deposition
of the witnesses. If needful at this point, he was put to the torture,
again and yet again.[84] He never heard the names of his accusers, nor
was he furnished with a full bill of the charges against him in writing.
At this stage he was usually remanded, and the judicial proceedings were
deliberately lengthened out with a view of crushing his spirit and
bringing him to abject submission. For his defence he might select one
advocate, but only from a list furnished by his judges; and this
advocate in no case saw the original documents of the impeachment. It
rarely happened, upon this one-sided method of trial, that an accused
person was acquitted altogether. If he escaped burning or perpetual
incarceration, he was almost certainly exposed to the public ceremony
of penitence, with its attendant infamy, fines, civil disabilities, and
future discipline. Sentence was not passed upon condemned persons until
they appeared, dressed up in a San Benito, at the place of punishment.
This costume was a sort of sack, travestying a monk's frock, made of
coarse yellow stuff, and worked over with crosses, flames, and devils,
in glaring red. It differed in details according to the destination of
the victim: for some ornaments symbolized eternal hell, and others the
milder fires of purgatory. If sufficiently versed in the infernal
heraldry of the Holy Office, a condemned man might read his doom before
he reached the platform of the _auto_. There he heard whether he was
sentenced to relaxation--in other words, to burning at the hands of the
hangman--or to reconciliation by means of penitence. At the last moment,
he might by confession _in extremis_ obtain the commutation of a death
sentence into life-imprisonment, or receive the favor of being strangled
before he was burned. A relapsed heretic, however--that is, one who
after being reconciled had once again apostatized, was never exempted
from the penalty of burning. To make these holocausts of human beings
more ghastly, the pageant was enhanced by processions of exhumed corpses
and heretics in effigy. Artificial dolls and decomposed bodies, with
grinning lips and mouldy foreheads, were hauled to the huge bonfire,
side by side with living men, women, and children. All of them
alike--_fantoccini_, skeletons, and quick folk--were enveloped in the
same grotesquely ghastly San Benito, with the same hideous yellow miters
on their pasteboard, worm-eaten, or palpitating foreheads. The
pro