Augustino de Cazalla (1510-1559), or Dr. Agustín Cazalla, was a Spanish clergyman, with humanist and Erasmist tendencies, who was prosecuted for founding a Protestant sect in Valladolid. The son of a royal accountant, Pedro de Cazalla, and Leonor de Vibero (or Vivero) - both were of 'converso' families - the nephew of Bishop Juan de Cazalla and the brother of María de Cazalla (of the group of illuminati in Guadalajara in 1525), he studied at the University of Valladolid with Bartolomé Carranza (who was also tried by the Spanish Inquisition) and at the University of Alcalá de Henares, where his uncle Juan was the former chaplain to Cardinal Cisneros and was also a renowned humanist and Erasmist. His classmate in Alcalá, Diego Laínez, was a founding member of the Society of Jesus.
Augustino was a canon in the cathedral of Salamanca and became chaplain to the Emperor Charles V, accompanying him throughout Europe. On his return to Valladolid in 1552, he joined a conventicle considered heretical. Among this group of religious elites was the corregidor of Toro, Carlos de Seso with whom he had been in contact Juan de Valdés in Italy. Despite the strict rules and secrecy practiced within the circle they were discovered.
Trial and conviction
Cazalla was subjected to a carefully managed trial by the Inquisitor General, Fernando de Valdés, who communicated his findings to King Philip II. Upon a confession of heresy, the penalty was burning at the stake at a religious ceremonial auto-da-fé held in Valladolid on 21 May 1559. Those who recanted, were granted the mercy of strangulation before burning. His siblings Francisco de Buiero, Beatriz and Pedro were also prosecuted and sentenced to the stake. Two more, Costanza de Buiero and Juan Buiero, were condemned to wear the Sanbenito and perpetual imprisonment (in all, they were ten brothers). The corpse of his mother Doña Leonora de Buiero was disinterred and thrown into the fire and as the "heretical" Lutheran conventicles had taken place in her home, the house was razed to the ground. A marble 'column of infamy' erected in its place, bore an inscription prohibiting the rebuilding of the house, or removal of plaque under penalty of excommunication and banishment from the Spanish realms.
Scabrous details emerged excoriating Cazalla and the activities of the conventicle:
"A cleric named José Cazalia [sic] lives in a certain city of Castile; He had planted a false and diabolical doctrine among the ignorant, and he summoned them to his house at dusk, a porter opened the door to each caller, who man or woman alike, on giving the name 'Cazuela', was admitted; being assembled he would give his lecture, and extinguishing the lights he would say: "Hallelujah, each with his own". And so each man would grab the woman that chance, or malice, placed next to him."
... there was a case of a boy of 13 or 14 years, whose mother, each night after he had gone to bed, would leave the home. Unable to discover where she would go, one night he followed her, and on seeing that she came to the house, and that calling and giving the name she entered it... he decided to call and give the same name as the others and enter. Having entered he had seen everything that happened, and when it came to the extinguishing of the lights, he did as the others; moved by curiosity he had cut a piece of the "basquine" (tight-fitting bodice) of the woman who he had touched, to see if he could come to know one day where he had been that night; the boy went home understanding nothing of what he had seen, but noticing that the basquine of his mother was missing the piece he had cut in the house of Cazalla, he understood that his mother was the woman he had known carnally. The next day he had confessed his guilt, and so the King's doctor came to be discovered, imprisoned and punished by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the house was sown with salt, and a stone plaque erected as an example and lesson to others for centuries to come.