An unpleasant doubt obtrudes itself whether in all cases the preliminary strangling really relieved the sufferer from death by fire. Spanish executioners are said to possess such dexterity in manipulating the garrote that they can prolong the death-agony for hours when they are not bribed to give a speedy release. In the universal venality of the period, it is possible that those, whose friends failed to earn the good-will of the minister of justice, were by no means insensible when the torch was applied to the faggots. There may have been more than mere lack of skill in the incident at the Cuenca auto of June 29, 1654, which gave Bartolomé López the opportunity of displaying his nerve. He had delayed professing conversion until after the reading of his sentence and was consequently relaxed for strangulation and burning. At the brasero, seeing that the executioner, Pedro de Alcalá, bungled in garrotting Violante Rodríguez and Ana de Guevara, he said to him "Pedro, if you do not treat me better, you had better burn me alive."[571]
According to inquisitorial jurisprudence, there were several causes which entailed relaxation. The first of these was pertinacity--the obstinacy which led the heretic or apostate to avow and defend his errors, and to resist the well-meant effort of his judges to save his soul by inducing conversion. This heroic temper, which preferred martyrdom to denying what it believed to be the truth, was not common, but the annals of the Inquisition are illustrated by cases of unknown and forgotten victims, whose persistence through torment and persuasion, to the fiery death at the brasero, ennobles human nature, whether they were Moslems or Jews, Protestants or Mystics. It was a blind perversity that refused to see in this aught but hardness of heart, inspired by Satan, and with empty rhetoric sought to draw a distinction between this and true martyrdom. Thus Simancas tells us that we should not be surprised to see heretics sometimes carried rejoicing to the stake. This is not true alacrity but madness, not patience but fierceness, and there is wide difference between barbarous fierceness and the modest constancy of the true martyr. Then there are those who, by certain arts, so benumb the body that it does not feel torments; there are also those who deprive the mind of sense, so that they meet death without fear, but that gentleness and placidity, that sublime humility and humble sublimity, we see only in the martyrs of Christ.[572]