Fourteen persons, men and women, all doomed to die by fire, formed a group in the centre of the scaffold. Sixteen others, condemned to infamy, confiscation and perpetual imprisonment, stood by their-we would say, more fortunate-companions. The costume of these two groups differed but little in appearance. All wore the coat of infamy, called san benito-a long slip of cloth, with an opening for the head, hanging loose before and behind. A high pointed cap of coarse paper was the only covering on the head of the prisoners. The impenitent were distinguished by the figures of flames and devils on these two parts of their dress. Near relatives-the sons and daughters of a wealthy citizencomposed the greatest part of the condemned group. They stood near the figure of a female placed upon a deal box. It was the effigy of Leonor de Vibero, their mother, whose bones were contained in the box, to be consumed in the same fire with her children. Augustin Cazalla, whom we have formerly mentioned, was the eldest. His dislocated limbs bore strong marks of the rack. Pain and the love of life had made him recant his opinions. He had been deluded with the hopes of mercy till the day before execution. Yet the barbarity of his tyrants was not sufficient to reanimate his courage. The unfortunate man was repentant. Not so his brother Francis de Vibero, a country vicar. The torture had once made him yield; but finding that he was to die, he loudly proclaimed his protestant principles, and expired calmly in the flames. Their sister, Beatrice de Vibero, was involved in the same fate. Out of regard to her humble submission, she was strangled before being thrown into the fire. John and Constance de Vibero, a brother and a sister of the preceding, appeared in the other group, under the sentence of imprisonment for life, confiscation and infamy. The latter was a widow with thirteen children. Cazalla the elder, when passing before the princess, on his way to execution, implored her protection for the orphans. The request must have been fruitless for what could be expected from hearts that could behold and hear these things without breaking? ; Our limits forbid us entering upon an enumeration of the victims which were, at this period, committed to the flames, or doomed to the worse pangs of a wretched existence in infamy, poverty and durance. We do not mean to harrow the feelings of our readers, nor keep our own on the rack longer than is absolutely necessary to do justice to the memory of the most worthy among these unknown martyrs of reformation. Thirteen Thirteen perished in the flames at the second Auto of Valladolid, on the 8th of October, 1559. Sixteen were confined for life under the usual aggravations of infamy and loss of their property. Don Carlos Seso, a noble Venetian, who had been the most active promoter of the Protestant cause, was among the first. He perished nobly at the stake. His wife, a descendant of the ancient kings of Castille, by a natural daughter of Peter the Cruel, wanted courage to follow her husband's example, and submitted to endure a life of infamy in a prison. There was still another Cazalla, the brother of those who perished in the preceding execution, to be exhibited at these cannibal shows. He twice lost and recovered his courage. A friar, who, with the usual obstinacy and perseverance, had harassed him to the last, extorted an act of submission when he was already bound to the stake. But we strongly suspect that many of these final triumphs were pretended by the assistant priests, to prevent the impression which the constancy of the victims might make upon the people. Among the females who suffered, at this time, were four nuns -one, in her twenty-first year. Though steady in their profession of the protestant faith, they were strangled before the wood was lighted; probably to obviate the shock which the sight of so many females burnt alive would give even to hearts armed with the triple mail of Roman orthodoxy. The priests gave out that they had asked absolution. It is, however, a fact, that all were bound to the stake before the supposed act of submission. The protestants of Seville afforded their persecutors much fewer opportunities of real or invented triumph. The instances of heroic firmness among them were so frequent and unquestionable that they hardly left room for fabricated reports of final conver sions. This pious fraud seems, however, to have been resorted to in the case of Don Juan Ponce de Leon, the son of a grandee, whose connection with all the peerage of Spain probably induced the inquisitors to diminish the imaginary infamy of his execution by the story of his late recantation. Montes, the Spanish protestant priest who, having saved himself by flight, published an account, in Latin, of the persecution at Seville, affirms that Leon died in the profession of the reformed doctrines. The Catholic records consulted by Llorente did not venture to deny his firmness till the last moment. Even allowing to the assistant priests that candour which, we well know, it is not the nature of their zeal to cherish, few victims would be found of such a powerful frame as to preserve their faculties unimpaired to the last. A long solitary imprisonment the torture endured more than once-the often repeated and alike distracting examinations before the secret court of of the tribunal—the agony of the whole period terminated by a day wholly employed in a barbarous exhibition, where every cir cumstance within the ingenuity of cruelty, indulged in the name of heaven, is employed to break the hearts of the prisoners by the agency of shame and terror-such overwhelming torrents of bitterness must, in the end, oppress and confound the faculties of any mind not endowed with something above human strength. Yet, of the thirty-five men and women who died at the two Autos of Seville, no less than twenty-seven submitted to be burnt alive rather than belie their conscience.