Tag Archives: seville

1781: Beata Dolores, the last victim of the Spanish Inquisition

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(Thanks to Henry Charles Lea for the guest post on the last person done to death by the Spanish Inquisition, “Beata Dolores”, who on August 24 of 1781* became in Seville the last person ever sent to the stake by the Spanish Inquisition. Lea’s summary first appeared in his Chapters from the Religious History of Spain Connected with the Inquisition. -ed.)

More remarkable in every respect was the case of Maria de los Dolores Lopez, known as the Beata Dolores, who suffered as a Molinist, in 1781, at Seville.

She was, or pretended to be, blind and ascribed her ability to read and write and embroider to miraculous interposition. At the age of twelve she left her father’s house to live as a concubine with her confessor. Four years later he died, when she went to Marchena and assumed the habit of a beata [a nun -ed.] which she continued to wear.

Her quick intelligence gained for her a high reputation among the people, who imagined that only supernatural gifts could enable a blind person to divine things so readily. The fame of her sanctity and of the special graces enjoyed by her spread far and wide; she held long conversations with her guardian angel, after the fashion of Josepha de San Luis Beltran, but her career at Marchena was brought to an end by her corrupting her confessor. He was relegated to a convent of rigid observance and she went to Seville, where she followed the same hypocritical life for twelve years till, in July, 1779, one of her confessors, pricked by conscience, denounced both herself and himself to the Inquisition, and abundant evidence as to her scandals was easily obtained.

The trial lasted for two years, for she resolutely maintained the truth of her pretensions; since the age of four she had been the object of special grace, she had continual and familiar intercourse with the Virgin, she had been married in heaven to the child Jesus with St. Joseph and St. Augustin as witnesses, she had liberated millions of souls from purgatory, and much more of the same sort.

Had she been content to confess herself an impostor she would have escaped with the customary moderate punishment of reclusion, but she rendered herself guilty of formal and obstinate heresy by maintaining the so-called Molinist doctrine that evil actions cease to be sinful when God so wills it.

Every effort was made to convert her. The most eminent theologians were summoned and vainly exhausted their learning and eloquence; Fray Diego de Cadiz preached to her constantly for two months. She was equally unmoved by the threat of burning; God, she said, had revealed to her that she would die a martyr, after which he would in three days prove her innocence.

Burning was going out of fashion, and the Inquisition honestly endeavored to escape its necessity, but her obstinacy admitted of no alternative, and on August 22, 1781, she was finally condemned and abandoned to the secular arm. She listened unmoved to the sentence, after which, in place of being as usual hurried at once to the stake, she was, as a supreme effort, kept for three days [sic] in the chapel with holy men exhorting her to no purpose.

Then at the auto de fe every one was melted to pity on seeing her with the mitre of flames and demons, while she alone remained impassible during the sermon and ceremony — in fact she had to be gagged to suppress her blasphemy. Finally however on her way to the stake she weakened, she burst into tears and asked for a confessor. The execution was postponed for some hours and her punishment was mitigated, according to rule, with preliminary strangulation.

* Three hundred years after Seville had the first Inquisition auto-de-fe, both events the discerning traveler can explore at the city’s Museo Del Castillo De San Jorge. For reasons that I’m unable to determine there are a number of citations abroad placing this execution on November 7, 1781. I’m affirming the 24th of August based on primary documentation such as this archival document cited by Lea, or the August 25 correspondence reporting the events of the preceding day addressed to Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. This detailed account is quoted in full in Jovellanos: vida y pensamiento; alternately, this Spanish-language page summarizes the day hour by hour based on that same source. -ed.

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1781: Diego Corrientes Mateos, Spanish social bandit

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On this date in 1781, the Spanish social bandit Diego Corrientes Mateos was hanged and quartered in Seville.

A robber who plied the roads from Portugal to his native Seville, Corrientes (English Wikpedia entry | Spanish) was said to be of farmworker stock himself. His consequent good treatment of the rural common folk enabled him to operate with great freedom and situated him as a Robin Hood character; folklore has consequently inflated the valor of his exploits and the bile of Sheriff of Nottinghamesque pursuers like the lieutenant governor of Seville. For example, surprising his adversary on one occasion, Corrientes is supposed to have remarked, “I have learned that you boast you will be able to capture me.”

“Yes, and hang you,” shot back Francisco de Bruna.

“Then I must spare your life so you can fulfill your promise,” the sporting Corrietes allowed. (The reader will discern that Francisco de Bruna soon made good his threat.)

By the 19th century, he’d become a positive fixture of romantic and nationalist literature.

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1481: Diego Suson, by his daughter’s hand

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On this date in 1481, Spain’s first auto-da-fe under the recently established Spanish Inquisition saw six burned at the stake in Seville.

These pageants of orthodox Catholic authority, with parades of heretics publicly confessing their error and being received back into the community on penitential terms, while others more contumacious were consigned to the flames, would soon become one of the signature features of Inquisition Spain. Some 700 people were executed at such events over the decade to come.

But here in the early 1480s, the terrifying powers of the Holy Office for the Propagation of Faith (the Inquisition’s business-card title) were, well … unexpected.


/Mandatory

Don Diego Suson, one of the six put to death this date, was the wealthy patriarch of a marrano family — Jews, who had converted a century prior. The Inquisition’s whole founding spirit was the sense of characters like Torquemada that as such conversions had generally been obtained under duress, the families in question were still secretly maintaining their Semitic rites. That would make them apostates (since they were baptized and supposedly Christian), and it would implicate them in God knows what other malignancy (since they were malignant Jews).

Spain, you’ll recall, is at this point about 11 years away from expelling all its Jews full stop.

This made it especially dicey for Suson that he was also a rabbi to an underground community of still-practicing “converted” Jews. (Spanish source) Torquemada was on to a real thing here.

Unfortunately his daughter — so the legend says — didn’t quite grasp what the Inquisitors had coming and lightly betrayed the fact to her Christian lover. In no time at all, the guys with the racks and thumbscrews had the terrible family secret in hand.

It’s said that the beautiful (of course) daughter was so riven with grief and shame for the careless destruction of her father that she shut herself up in a convent … and arranged that when she died her guilt-stricken head should be hung up at her former home.

The location of this macabre monument is still marked in Seville today; once known as the Calle de la Muerte, it is now called the Calle Susona.

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