Article XXII

Should heretics who are delivered to the secular arm leave children who are minors and unmarried, the inquisitors shall provide and ordain that they be cared for and reared by some persons who will instruct them in our Holy Faith. The inquisitors shall prepare a memorial of such orphans and the circumstances of each, to the end that of the royal bounty alms may be provided to the extent necessary, this being the wish of the Sovereigns when the children are good Christians, especially in the case of girls, who should receive a dower sufficient to enable them to marry or enter a convent.

Llorente tells us that although he went through very many records of old proceedings of the Inquisition, in no single instance did he discover a record of any such provision in favour of the child of a condemned heretic.91

Harsh as were the decrees of the Inquisition in all things, in nothing were they so harsh as in the enactments concerning the children of heretics. However innocent themselves of the heresy for which their parents or grandparents might have suffered, not only must they go destitute, but further they must be prevented from ever extricating themselves appreciably from that condition, being inhibited—to the second generation—from holding any office under the Crown, or any ecclesiastical benefice, and from following any honourable or lucrative profession. And, as if that were not in itself sufficient, they were further condemned to wear the outward signs of infamy, to go dressed in serge, without weapons or ornaments, and never ride on horseback, under pain of worse befalling them. One of the inevitable results of this barbarous decree was the extinction of many good Spanish families of Jewish blood in the last decade of the fifteenth century.

This the inquisitors understood to be the literal application to practical life of the gentle and merciful precepts of the sweet Christ in Whose name they acted.

Eymeric and his commentator Pegna make clear, between them, the inquisitorial point of view. The author of the “Directorium” tells us that commiseration for the children of heretics who are reduced to mendicity must not be allowed to soften this severity, since by all laws, human and divine, it is prescribed that the children must suffer for the sins of the fathers.92

The scholiast expounds at length the justice of this measure. He says that there have been authors, such as Hostiensis, who pretend that it lacks the equity of the ancient laws, which admitted Catholic children to inheritance. But he assures us that they are wrong in holding such views, that there is no injustice in the provision, and that it is salutary, since the fear of it is calculated to influence parents and to turn them—out of love for their offspring—from the great crime of heresy.

To minds less dulled by bigotry it must have been clear that by this, as, for that matter, by many other of their decrees, all that was achieved was to put a premium upon hypocrisy.

Another consideration that escaped their notice—being, as they were, capable of perceiving one thing only at a time—was that if this precious measure was prescribed by all laws, human and divine, it should have been unavoidable. Yet they themselves provided the means of avoiding it—as we know—for the child vile enough to lay information of his parents’ heresy. By what laws, human or divine, did they dare to encourage such an infamy? By no law but their own—a law whose chief aim, it is obvious at every turn, was to swell the number of convictions.

What opinion was held of children who informed against their parents to avert the awful fate that awaited them should their parents’ heresy be discovered by others, is apparent in the case of the daughter of Diego de Susan—who, very possibly, was actuated by just such motives.