om neglected, was exactly observed in
the case of the poor chaplain. Denying the offence of dogmatizing, he
confessed having held heretical opinions, and offered to abjure them.
Nevertheless he was "relaxed," or in secular speech, burnt, with
thirteen companions, at Valladolid, in the presence of the
princess-regent and her court.

A more illustrious victim of the holy office was Constantine Ponce de la
Fuente, canon of Seville, and famous both as a pulpit orator, and as
author of several theological works, which were much esteemed in Italy
as well as Spain. He, too, had attended the emperor in Germany, as his
preacher and almoner. For him Charles seemed to entertain more respect;
for upon hearing that he had been committed to the castle of Triana, he
remarked, "If Constantine is a heretic, he will prove a great one." The
canon's "merits," for so the inquisition, with a sort of grim humor,
called the acts or opinions which qualified a man for the stake, were
certain heretical treatises in his handwriting, which had been dug with
his other papers out of a wall. Confessing to the proscribed doctrines,
but refusing to name his disciples, he was thrown into a dungeon, damp
and noisome as Jeremiah's pit, far below the level of the Guadalquivir,
where a dysentery soon delivered him from his chains. "Yet did not his
body," says the historian[K] of Spanish literature, writing several ages
after, with all the bitterness of a contemporary, "for this escape the
avenging flames." His bones, and a carefully modelled effigy of him,
with outstretched arms, as he charmed the crowd from the pulpits of
Seville, figured at the _auto-da-fe_ which, in 1560, illuminated the
burning-place, the _quemadero_, of that city. Another sufferer there,
Fray Domingo de Guzman, was also known to the emperor. His arrest,
however, merely drew from him the contemptuous remark, that fray Domingo
might have been shut up as much for idiocy as for heresy.

In looking back on the religious troubles of his reign, Charles bitterly
regretted that he did not put Luther to death when he was in his power.
He had spared him, he said, on account of his pledged word, which,
indeed, he would have been bound to respect had the offences of Luther
merely concerned his own authority; but he now saw that he had erred, in
preferring the obligation of his promise to the greater duty of avenging
upon that arch-heretic his offences against God. Had Luther been
removed, he concei