“There is no country in Europe whose history is so tragic as that of Spain.”2 So the nineteenth-century Scottish Church leader J A Wylie declared. Partly he had in mind the country’s economic condition, but he was most interested in its religious history.
“In Spain”, Wylie pointed out, “the Reformers had to encounter unaided the whole power of Philip II, pushed on by the Pope.” Not least, they had to face the ruthless power and the highly-organised force of the Inquisition. “Before they had time to organise,” Wylie adds, “or had gathered strength from numbers, or enlisted public opinion on their side, the blow fell upon them and crushed them.” Yet “before the Inquisition, ever on the watch . . .
5Vol 27, no 6, (October 1922).
1This is the first section of a longer version of a paper delivered by the Editor at the 2014 Theological Conference.
2J A Wylie, Daybreak in Spain, Edinburgh, nd, p 1.
had even suspected that Reformed opinions had entered Spain, the gospel numbered its converts by thousands and had spread through all parts of the country . . . . The cause of Rome was well-nigh lost before she knew it was in peril. Whole villages had become Protestant. The light found its way into the convents; and in some instances whole communities of monks and nuns embraced the gospel, and the fact was known only when their sudden flight left the buildings empty.”3
Yet the Spanish Church had already undergone a reformation, albeit one that was merely moral, rather than one which involved the saving work of Holy Spirit. Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros was appointed Archbishop of Toledo in 1495, when Ferdinand and Isabella were the first rulers of the united kingdom of Spain. The Queen was concerned to cleanse the Church in her realms, and Ximenes was placed in charge of the operation. For instance, he went round the monasteries and insisted on the strictest discipline. He also made arrangements to provide education for the clergy and removed from their positions those who were totally ignorant. But something far more was needed.
On 31 October 1517 Martin Luther, then a professor of theology at Wittenberg University, nailed his 95 theses, on the subject of indulgences, to the door of the local church – a date and an action which are taken to mark the beginning of the Reformation. Less than two years later, at the beginning of 1519, a collection of tracts by Luther, in Latin, appeared in Spain; they had come from John Froben, a well-known printer in Basel. But in the next year Luther’s commentary on Galatians was translated into Spanish, a book which contains his fundamental, distinctively-Reformed teachings on justification by faith alone. This was followed by other translations, which were probably carried out in Antwerp, then part of the Spanish Netherlands. The cost was borne by Spanish merchants trading in the city, and they would have found it easy to get such literature to Spain along with other goods.
Alphonso Valdes was a young, able Spaniard who had accompanied Charles V to his coronation, as a secretary. Peter Martyr Vermigli, an Italian Reformer, had employed the skills of Valdes in 1520, when he had him translate into Spanish an account of the religious dispute in Germany; the account concluded with Luther burning the Pope’s decrees at Wittenberg. The following year Valdes continued the history until the end of the Diet of Worms. M’Crie believed that Valdes’ account was “in general correct; and although he expresses great horror at the boldness with which the Reformer attacked the papal authority, he acknowledges the necessity of reform and ascribes
3Daybreak in Spain, pp 18-19.
the continuance of the evil to the aversion of the Pope to a general council, and ‘his preferring his private interest to the public good’”. Clearly Valdes, though recognising defects in the Roman system, was still entangled with it, for he continues, still referring to the Pope: “While he tenaciously adheres to his rights, and shutting his ears, under the influence of a pious feeling perhaps, wishes to have Luther devoted to the flames, the whole Christian commonwealth is going to ruin, if God interpose not”.4
In March 1521, the Pope, Leo X, directed the civil authorities in Spain to take steps to prevent the books of Luther and his defenders entering the country. Within a month, the future Pope Adrian VI, then a Cardinal in Spain and acting as regent of the country in the King’s absence, was directing the Inquisition to seize all books of this kind. At this point in time, the Inquisition was more focused on the writings of Erasmus than those of Luther. Though Erasmus wrote against defects in Roman Catholic practice, he never left the Church and did not give up the distinctive doctrines of Rome; he certainly was not a Protestant. The unreformed nature of his doctrine led to controversy between him and Luther over the freedom of the will; Luther’s contribution to this debate was The Bondage of the Will. The Inquisition in Spain was intensely hostile to Erasmus’ writings and put great effort into pursuing his followers and his books, dishonestly conflating his teachings with those of Luther. Indeed the writings of Erasmus had a greater circulation in Spain than in any other country in Europe.
In 1533 Juan de Vergara, a leading Greek scholar and a personal friend of Erasmus, was arrested on the orders of the inquisitors of Toledo. Though he was no Lutheran, the inquisitors held him in their dungeons until he had abjured what they described as the heresy of Luther and had submitted to certain penances. We see here the mindset that would allow no deviation from strict Romanism and would use all manner of oppression to prevent any such deviation from taking hold in Spain. Yet this was the country whose king, Charles V, had waged war with Pope Clement VII and in 1527 had even imprisoned him.
