shop and library was very strict. At Yuste, Dr. Mathys had a small bible, in French and without notes, which, in these times of doubt and danger, he feared might get him into trouble. He therefore asked the secretary of state to procure him a licence to retain and read the volume. Vazquez replied that the inquisitors demurred about granting this request; and the prudent doctor, therefore, soon after intimated that he had burned the forbidden book in the presence of the emperor's confessor.

The physician judged wisely. When court ladies and Jeromite friars were attacked with the plague of heresy, and carried off to the hospitals of the inquisition, who could feel certain of escaping the epidemic, or the cure? The most catholic horror of the new doctrines was therefore professed at Yuste; and Gaztelu, reporting at the beginning of June, that ceaseless rain had been falling for nearly twenty days, remarked, that such weather would do much damage in the country, but that the errors of Luther would do far more. The emperor was much distressed by a rumour that a son of father Borja had been arrested at Seville. He immediately wrote to the secretary of state to send him a statement of the fact, and was relieved by learning that it was not known at court. It turned out to be a fiction of the friars of Yuste, who, thinking it hard that the fold of Jerome alone should have the shame of harbouring wolves in sheep's clothing, were nothing loath to cast a stone at the austerely orthodox and rapidly rising company of Jesus. On discovering the story's source the emperor was not greatly surprised; for, said Gaztelu, 'the friars and Flemings are ever filling his ears with fables, and I myself stink in their nostrils by reason of the many lies I have brought home to them.'

Another rumour, which was better founded, spoke of the arrest of Pompeyo Leoni, one of the royal artists.

Much annoyed, the emperor applied to Vazquez for information of the crime of Pompeyo, son of Leoni, the sculptor who made my bust and the king's, and brought them with him to Spain in the fleet in which I myself came hither.' The secretary answered that the sculptor was in prison for maintaining certain Lutheran propositions; and that he was sentenced to appear at an autode-fé, and afterwards suffer a year's imprisonment in a monastery; but that the busts were in safety.

At Seville, Fray Domingo de Guzman, also a new-made prisoner, was likewise known to the emperor. Of him, however, on hearing of his arrest, Charles merely remarked that he might have been locked up as much for being an idiot as for being a heretic.1 A more illustrious victim of the Andalusian holy office was Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, magistral-canon of Seville, and famous as a scholar, as a pulpit-orator, and as author of several theological works much esteemed both in Italy and Spain. He had attended the emperor in Germany as his preacher and almoner, and one of his writings was, at this time, on the imperial bookshelf at Yuste. For him Charles entertained more respect, and upon hearing that he had been committed to the castle of Triana, observed, 'If Constantino be a heretic, he will prove a great one.' Like Cazalla, the canon, after thundering against reform in the land of reform, had returned to Spain a reformer. His immediate 'merits,' for so the inquisition, with grim irony, called the acts or opinions which qualified a man for the stake, were certain heretical treatises in his handwriting which had been dug, with his other papers, out of a wall.

Notwithstanding the crowded state of the prisons, the inquisition did not see fit to vary, during this year, the

1 Sandoval, ii. 829.

2 Chap. v. p. 111.

monotony of the bull-fights by indulging the people with an auto-de-fé. The emperor was therefore dead before the unhappy clergymen, who had stood by his bed in sickness and conversed with him at table in health, were sent to expiate with their blood their speculative offences against the church. Dr. Cazalla

was one of fourteen heretics who were 'relaxed,' or, in secular speech, burnt, in May, 1559, at Valladolid, before the regent and his court. Unhappily for his party and for his own fair fame, the poor chaplain behaved with a pusillanimity very rare amongst Spaniards when brought face to face with inevitable death, or amongst men who suffer for conscience sake. Denying the crime of 'dogmatizing,' as the inquisition well called preaching, he confessed that he had held heretical opinions, and abjectly abjured them all. His tears and cries, as in his robe, painted with devils, he walked in the sad procession and stood upon the fatal stage, moved the contempt of his companions, amongst whom his brother and sister had also come calmly to die. At the price of this humiliation he obtained the grace of being strangled before he was cast into the flames. A report had spread amongst the populace that he had declared that, if his penitence and sufferings should obtain him salvation, he would appear the day after his death riding through the city on a white horse. The inquisitors, availing themselves of a rumour of which they perhaps were authors, next day turned a white horse loose in the streets, and caused it to be whispered that the steed was indeed ridden by the departed doctor, although not in such shape as to be visible to every carnal eye.' Fray Francisco de Roxas, amidst a band in which the shepherd and the muleteer were associated in suffering and

A. de Castro: Spanish Protestants, 98.

P

in glory with the noble knight and the delicate lady, died bravely, in October 1559, at Valladolid, in the presence of Philip the Second. Fray Domingo de Guzman suffered at Seville in 1560, in that auto-de-fé in which English Nicholas Burton also perished, and in which Juana Bohorques, a young mother who had been racked to death a few weeks before, was solemnly declared to have been innocent by her murderers themselves. Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, confessing to the proscribed doctrines, but refusing to name his disciples, had been thrown into a dungeon, dark and noisome as Jeremiah's pit, far below the level of the Guadalquivir, where a dysentery soon delivered him from chains and the hands of his tormentors. 'Yet did not his body,' says a churchman, writing some ages after, in the true spirit of orthodoxy, and with all the bitterness of contemporary gall,' 'for this escape the avenging flames.' At this same auto-de-fé of 1560, they burned the exhumed bones of Constantino, together with his effigy, modelled with some care, and imitating, with outstretched arms, the attitude in which he was wont to charm the crowds that gathered beneath his pulpit at Seville.

During the progress of the hunt after heretics Charles frequently conversed with his confessor and the prior on the subject which lay so near his heart. So keen was his hatred of the very name of heresy, that he once reproved Regla for citing, in his presence, in proof of some indifferent topic, a passage from a book by one Juan Fero, because that forgotten writer was then known to have been no catholic.2 In looking back on the early religious troubles of his reign, it was ever his

'Nicolas Antonio: art., Constantino Ponce de la Fuente.

Salazar de Mendoça: Dignidades de Castilla, fol. Madrid: 1617, fol. 161.

regret that he did not put Luther to death when he had him in his power. He had spared him, he said, on account of his pledged word, which, indeed, he would have been bound to respect in any case which concerned his own authority alone; but he now saw that he had greatly erred in preferring the obligation of a promise to the higher duty of avenging upon that archheretic his offences against God. Had Luther been removed, he conceived that the plague might have been stayed, but now it seemed to rage with ever-increasing fury. He had some consolation, however, in recollecting how steadily he had refused to hear the points at issue between the church and the schismatics argued in his presence. At this price he had declined to purchase the support of some of the protestant princes of the empire, when he first took the field against the Saxon and the Hessian: he had refused to buy aid at this price, even when flying with only ten horsemen before the army of duke Maurice. He knew the danger, especially for the unlearned, of parleying with heretics who had their quivers full of reasons so apt and so well ordered. Suppose one of their specious arguments had been planted in his soul, how did he know that he could ever have got it rooted out? Thus did a great man misread the spirit of his time; thus did he cling, to the last, to the sophisms of blind guides who taught that crass ignorance was saving faith, and that the delectable mountains of spiritual perfection were to be climbed only by those who would walk with stopped ears and hoodwinked eyes.

In this year, cardinal Siliceo having gone to St. Ildefonso's bosom, the vacant archiepiscopal throne of Toledo became a mark for the intrigues of every ambi

'Sandoval, ii. 829.