* Thirteen of these heroic suf ferers were females; and most of them the wives, daughters, or sisters of distinguished individuals. Two Englishmen, the one named Burton, the other Brook, perished in the same flames, and with equal firmness. If the manly courage and Christian fortitude of the victims sup port the mind in the contemplation of these scenes, there is something approaching to satisfaction in the view of fallen virtue recovering, as it were, from the swoon which exposed her to pollution, and wrenching the palm of victory from her enemies at the very moment when death is about to exalt her for ever, far, far above their reach. Our readers probably recollect the fears which made Arias, the Hieronymite, betray his religious associates. No Spanish theologian had equalled him in the vehemence of his censures upon the doctrines which he secretly held in common with them. But this dastardly subterfuge could not clear him from the strong suspicions which existed against his orthodoxy. His trial and confinement lasted till the second Auto da Fe, when he was joined to his departed friends-those friends whom he had cruelly injured, but whom he might meet unblushing in the regions of bliss; for now the same fire which freed them from the dross of mortality, dispersed also the last stain of his shame. A priest, named Gonzalez, had, among other proselytes, gained over two young females, his sisters, to the protestant faith. All three were confined in the dungeons of the Inquisition. The forture, repeatedly applied, could not draw from them the least evidence against their religious associates. Every artifice was employed to obtain a recantation from the two sisters, since the constancy and learning of Gonzalez precluded all hopes of a theo logical victory. Their answer, if not exactly logical, is wonderfully simple and affecting. We will die in the faith of our brother: he is too clever to be wrong, and too good to deceive us.' The three stakes on which they died were near each other. The priest * The first of these Autos da Fe took place on the 24th September, 1559; the sccond on the 22d December, 1560. had had been gagged till the moment of lighting up the wood. The few minutes that he was allowed to speak he employed in comforting his sisters, with whom he sang the 109th Psalm, till the flames smothered their voices. The fatal end of Maria Gomez, the widow, who, in a state of mental derangement, betrayed the protestant congregation of Seville, is too affecting to be passed over. No sooner had she recovered her reason than the protestant doctrines resumed their former ascendancy in her mind. She was doubly united by the ties of blood and religious feeling with Leonor Gomez, her widowed sister, and three unmarried daughters of the latter, Elvira Nuñez, and Theresa and Lucy Gomez, whom, notwithstanding the difference in their sirnames, she had by the same husband, a physician of Seville. One of these young women being arrested, every effort of cruelty and deceit was employed to extort a confession implicating her mother, aunt and sisters. But she endured the rack in perfect silence. An inquisitor, piqued at this extraordinary firmness, took the determination of entrapping the prisoner by affecting a decided interest in her favour. He gave her private audiences, where his tone of paternal affection soon melted a heart which had so long been fed with tears and bitterness. She was made to believe that all danger would be removed from her dear relatives if the judge, who seemed so bent upon saving her, was put at once in possession of the whole truth. A declaration of this kind was all that the evidence wanted to be complete; and the five female relatives were condemned to the flames. Without the least sign of weakness, subterfuge, or wavering, the helpless creatures prepared themselves to die. They comforted each other on the scaffold—the young thanking the old for their cares, and religious instruction-and these pointing to heaven where, within a few moments, they all firmly hoped to embrace in never-ending happiness. We confess ourselves unable to dwell any longer upon this subject. There may be some who can look on these facts with stoic indifference, or over-refined fastidiousness. As for ourselves, the painful agitation under which we have executed this part of our task will, we trust, plead our excuse with such as might wish for a fuller account of this comparatively late period of religious persecution. To those, whom the monotony of these, alas! too often repeated scenes of martyrdom may move to charge us with some partiality to this sort of description, we pledge our word that, far from the attraction which either invented, or real but distant horrors have for some minds, it affects us with all the intolerable keenness of present reality. The scenes we have laid before them are deeply and indelibly stamped on our imagi nation. nation. In one case, indeed, we have seen the scaffold, supported on combustibles, where, a few hours after, a female perished at Seville.* Of more ancient executions we have that vivid conception which might haunt an eye-witness; for we have scanned, in early life, every figure of the large historical pictures of these scenes, which held a conspicuous place in the church of the Dominicans of Seville. We have read the lists of names devoted to perpetual infamy; and, almost daily, for many years, walked by the side of the large brick pediment, on which, near that town, thousands of human beings have been reduced to ashes.+ It is not with the views of a romance writer that we refresh these painful recollections. We would not, indeed, have submitted to this mental torture but from the strong persuasion that the records of religious intolerance should not be allowed to moulder in oblivion; nor should they, who still cherish the principles which produced these horrors, be allowed to disguise themselves in the sheep's clothing' which they are sure to assume whenever they want power. We felt, besides, another motive, which all, but the most thoughtless, will pardon-a wish to do some justice to the memory of the Spanish protestants, whose very existence is nearly unknown to their prosperous brethren of the north. Scenes so revolting to humanity as the Inquisition presented, with all the pomp and circumstance of national exhibitions, could not have been tolerated by a noble, generous people, but for the existence of those prejudices against all enemies of the faith which we have traced to their hatred of the Moors. But whilst the coupled ideas of religious dissent and degradation supported both church and state in the destruction of mental independence, the prejudice itself, by being acted upon to such a monstrous extent, became a gigantic evil, which stood in the way of improvement, and scouted every accession of knowledge, as threatening the honour of the nation by endangering its orthodoxy. The professional classes of the community saw the necessity of limiting their studies to the stock of ideas which were settled by a kind of prescription.. *In the year 1788. + The Quemadero (burning place) was demolished in 1810, to erect a battery against the approaching French army. The difference between the power of the Inquisition supported by Spanish prejudice, or left to work upon that degree of intolerance which exists among the multitude in all Catholic countries, may be observed in the contemporary events in Spain and Italy, at the period we speak of. On the 18th August, 1559, the day of Pope Paul IV.'s death, a Roman mob liberated the prisoners detained in the dungeons of the Inquisition, wounded the grand inquisitor, burnt the house to the ground, and were with great difficulty prevented from destroying the principal convent of the Dominicans. This happened only six weeks before the first Auto da Fe of Seville, and in the short interval between the two of Valladolid.-Fleury, Hist. Ecclésiastique, l. 154, anno 1559, §14, quoted by Llorente. VOL. XXIX. NÓ. LVII. R The |