all cost, the women must put up with outrage and say nothing, lest the cause of Christ should languish!
        The Cortes, or Parliament, of Toledo, in 1525, complained to Charles of the rascalities of the inquisitors and the lawlessness of the familiars, and asked that the secular judges might be empowered to protect citizens. Charles replied that if abuses existed he would have them corrected, but he never did so, and probably never thought of the matter again.
        Those who can may take the stand that the Spanish monarchs who supported the Inquisition were sincere in their protestation of belief that the "faith" more than repaid them for maintaining it at such frightful cost; but the evidence is against that view of the case. They saw hundred of innocent persons arrested, imprisoned, tortured, burned alive, and their families disrupted and disgraced. In return for this depopulation of the kingdom of its ablest and worthiest subjects, what did the monarch gain by their adherence to the church? Nothing but the hypocritical prayers of the priests. Would sane men make such a bargain? They would not and never did. These monarch s tolerated and protected the Inquisition because the Inquisition was a great robbers' roost, and the priestly highwaymen shared their plunder with the royal treasury. The facts do not support any other conclusion than that the Spanish monarchs were voluntary and deliberate accomplices in the crimes of the Inquisition because the blood of heretics could be coined into money.
        As early as 1385 the old inquisitor Eymerich, who held office in Aragon at the pleasure of Dominican authorities, complained that princes were unwilling to defray expenses because there were no rich heretics left whose confiscations excited their cupidity; hence the Inquisition in Aragon had fallen into innocuous desuetude. One hundred years later Aragon had filled up with wealthy New Christians, of Jewish lineage, thus providing something to tempt both fanaticism and greed, and Ferdinand resolved to revive the holy tribunal. Over this matter he had a falling out with Pope Sixtus IV, who wanted to know whether the Inquisition was a royal affair or a papal one, and whether the Holy See was to be altogether ignored in running it. Sixtus insisted that all appeals should be made to him instead of the king, for the right to entertain them was a very profitable one. Ferdinand replied that this was his Inquisition, and that if the Dominicans interfered with his pleasure he would break up the order.
        The pope's rejoinder came in the form of a bull, in which, with fine hypocrisy, his holiness charged that for some time the inquisitors of Aragon had been moved not by zeal for the faith but by cupidity; that many faithful Christians, on the evidence of slaves, enemies, and unfit witnesses, without legitimate proofs, had been thrust into secular prisons, tortured, and condemned as heretics, their property confiscated and their persons relaxed to the secular arm for execution; all of which was perfectly true, but as the same was true of the Inquisition everywhere, there was some assurance in the pope's quotation of Aragon as the particular scene of the infamied enumerated.
        His holiness, in the bull aforesaid, goes on to declare that in view of the many complaints reaching him, he has ordered that in future the names and evidence of accusers and witnesses should be communicated to the accused, who should be allowed counsel, and that the evidence for the defense and all legitimate exceptions should be freely admitted; that imprisonment should be in the church jails; that for all oppression there should be free appeal to the Holy See, with suspension of proceedings, under pain of excommunication removable only by the pope.
        Such a surrender of the pope to the New Christians or Conversos must have made his inquisitors everywhere "sit up and take notice", since here, for the first time in the history of the Inquisition, were orders that heretics should be treated as though they were human beings with rights which the Holy Office was bound to respect. The orders were not and never were intended to be carried out.
        It had been an invariable rule in inquisitorial procedure that confession of heresy to a priest was good only in the matter of conscience and no bar to prosecution later on. But the Pope in this bull decreed that all who had been guilty of heresy should be permitted to confess secretly to the inquisitors or church officials, who were required to hear them promptly and confer absolution, good in both the forum of conscience and that of justice, without abjuration, on their accepting secret penance, after which they could no longer be prosecuted for any previous acts, a certificate being given to them in which the sins confessed were not to be mentioned, nor were they to be vexed or molested thereafter in any way; and all this under pain of similar excommunication. It was ordered that this bull be read in all the churches, and that the names of those incurring censure under it be published in contravention of its provisions were declared to be null and void.
        Ferdinand saw at once that this bull, putting a spoke in the wheel of his Inquisition in Aragon, had been paid for by the money of the New Christians, and, suspecting that Gonsalvo de Royz had acted as their agent, he ordered that person arrested and not released without his order.