THE INQUISITOR-GENERALSHIP
Meanwhile there was a court revolution. María Luisa of Savoy, Philip’s wife, died February 11, 1714. The Princesse des Ursins, who had accompanied her to Spain and had become the most considerable personage in the kingdom, desired to find a new bride whom she could control. Giulio Alberoni, an adroit Italian adventurer, was then serving as the envoy of the Duke of Parma and persuaded her that Elisabeth Farnese, the daughter of his patron, would be subservient to her, and the match was arranged. December 11, 1714, Elisabeth reached Pampeluna and found Alberoni there ready to instruct her as to her course and his teaching bore speedy fruit. Des Ursins had also hastened to meet the new queen and was at Idiaguez, not far distant, where she received from the imperious young woman an order to quit Spain. Alberoni, who was in league with Giudice and hated Macanaz, painted him to Elisabeth in the darkest colors and his ruin was resolved upon.
He had been pursuing his duty as Fiscal-general of the Council of Castile; in July, 1714, he had occasion to make another report on the notorious evils of the Religious Orders, pointing out the necessity of their reform and asserting that the pope is not the master of ecclesiastical property and spiritual profits. Some months later he was called upon to draw up a complete reform of the Inquisition, suggested doubtless by the pending conflict, for which an occasion was found in an insolent invasion of the royal rights by the tribunal of Lima. The Council of Indies complained that the latter had removed from the administration of certain properties indebted to the royal treasury the person appointed by the Chamber of Accounts, on the plea that the owner was also a debtor to the Inquisition. Philip V thereupon ordered Macanaz, in conjunction with D. Martin de Miraval, fiscal of the Council of Indies, to make a report covering all the points on which the Holy Office should be reformed. The two fiscals presented their report November 14, 1714, exhaustively reviewing the invasions of the royal jurisdiction which, as we shall see hereafter, were constant and audacious, and their recommendations were framed with a view of rendering the Inquisition an instrument for executing the royal will, to the subversion of the jealously-guarded principle that laymen should be wholly excluded from spiritual jurisdiction.[786]
In the reaction wrought by Elisabeth and Alberoni, Macanaz was necessarily sacrificed. Philip, notoriously uxorious, speedily fell under the domination of his strong-minded bride and Alberoni became the all-powerful minister. Giudice, who had been loitering on the borders, was recalled and, on March 28, 1715, Philip abased himself by signing a most humiliating paper, evidently drawn up by Giudice, reinstating the latter and apologizing for his acts on the ground of having been misled by evil counsel.[787] Alberoni and Giudice, however, were too ambitious and too unprincipled to remain friends. Their intrigues clashed in Rome, the one to obtain a cardinal’s hat, the other to advance his nephew. Alberoni had the ear of the queen and speedily undermined his rival. Giudice was also tutor of the young prince Luis; on July 15, 1716, he was deprived of the post and ordered to leave the palace and, on the 25th, he was forbidden to enter it. He fell into complete disfavor and shortly left Spain for Rome, where he placed the imperial arms over his door. His resignation must have followed speedily for, on January 23, 1717, the tribunal of Barcelona acknowledges receipt of an announcement from the Suprema that the pope has at last acceded to the reiterated requests of Cardinal Giudice to be allowed to resign and has appointed in his place D. Joseph de Molines, as published in a royal decree of January 9th.[788] Alberoni obtained the coveted cardinalate but his triumph was transient. He replaced the king’s confessor, Father Robinet with another Jesuit, Father Daubenton, who soon intrigued against him so successfully and so secretly that the first intimation of his fall was a royal order, December 5, 1719, to leave Madrid within eight days and Spain in three weeks. He vainly sought an audience of Philip and was forced to obey.[789]
THE INQUISITOR-GENERALSHIP
