Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition

Migrants, Converts and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia

Thomas O'Connor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137465900
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This book explores the activities of early modern Irish migrants in Spain, particularly their rather surprising association with the Spanish Inquisition. Pushed from home by political, economic and religious instability, and attracted to Spain by the wealth and opportunities of its burgeoning economy and empire, the incoming Irish fell prey to the Spanish Inquisition. For the inquisitors, the Irish, as vassals of Elizabeth I, were initially viewed as a heretical threat and suffered prosecution for Protestant heresy. However, for most Irish migrants, their dual status as English vassals and loyal Catholics permitted them to adapt quickly to provide brokerage and intermediary services to the Spanish state, mediating informally between it and Protestant jurisdictions, especially England. The Irish were particularly successful in forging an association with the Inquisition to convert incoming Protestant soldiers, merchants and operatives for useful service in Catholic Spain. As both victims and agents of the Inquisition, the Irish emerge as a versatile and complex migrant group. Their activities complicate our view of early modern migration and raise questions about the role of migrant groups and their foreign networks in the core historical narratives of Ireland, Spain and England, and in the history of their connections. Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition throws new light on how the Inquisition worked, not only as an organ of doctrinal police, but also in its unexpected role as a cross-creedal instrument of conversion and assimilation.

Part I

Sixteenth Century

1

The European Context for Irish Migrant Mobility

The history of sixteenth-century Hispano-Irish relations is usually chronicled as a failed Catholic salvage operation bankrolled by Philip II, and bookended by the Desmond revolts and the Nine Years’ War. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to discover a substantially different narrative in the records of the Spanish Inquisition. For the Holy Office, Ireland was not Spain’s most favoured charitable object but, first and foremost, a threat, like England, to the religious and political integrity of the monarchy. In 1558, vassals of the Protestant English queen were, ipso facto, liable to arrest, trial and punishment for heresy. In 1604 her successor’s visiting vassals were granted, along with important commercial advantages, official immunity from inquisitorial interference. In between these two dates, separated by years of wars and conflict, the English and Spanish monarchies faced the challenge of cutting a confessional deal that would permit reasonable cooperation in one indispensably crucial area of mutual interest, trade. The pursuit of this end, historically obscured by the inquisitorial pyre, long periods of warfare and economic embargoes, was a constant in English–Spanish relations throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. Its successful solution in 1604 conferred special status on the Protestant vassals of the English monarch visiting Spain for trade, whether they were English, Irish or Scots. If, during the same time, Irish Catholic visitors to Spain emerged as a recognizable subgroup among the English monarch’s vassals, it was a consequence of this larger process. The achievement of ‘visibility’ for Irish Catholic vassals was mirrored by, and dependent on, the conferring of the special standing on the now Protestant English.¹ In this piecemeal process, the Inquisition played a crucial role. In 1558 its credit with the Spanish monarchy was high, and its responsibility for the maintenance of religious uniformity seemed unquestionable.² The reality was more complex. For Philip II, the Inquisition was not an autonomous religious authority but a tactical instrument of Habsburg strategy, responsive to its political and commercial interests.³ At the very heart of the Inquisition’s dealings with Irish and English visitors in the half-century after 1558 lay mundane raison d’état, diplomatic horse-trading and the greasy marks of commercial exchange.

Anglo-Spanish tensions

Philip II married Queen Mary in 1554, and in the following year he accepted the lordship of the Netherlands from his father, Charles V.⁴ These events created twin strategic priorities for Philip: the maintenance of peace in the Low Countries and good relations between England and Spain. It was difficult to conceive of one without the other. England was so close to the Netherlands and their economies so interdependent that, in a real sense, Philip had little choice but to court the English. While Mary lived, these strategic and economic interests were for the most part assured. With her death in 1558 and the accession of her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth, Spanish interests suffered a blow. For the new queen, Habsburg vulnerability in the Netherlands was an advantage to be exploited rather than palliated by alliance. Freedom to intervene in the Netherlands in England’s own interests rather than Spain’s gave strategic independence to the Elizabethan regime, and the opportunity to compete with Spain, gingerly at first, for a larger share in the American trade. Therein lay the rub. Despite the accession of a Protestant to the English throne and the champion of international Catholicism to the Spanish, the strategic fortunes of the two kingdoms were joined at the hip.

