PROTESTANTISM - The Library of Iberian Resources Online

Nor were there altogether lacking cases, like those of Centellas and Arquer, in which conscientious
conviction carried the delinquent to the stake, as that of Pedro Mantilla, a student of Vezerril in. Old
Castile, who, in 1585, was relaxed at Saragossa as a pertinacious heretic, who was Arian in denying the
Trinity and Lutheran in rejecting papal authority. (93)
The last relic of the movement of 1558 was the Catalan, Pedro Galés, reckoned as one of the most
learned Spaniards of the age, and highly valued as a correspondent by such scholars as Isaac Casaubon,
Cujas and Arias Montano. As early as 1558 he had commenced to reject some of the Catholic dogmas,
but he escaped suspicion and enjoyed intimate relations with Archbishop Antonio Agustin, who made
him one of the interlocutors in his celebrated Dialogi de Emendatione Gratiani--the first assault on the
authority of the False Decretals. About 1563 he left Spain for Italy, where he made progress in heresy,
leading to his prosecution by the Roman Inquisition and the loss of an eye under torture. Abjuration
saved him and, in 1580, he returned to Spain, where Don Juan de Idiaquez sought to secure him as tutor
to his son Alonso. In 1582 he passed through Italy to Geneva, where he married and occupied the chair
of philosophy until 1586. He rejected some of the Calvinist doctrines and, leaving Geneva, he taught in
Nîmes, [455] Orange and Castres, holding frequent disputes with Huguenot preachers. Accompanied
by his wife and two little daughters, he was on his way to Bordeaux, in August, 1593, when the
Leaguers at Marmande arrested him as a Huguenot, with his precious accumulation of MSS. and books
in ten bales. He was delivered to the Capitan Pedro Sarravía, who had been placed by Philip II at the
service of the Marquis of Villars, Governor of Guyenne. He made no secret of his belief and Sarravía
was impressed with the extreme importance of the information which the Inquisition could extract from
him as to his co-religionists, but the Governor of Marmande refused to convey him across the border
and, when Villars was applied to, he obligingly offered to hang or drown the heretic, but shrunk from
the responsibility of extraditing him. The distracted wife was imploring the officials to liberate her
husband and Sarravía was consumed with anxiety lest she should succeed while he was seeking the
intervention of Philip. In this he succeeded; Galés was surrendered to the tribunal of Saragossa, where
he freely admitted his faith and stubbornly refused conversion, but his endurance was mercifully spared
by sickness and death after his third audience and, as an impenitent, his bones and effigy were burnt in
the auto of April 17, 1597. (94)
In all, the cases of so-called Lutheranism, collected by Dr. Schäfer, up to 1600, amount to 1995, of
which 1640 are of foreigners and 355 of Spaniards, and he estimates that he has succeeded in finding
about two-fifths of the autos de fe of the thirteen tribunals of the mainland. (95) This probably conveys a
reasonably accurate impression as to the comparative numbers of the two classes, but it would be a
gross error to regard all the Spaniards as real Protestants, for the great majority may be assumed to
have been Protestant only in the imagination of the calificadores.
In the seventeenth century scattering cases continue to occur from time to time among Spaniards, but
their treatment indicates that there was no longer felt the necessity of making examples. Fray Juan
González de Carvajal, a Benedictine who had been expelled from his Order for repeated escapes,
embraced Calvinism, which he confessed in France and obtained absolution; again he confessed it
judicially in the Roman Inquisition, and yet again in the Toledo tribunal and was reconciled. Then, in
1622, he was [456] tried in Valladolid, where he told all this freely, but with such signs of repentance
that the consulta de fe voted only to reconcile him in a public auto, with ten years of galley-service and
perpetual prison. While waiting an auto he sought an audience and confessed that he had again
relapsed; there was no choice now but to sentence him to degradation and relaxation, but the Suprema
mercifully modified this to reading his sentence in the audience-chamber, where his sanbenito was to
be removed, perpetual deprivation of his functions as deacon and life-long imprisonment. (96) There