In the Indies, where distance rendered application to the Suprema virtually impossible, the tribunals seem to have retained the power of modifying sentences, even though they may rarely have exercised it. In 1663 an old woman, known as Isabel de Montoya, tried for sorcery in Mexico, was sentenced to appear in an auto de fe with the sanbenito, to receive two hundred lashes and to serve for life in a hospital. In the audience-chamber, November 5th, the sentence was read to her, in presence of the fiscal and her advocate. With the assent of the latter, she begged that the sanbenito and the scourging be omitted; she had only been an impostor and had had no pact, expressed or implied, with the demon, and in view of her age and sickness and crippling in the torture she supplicated mercy. On November 7th the fiscal replied to this, asking an aggravation of punishment because it proved her to be an impenitent in denying her pact and intention. November 21st the consulta de fe assembled and unanimously confirmed its former sentence.
The auto de fe was not celebrated until May 4, 1664; on the 6th she was duly scourged through the streets and on the 15th she was delivered to the Hospital del Amor de Dios. Her pitiful prayer, urging age and sickness, was justified for, on June 17th, a messenger from the hospital announced her death, and the inquisitors briefly ordered it to bury her.[261]
As regards cruelty, it is impossible to generalize, where in the earlier periods so much discretion was allowed to the tribunals, and so much depended on the temper of the inquisitors, who might be stern or humane. In the case of the obstinate heretic or of the _impenitente negativo_ there was no question; the law of the land and universal public opinion alike condemned him to the stake but, in the wide sphere of the penitent heretic and of the numerous offences of which the Inquisition had cognizance, there was an ample field for the display of severity or benignity. Against the barbarity of a case like that of Isabel de Montoya, which had too many parallels, may be set the tendencies of the Toledo tribunal about 1600. In its reports to the Suprema at that period there, frequently occur explanatory remarks, as though to apologize for the mildness of the sentences, which indicate its readiness to temper its judgements--such expressions as "she was a poor and ignorant woman," "she was simple and ignorant," "she was spared heavier penance because she was only sixteen years old," "she seemed a very simple and a very good woman," "recent baptism and drunkenness." Occasionally, in bigamy cases, involving scourging and the galleys according to rule, the omission of these is justified by the age or weakness of the culprit. Sometimes, but not often, the suffering which the prisoner has endured during prolonged imprisonment is taken into consideration, and is admitted as part of the punishment.[262] This tendency towards mercy becomes more marked in the period of decadence, when the humanitarian development of the age made itself felt even in the Inquisition, and it offers a suggestive contrast to the savage fanaticism of the secular courts of a land which claimed to be more enlightened than Spain. In 1765 a wooden crucifix on the bridge at Abbeville was mutilated and the Bishop of Amiens published a _monitoire_ ordering, under pain of excommunication, any one having knowledge of the matter to denounce the offender. Duval de Saucourt, a counsellor in the court of Abbeville, who was inimical to the Abbess of Villancourt, accused her nephew, the Chevalier de la Barre, a youth of nineteen. The only evidence was that he had once passed a procession without lifting his hat, that he had talked against the Eucharist and had sung impious and licentious songs. He was doubtless irreligious and debauched, and his evil reputation sufficed, in the court of Abbeville, to justify a sentence of amputating his tongue and right hand and burning him alive. Appeal was made to the Parlement of Paris which, by a vote of fifteen to ten, confirmed the sentence, with the mitigation of beheading before concremation and this was duly executed, July 1, 1766.[263] The annals of the Spanish Inquisition offer nothing more hideous than this, and the comparison is the more instructive in that its penalty for sacrilegiously outraging an image of Christ, the Virgin or the saints, with aggravating circumstances, was merely appearance in an auto de fe with the insignia of a blasphemer, abjuration _de levi_ and a hundred lashes or vergüenza or exile, according to the character of the offence and of the culprit.[264]