This discourse of Leonora greatly affected me; but I found everything to be as she told me, in the course of time, and I took care to appear as cheerful as possible before Mary. In this manner I continued eighteen months, during which time eleven ladies were taken from the house; but in lieu of them we got nineteen new ones, which made our number just sixty, at the time we were so happily relieved by the French officers, and providentially restored to the joys of society, and to the arms of our parents and friends. On that happy day, the door of my dungeon was opened by the gentleman who is now my husband, and who with the utmost expedition, sent both Leonora and me to his father's; and (soon after the campaign was over) when he returned home, he thought proper to make me his wife, in which situation I enjoy a recompense for all the miseries I before suffered.
From the foregoing narrative it is evident, that the inquisitors are a set of libidinous villains, lost to every just idea of religion, and totally destitute of humanity. Those who possess wealth, beauty, or liberal sentiments, are sure to find enemies in them. Avarice, lust, and prejudice, are their ruling passions; and they sacrifice every law, human and divine, to gratify their predominant desire. Their supposed piety is affectation; their pretended compassion hypocrisy; their justice depends on their will: and their equitable punishments are founded on their prejudices. None are secure from them, all ranks fall equally victims to their pride, their power, their avarice, or their aversion.
Some may suggest, that it is strange crowned heads and eminent nobles, have not attempted to crush the power of the inquisition, and reduce the authority of those ecclesiastical tyrants, from whose merciless fangs neither their families nor themselves are secure.
But astonishing as it is, superstition hath, in this case, always overcome common sense, and custom operated against reason. One prince, indeed, intended to abolish the inquisition, but he lost his life before he became king, and consequently before he had the power so to do; for the very intimation of his design procured his destruction.
This was that amiable prince Don Carlos, son of Philip the Second, king of Spain, and grandson of the celebrated emperor Charles V. Don Carlos, possessed all the good qualities of his grandfather without any of the bad ones of his father; and was a prince of great vivacity, admirable learning, and the most amiable disposition.--He had sense enough to see into the errors of popery, and abhorred the very name of the inquisition. He inveighed publicly against the institution, ridiculed the affected piety of the inquisitors, did all he could to expose their atrocious deeds, end even declared, that if he ever came to the crown, he would abolish the inquisition, and exterminate its agents.
These things were sufficient to irritate the inquisitors against the prince: they, accordingly, bent their minds to vengeance, and determined on his destruction.
The inquisitors now employed all their agents and emissaries to spread abroad the most artful insinuations against the prince; and, at length, raised such a spirit of discontent among the people, that the king was under the necessity of removing Don Carlos from court. Not content with this, they pursued even his friends, and obliged the king likewise to banish Don John, duke of Austria, his own brother, and consequently uncle to the prince; together with the prince of Parma, nephew to the king, and cousin to the prince, because they well knew that both the duke of Austria, and the prince of Parma, had a most sincere and inviolable attachment to Don Carlos.
Some few years after, the prince having shown great lenity and favour to the protestants in the Netherlands, the inquisition loudly exclaimed against him, declaring, that as the persons in question were heretics, the prince himself must necessarily be one, since he gave them countenance. In short, they gained so great an ascendency over the mind of the king, who was absolutely a slave to superstition, that, shocking to relate, he sacrificed the feelings of nature to the force of bigotry, and, for fear of incurring the anger of the inquisition, gave up his only son, passing the sentence of death on him himself.