Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. I.djvu/402

2^8 THE INQUISITION. PART Office, who has furnished the most authentic report ' of its transactions, not to have been exaggerated in any of the numerous narratives which have dragged these subterranean horrors into light. If the in- tensity of pain extorted a confession from the suf- ferer, he was expected, if he survived, which did not always happen, to confirm it on the next day. Should he refuse to do this, his mutilated members were condemned to a repetition of the same suffer- ings, until his obstinacy (it should rather have been termed his heroism) might be vanquished. ^^ Should the rack, however, prove ineffectual to force a confession of his guilt, he was so far from being considered as having established his innocence, that, with a barbarity unknown to any tribunal where the torture has been admitted, and which of itself proves its utter incompetency to the ends it proposes, he was not unfrequently convicted on the depositions of the witnesses. At the conclusion of his mock trial, the prisoner was again returned to his dungeon, where, without the blaze of a single fagot to dispel the cold, or illuminate the darkness of the long winter night, he was left in unbroken silence to await the doom which was to consign him to an ignominious death, or a life scarcely less ignominious. ^^ ^^Llorente, Hist, de I'lnquisi- pretending after each new inflic- tion, torn. i. chap. 9, art. 7. — tion of punishment, that they had By a subsequent regulation of only suspended, and not terminat- Philip IT., the repetition of torture cd the torture ! in the same process was strictly 43 Montanus, Inquisition of prohibited to the inquisitors. But Spaync, fol.24 etseq. — Limborch, they, making use of a sophism Inquisition, vol. ii. chap. 29. — worthy of the arch-fiend himself, Puigblaiich, Inquisition Unmasked, contrived to evade this law, by vol. i. chap. 4. — Llorente, Hist.