When Charles V appeared at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 to settle the religious affairs of his German Empire, the King had many Spanish attendants
4Thomas M’Crie, The Reformation in Spain, Hartland Publications reprint, 1998, p 125-6. This reprint has been reset, but the original pagination, of the 1824 edition, has also been included; it is the original pagination that has been used here. Page references in the text are to this volume. It is worth noting that A Gordon Kinder in his bibliography of Spanish Protestants and Reformers in the Sixteenth Century (Grant and Cutler Ltd, 1983, p 68), comments on M’Crie’s volume as follows: “Despite its age, this book is remarkably reliable”. This praise should not surprise anyone who realises how thorough M’Crie’s research was.
around him. Valdes, the King’s secretary, had a number of meetings with the Reformer, Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon expressed disappointment about the strong Spanish prejudices against the Reformers; he referred to his many efforts, by word of mouth and by correspondence, to set the record straight, but he confessed that he had very little success.
Valdes acknowledged that it was commonly believed in Spain that Luther and his followers did not believe either in God or the Trinity, in Christ or the Virgin Mary, and that it was thought as meritorious an action to strangle a Lutheran as to shoot a Turk. He told Melanchthon of his efforts to help the Emperor to understand the Reformed position better and that the Emperor had expressed the wish that Melanchthon should draw up a clear summary, point by point, of the differences between the Lutheran and the Roman Catholic doctrines. Melanchthon willingly did so, and Valdes passed the document on to Campeggio, the papal legate. Valdes had actually read the Augsburg Confession before it was presented to the Diet; his only objection apparently was that the language used against its opponents was rather severe. But when he returned to Spain, he was accused to the Inquisition and condemned as a suspected Lutheran.
Among Valdes’ friends was Alphonso de Virves, a learned Benedictine who was Charles V’s chaplain. The King was so fond of his chaplain that, after returning to Spain, he would listen to no other preacher. The chaplain, however, was known to appreciate, to some extent, the writings of Erasmus; he was also known to have conversed with some of the Reformers. This was enough to attract the suspicions of the Inquisition in Seville, in southern Spain. He was arrested, and nothing he could do could release him from the ruthless power of the Inquisition. He pointed to the fact that he had written a volume against Melanchthon, then ready for the printers, but it was in vain.
The King tried to stop the Inquisition pursuing his favourite preacher and to banish the Inquisitor-General from Seville, but this too was unsuccessful. De Virves spent four years in prison before he was condemned as suspected of holding Lutheran views. He was sentenced to making a formal abjuration, in general, of Luther’s doctrines and, in particular, of those errors that he was suspected of accepting. He was also sentenced to confinement in a monastery for two years and was barred from preaching for an additional two years. It shows the huge power of the Inquisition when it could so act in the face of the King’s wishes.
The Spanish Inquisition was not a new institution brought into existence to resist the Reformation. It dated back to 1478 – and to 1238 in Aragon, then a separate nation. It was established to root out Jews and Moors who professed to be Roman Catholics but were suspected of practising their former
religion secretly. It has been described as “the most efficient instrument for the suppression of dissent yet developed”.5 It illustrates the determination of the Inquisition to snuff out any deviation from its idea of orthodoxy that it was suspicious of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and barred him from preaching for three years. One inquisitor stated to his colleagues in 1578: “We must remember that the main purpose of the trial and execution is not to save the soul of the accused but to achieve the public good and put fear into others”.6
Yet there were occasions when the Inquisition succeeded, not in stamping out someone’s Protestant beliefs, but in bringing him to understand the truth. One such was a simple soul from the Spanish countryside who was brought before the inquisitors of Seville accused of telling some friends that he did not think there was any purgatory but the blood of Christ. He admitted that he had indeed said so but indicated his willingness to retract, since the idea was offensive to the priests. They were not satisfied; they pointed out that this one error implied a multitude of others: if there was no purgatory, then the pope, who had decreed its existence, could not be infallible; general councils had erred; justification was by faith; and so on. It was pointless for the man to declare that these thoughts had never entered his head; he was sent to prison until he would be prepared to retract them. But when these ideas had entered his head, he considered them seriously, and he left prison a confirmed Lutheran.
According to M’Crie, the first person in Spain to embrace the Reformation faith and become active in spreading it was Juan Valdes. He had a university education and held a position at court. When Charles V left Spain in 1535, Valdes followed him and was sent to Naples, part of the King’s dominions, as a secretary to the viceroy there.
Before leaving Spain, he committed his thoughts to writing in a piece entitled, Advice on the Interpreters of Sacred Scriptures. Valdes originally sent this as a letter to his friend Bartolomé Carranza, later Archbishop of Toledo. It contained the following statements: (1) in order to understand the sacred Scriptures, we must not rely on the interpretations of the Fathers; (2) we are justified by a lively faith in the passion and death of our Saviour; (3) thus we may attain to a certainty concerning our justification (pp 141-2). The Inquisition already had suspicions about Carranza’s orthodoxy, but when he was arrested, Valdes’ letter was discovered and formed one of the most serious pieces of evidence against him. Carranza acted inconsistently at times, but he spent 17 years in prison because of his beliefs, and died there.
5W R Estep, Renaissance and Reformation, Eerdmans, 1986, p 284.
6Quoted in Michael Baigen and Richard Leigh, The Inquisition, Penguin, 2000, p 67.
Valdes’ contribution to the Spanish Reformation continued from outside the country – through his writings, which included a commentary on Romans. His doctrine reflects Luther’s but also reflects the influence of Tauler, one of the fourteenth-century German mystics, who for a time had a great influence on Luther himself.