little school children, who were immediately followed by the band of
prisoners, each attired in the horrible yet ludicrous manner described.
Then came the magistrates and nobility, the prelates and other
dignitaries of the Church: the holy inquisitors, with their officials and
familiars, followed, all on horseback, with the blood-red flag of the
"sacred office" waving above them, blazoned upon either side with the
portraits of Alexander and of Ferdinand, the pair of brothers who had
established the institution. After the procession came the rabble. When
all had reached the neighborhood of the scaffold, and had been arranged
in order, a sermon was preached to the assembled multitude. It was
filled with laudations of the inquisition, and with blasphemous revilings
against the condemned prisoners. Then the sentences were read to the
individual victims. Then the clergy chanted the fifty-first psalm, the
whole vast throng uniting in one tremendous miserere. If a priest
happened to be among the culprits, he was now stripped of the canonicals
which he had hitherto worn; while his hands, lips, and shaven crown were
scraped with a bit of glass, by which process the oil of his consecration
was supposed to be removed. He was then thrown into the common herd.
Those of the prisoners who were reconciled, and those whose execution was
not yet appointed, were now separated from the others. The rest were
compelled to mount a scaffold, where the executioner stood ready to
conduct them to the fire. The inquisitors then delivered them into his
hands, with an ironical request that he would deal with them tenderly,
and without blood-letting or injury. Those who remained steadfast to the
last were then burned at the stake; they who in the last extremity
renounced their faith were strangled before being thrown into the flames.
Such was the Spanish inquisition--technically--so called: It was,
according' to the biographer of Philip the Second, a "heavenly remedy,
a guardian angel of Paradise, a lions' den in which Daniel and other just
men could sustain no injury, but in which perverse sinners were torn to