Although the episode of Giudice is thus closed, the fate of Macanaz is too illustrative of inquisitorial methods and of royal weakness to be passed over without brief mention. He had incurred the undying hatred of the Inquisition simply in discharge of his duty as an adviser of the crown, with perhaps an excess of zeal for his master and an intemperate patriotism that strove to restore its lost glories to Spain. It was impossible to continue him in his high function while recalling Giudice and, as a decent cover for banishment, he was allowed, in March, 1715, to seek the waters of Bagnères for his health, when he departed on an exile that lasted for thirty-three years to be followed by an imprisonment of twelve. Giudice promptly commenced a prosecution for heresy, sufficient proof of which, according to the standards of the Holy Office, was afforded by his official papers. As he dared not return, his trial in absentia resulted, as such trials were wont to do, in conviction, and he seems to have been sentenced to perpetual exile with confiscation of all his property, including even five hundred doubloons which the king was sending to him at Pau through a banker of Saragossa. All his papers and correspondence in the hands of his friends were seized and his brother, a Dominican fraile, whom the king had placed in the Suprema, was arrested in the hope of obtaining incriminating evidence.[790]
Thenceforth he led a life of wandering exile, so peculiar that it is explicable only by the character of Philip. He was in constant correspondence with high state officials and was frequently entrusted with important negotiations. Sometimes he was under salary, but it was irregularly paid and for the most part he had to struggle with poverty. When the Infanta María Ana Vitoria was sent back to Spain from France, in 1725, he was commissioned to attend her to the border and from there he went as plenipotentiary to the Congress of Cambray, with the comforting assurance that the king was endeavoring to put an end to the affair of the Inquisition—an effort apparently frustrated by the influence of Père Daubenton.[791] It was possibly with a view to overcome this fatal enmity that he occupied his leisure, between 1734 and 1736, in composing a defence of the Inquisition from the attacks of Dr. Dellon and the Abbé Du Bos. In this he had nothing but praise for its kindliness towards its prisoners, its scrupulous care to avoid injustice, the rectitude of its procedure and the benignity of its punishments. Beyond these assertions, the defence reduces itself to showing that, from the time when the Church acquired the power to persecute, it has persecuted heretics to the death and that the heretics in their turn have been persecutors—propositions readily proved from his wide and various stores of learning and sufficient to satisfy a believer in the semper et ubique et ab omnibus.[792] Ten years later, when Fernando VI ascended the throne in 1746, Macanaz addressed him a memorial on the measures requisite to relieve the misery of Spain and in this he superfluously urged the maintenance of the Inquisition in all its lustre and authority.[793] In spite of all this it was unrelenting and his entreaties to be allowed to return were fruitless.
In 1747 he was sent to the Congress of Breda where he mismanaged the negotiations, deceived, it is said, by Lord Sandwich. Relieved and ordered, in 1748, to present himself to the Viceroy of Navarre at Pampeluna, after some delay he was carried to Coruña and immured incomunicado in a casemate of the castle of San Antonio, a prison known as a place of rigorous confinement. Even the authorities there compassionated him and, at their intercession, he was removed to an easier prison and permitted the use of books and writing materials. Here, during a further captivity of twelve years, the indomitable old man occupied himself with voluminous commentaries on the Teatro crítico of Padre Feyjoo and the España sagrada of Florez, with many other writings and memorials to the king. It was not until the death of the latter, in 1760, that Elisabeth of Parma, the regent and the cause of his misfortunes, liberated him with orders to proceed directly to Murcia. At Leganes he was greeted by his wife and daughter, with whom he went to Hellin, his birth-place, where he died on the following November 2d, in his ninety-first year.[794]
THE INQUISITOR-GENERALSHIP
There is no record of any further exercise of royal control over inquisitors-general until, in 1761, Clement XIII saw fit to condemn the Catechism of Mesengui for its alleged Jansenism in denying the authority of popes over kings. The debate over it in Rome had attracted the attention of all Europe and the prohibition of the book was regarded as a general challenge to monarchs.