Philip was aware that the Netherlands were the soft underbelly of his Habsburg inheritance. So he trod carefully.⁵ Although Elizabeth’s succession was unfortunate, there was no immediate reason to assume that the Tudors’ renewed break with Rome would necessarily jeopardize Habsburg interests. The queen’s heresy was, of course, a disappointment, which distressed Philip. But while there was no doubting the sincerity of his attachment to Catholicism, Spain’s strategic priorities determined how he expressed it diplomatically and militarily. In the late 1550s, peace with England was desirable, and it was strategically important to foster it. As a token of his good intentions, Philip, for instance, refused to consider offers from discontented Irish nobility to harry the new queen in her Irish kingdom.⁶ His rebuff prompted complaints that his indulgence of the English queen was fostering heresy on her Catholic island.⁷ The king was unmoved, and his initial refusal was a token of things to come. He was prepared, on occasion, to listen to Irish requests for military assistance but responded only when assured that Habsburg interests were served.⁸ English Catholic militants had the same experience. For the king of Spain, faith in God and his dynasty were one.

In the meantime, he had a more immediate religious problem on his hands. Philip was still in the Netherlands when, in May 1558, the Inquisitor General, Fernando de Valdés, informed him that indigenous Protestant cells had been uncovered in Valladolid and Seville.⁹ A panicked inquisitorial clampdown followed, stoked by rumours of foreign Protestant infiltration. Stories spread of dissident Spaniards in collusion with English heretics to introduce a seditious fifth column into the peninsula.¹⁰ One English agent had claimed that, ‘it was a great miracle that so many countries had embraced Protestantism, Spain will do the same, notwithstanding the Inquisition’s vigilance and the country’s remoteness from the German Protestant heartland’.¹¹ Everywhere the Inquisitors looked, Protestantism was on the march.¹²

The panicky, paranoid mood was grist to the inquisitorial mill. For the periodically unpopular institution, the domestic Protestant crisis of the late 1550s and the accompanying fear of heretic infiltration were a godsend. Together they presented the Holy Office with a new opportunity to demonstrate its indispensability to the monarchy in the maintenance of religious orthodoxy and political obedience. The Holy Office seized the opportunity with both hands. Even before Philip had returned to Spain, the Inquisitor General, Valdés, had swung into action, securing extra inquisitorial powers from Pope Paul IV to investigate suspect clergy, including bishops. In a move to control the circulation of heretical ideas, strict censorship of the press was imposed and Spanish students were forbidden to frequent unauthorized foreign universities. In October 1559, hot on the heels of his homecoming, Philip attended in person the public penancing of heretics at the auto de fe in Valladolid.¹³

The crackdown was successful, not only in weeding out putative Spanish Protestants but also in demonstrating, once again, the efficiency of the Inquisition as the royal instrument par excellence of religious uniformity. Spanish Protestantism had been nipped in the bud, and for this the king was grateful.¹⁴ To keep heresy in check, however, it was also necessary to control the ingress of foreigners and their potentially pernicious ideas and books. Again the Inquisition stepped up to the mark, detaining Protestant merchants and confiscating their cargoes in Spanish ports, especially Seville.¹⁵ Among the detainees were traders from England and Ireland.¹⁶ This was not an entirely clinical exercise. It was the practice of the Holy Office to confiscate not only the property of the individual charged with heresy but also that of the entire ship in which he had sailed. This caused enormous disruption and prompted objections not only from foreigners but also from commercial interests in the Spanish ports. For them the Inquisition, which financed its activities in part through confiscated property, was acting self-interestedly, for personal enrichment rather than love of orthodoxy. There was more than a grain of truth to that accusation. However, despite local opposition to the Inquisition’s exactions and the constant importuning of the king on behalf of foreign traders, only interim concessions were granted and the situation for foreign merchants remained troublingly unpredictable.

