At seven o'clock the next morning the King and Queen left the palace in their coach, followed by the whole Court; and when the royal party had seated themselves in their gay bedizened balconies, the long procession of the Inquisition, { 152} with swaying censers, flaming tapers, and propitiatory dirges, wound into the plaza under the archway from the Calle Mayor. First came the alguaciles of the municipality and the town officials, then the alguaciles of the Court and the officers of the Royal Council; seventy hooded familiars of the dread tribunal with their big crosses upon their sombre garb, followed with the crowd of consultants, notaries, and prosecutors of the Holy Office. After them walked the municipality of Madrid, then the Chief Constable of the Inquisition alone, followed by the fiscal of the Inquisition of Toledo bearing the banner of the Holy Office, whose tassels were held by fiscals of Castile. The Inquisition of Toledo came next, and then the Supreme Council of the Inquisition itself, the last and most important member being Cardinal Zapata, the Inquisitor-General.
When all had taken their places, the Cardinal, as usual, ascended to the royal balcony and administered to the King the oath to keep inviolate the purity of the Church at any cost, an oath afterwards repeated by the members of the tribunal itself and the Councils. Upon a lower staging before the official platform were grouped the forty wretched creatures in their flaming tabards of shame, whose offence this pompous show was to punish. An interminable sermon was preached by the King's confessor, Sotomayor, exhorting the accused to repent and the faithful to increased zeal in the extermination of the enemies of the holy faith; and then the dread sentences were read out by the relator. Seven of the accused were condemned to be burned alive that night { 153} outside the gate of the city, and four more were to be executed in effigy, whilst their bodies rotted for life in the secret dungeons of the Holy Office; the rest being sent back to their prison, probably never again to see the light of day, and to suffer unrecorded tortures until death should release them. The house where the offence was said to have been committed was doomed to be swept utterly from the face of the earth, and a church and monastery dedicated to Christ crucified erected in its place.[22] By the time the condemned were led away it was three o'clock in the afternoon; and whilst the wretched prisoners in their _sambenitos_, amidst the curses and insults of the crowd, went to their doom, the smart company of courtiers, together with King Philip and his wife, returned to their respective homes and their much-needed repast, doubtless in an exceedingly self-approving and pharisaical mood.[23]