In a previous post I wrote about the medieval Spanish inquisition and its relationship with the Camino de Santiago. The Black Legend of the Inquisition in the early modern period – the horror story version of its activities created in Protestant Netherlands and Britain – still dominates the popular image. That is not to say that there isn’t some truth to it, and certainly they were no cuddly crew, but as Prof Alec Ryrie pointed out, the numbers executed during its heyday only exceed by a few hundred the number of people executed in US federal jails since 1970. Recently, I had the opportunity to read Professor Tom O’Connor’s book Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition,[1] which I won’t say changed my mind about the Inquisition or Irish people in the early modern Iberian world, but rather substantially enhanced my understanding.
O’Connor draws upon Inquisition (and other) documentation to show how the organisation was incredibly adept at reimagining itself to meet the needs of the Spanish monarchy. Beginning as a doctrinal police, it evolved into a kind of naturalisation service – migrants to Spanish territories could engage with the Inquisition to get a clean bill of spiritual health (so to speak), which facilitated their entry, engagement and incorporation into Spanish society. Irish engagement with the Inquisition played on their dual position as Catholics and subjects of the Protestant English crown, to act as brokers in the uneasy trading arrangements between two religiously, economically and imperially opposing powers. In doing so, Irish Catholics engaged with the Inquisition in a self-interested manner, acting as translators, facilitators and occasional proselytisers.
Certainly the Inquisition never lost its doctrinal focus, but it was increasingly pressed into supporting the needs of the state, and sometimes muzzled when it did not. The picture that emerges is of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Inquisition that functioned more as a Department of Naturalisation for the government, rather than a Gregorian-Chant Gestapo.
[1] Thomas O’Connor, Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia (London, 2016). Available for purchase at: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465900.
Denis Casey 