For the queen’s Protestant vassals it was a dangerous time to be abroad. For the obedient majority of her trading vassals, public conformity became the order of the day, with recusants paying the price for their religious convictions, usually in fines. Even in Irish ports public conformity was enforced, and traders generally complied.¹⁷ However, difficulties arose for conforming Irish and English merchants when they dropped anchor in Spanish ports. For the Inquisition, they were apostate Catholics, who had culpably fallen into heresy. Ipso facto, they were liable to the penances imposed by the Holy Office, in the same way as backsliding conversos (converted Jews) and moriscos (converted Muslims). Initially, the prudent majority of visiting English and Irish conformists kept their heads down and observed Catholic rites, at least while in port. However, their practical dissimulation pleased neither their sovereign nor their hosts. Moreover, it bred precisely the sort of duplicity the Inquisition had been originally established to detect. Nor were all visiting Protestants happy with the deceit. Some despised their countrymen’s oily nicodemism. A few of the more missionary minded considered it their duty to enlighten the benighted Spaniards, and a handful paid the ultimate price.¹⁸

This created an awkward situation for Philip, who had to balance his religious obligations against his dynastic duties and his responsibility to keep his Spanish kingdoms prosperous. On the one hand, the Inquisition’s gung-ho attitude to prosecuting visiting merchants was perfectly justified both by its remit and by the threat of Protestant contagion in Spain. It was unthinkable that Philip would not do all he could to assist the Holy Office. Apart from the risk of running a bar sinister across the Habsburgs’ Catholic escutcheon, failure to act risked heretical contagion at home and encouraged demands for religious freedom in the Empire, especially the Netherlands. It would also contradict centuries of Spanish investment in religious orthodoxy against crypto-Judaism and Islam. On the other hand, Philip’s regime feared that inquisitorial activities in the ports would discourage international commerce and damage Spanish trade.¹⁹ It also risked provoking the English regime into retaliatory action on the high seas and potentially in the Netherlands. If Philip recognized the need for some sort of compromise for the sake of trade, he was, however, unsure how to go about it.

Inquisition and the English Embassy in Madrid

To compound his discomfiture, an English embassy was now on its way to Madrid.²⁰ Elizabeth, at this stage, anxious to avoid antagonizing the Spanish any more than was technically or operationally necessary, had appointed a Catholic ambassador, Sir Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague.²¹ However, he was mischievously partnered with the canny Protestant diplomat, Sir Thomas Chamberlain (1504–1580). This meant that, after the embassy’s arrival in early 1560, Philip had vassals of a Protestant monarch officially resident in the city. Although all members of the embassy were obliged to attend public Mass, the Inquisition suspected that the embassy harboured heretics, and bristled at the perceived provocation.

Worse was to come. On returning to England, Montague left the Protestant Chamberlain in charge, exacerbating the king’s difficulty. The Protestant ambassador, who conformed in public, had no reason to doubt the king’s protection. However, that security was a personal, not a real grace, attaching only to the body of the ambassador and not ‘extraterritorially’ to the embassy or to the queen’s vassals. Chamberlain was anxious to formalize his personal immunity. At this delicate moment a similar concession was not contemplated for the harried English and Irish merchants in Seville, but it fell to the ambassador to plead their cause too. In the recent past Chamberlain had pressed for his diplomatic rights, making a great fuss as ambassador in Brussels when Charles V forbade him to hold religious services in his house.²² In Madrid, however, he accepted the obligation to maintain the fiction of official Catholicism, fully understanding Philip’s unwillingness to grant anything more than personal assurances. But he was also resolved to obtain for the English mission in Madrid at least the same privileges as those accorded to the Spanish ambassador and his household in London.²³

In the meantime, the Inquisition kept a beady eye on the embassy, constantly on the lookout for breaches in public conformity. One came their way in October 1560 when Chamberlain’s own personal secretary, the Protestant Thomas Staferson, was denounced to the Holy Office. Surprisingly, the denunciation originated from within the embassy with Chamberlain’s Catholic majordomo, William Fayer, who does not appear to have appreciated fully the delicacy of his master’s position.²⁴ According to Fayer’s accusation, Staferson, on visiting a city church, had refused to make the sign of the cross with holy water. This public omission disturbed the pious majordomo and sparked a theological argument between them.²⁵ To Fayer’s consternation, Staferson then proceeded to deny the existence of venial sin. Worse again, during subsequent conversations in their lodgings, and in earshot of other servants, Staferson rejected Church teaching on purgatory and on the Mass. On foot of Fayer’s denunciation the Inquisition launched an investigation. Simultaneously, however, Chamberlain approached the duke of Alva whom he persuaded to intervene to abort the inquiry.²⁶ Raison d’état prevailed, obliging the Inquisition to drop the case. However, it continued to pester. Early in 1561 it interviewed the embassy laundry lady, Lucia Lopez, who had denounced an embassy servant, Thomas Quinn, for s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction
• Part I   Sixteenth Century
• Part II   Seventeenth Century
• Part III   Eighteenth Century
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index