Part 6 (1/2)
As the Dominicans in Hispaniola were ignorant of the progress of events at court and the loss sustained by Las Casas through the death of the Chancellor, they still conceived him to enjoy great influence. The Prior, Pedro de Cordoba, wrote him a detailed description of some recent atrocities perpetrated by the Spaniards in Trinidad where they had gone to fish for pearls; manifesting also dissatisfaction with the conduct of the Jeronymites. He therefore begged Las Casas to obtain from the King a grant for the Franciscan and Dominican monks of one hundred leagues of coast on the mainland about c.u.mana, from which laymen should be excluded; should one hundred leagues be thought excessive, then he begged for ten, and failing this he would accept the small islands known as the Alonso group, which lay some fifteen leagues from the coast. His intention was to establish a place of refuge, or sanctuary, to which the persecuted Indians might repair, sure of finding kind treatment, and, through instruction, be converted to Christianity. The Prior declared that unless some one of these concessions was made, he would have to recall all the monks of his Order from those countries, where it was idle for them to attempt to teach Christian doctrines, as long as the Indians saw those who called themselves Christians acting in open violation of them. The contents of this letter vexed and alarmed Las Casas not a little, for he feared that if the Prior were driven to make good his threat of recalling his monks, the Indians would be abandoned, without defence, to the cruelties of the Spaniards and would soon be exterminated. His one hope of support in his own plans lay in the Dominicans, without whose aid his efforts were foredoomed to failure. He spoke to the Bishop and the members of the Council, reading them the letter and addressing earnest appeals to them to stop the iniquities which were devastating the entire coast. He urged, with all the arguments of which he was master, that the one hundred leagues asked for should be conceded. The Bishop of Burgos was unmoved, both by the Prior's harrowing description of the outrages committed on the Indians and by the appeal of Las Casas, and he coolly answered that the King would be badly advised to grant a hundred leagues of land to the friars, without some return therefor; a reply which Las Casas observes was unworthy of a successor of the Apostles. Poor as the Bishop was in episcopal qualities, he was even less gifted with those which make a good minister of colonial affairs, and the results of his thirty-five years of control of Indian affairs were as unprofitable to the Spanish Crown as they were disastrous to the Indians.
Las Casas did not hesitate to express his opinion to the Bishop with his customary uncompromising frankness, but with no result, save probably that of confirming his stubborn and hostile att.i.tude.
Perceiving that no argument which did not promise lucrative returns would avail to secure a grant of territory, the clerigo evolved a plan that promised to secure the ends for which he and the Dominicans were striving and, at the same time, would a.s.sure a profitable investment for the Crown.
In spite of the Bishop's continued opposition, Las Casas pushed forward his plan for colonising, and though the Chancellor's death was a great loss to him, he nevertheless found in Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht and other Flemings, every possible a.s.sistance. He was named royal chaplain in order to give him additional prestige before the public, and letters were sent throughout the kingdom to the princ.i.p.al civil and ecclesiastical authorities, ordering some and inviting others to aid him by every means in their power to collect the desired emigrants. The officials of India House in Seville were instructed to receive and attend to those intending to emigrate under Las Casas, when they arrived in Seville; they were likewise directed to prepare the necessary s.h.i.+ps to transport them to America. It was necessary that Las Casas should be accompanied on his recruiting tour through the country by some trustworthy man to help him in enrolling his emigrants, and, as fate would have it, his choice fell most unfortunately upon one Berrio, an Italian, a circ.u.mstance which Las Casas afterwards observed was, in itself, sufficient to explain his treachery.
Berrio was to act as herald, publis.h.i.+ng in the different cities, with sound of trumpet, the object of Las Casas's visit, the high powers he held from the King, and the favourable conditions he offered. To give his a.s.sistant more dignity in the eyes of the people Las Casas procured for him the designation of Captain in the royal service, with a salary of four hundred and five maravedis per day.
Berrio sold himself to the Bishop of Burgos before the recruiting expedition even began, and his signed instructions, which he had engaged to obey, were fraudulently altered by the latter so as to free him from all control. Thus provided, he soon detached himself from his rightful superior and went to Andalusia, where he a.s.sembled on his own account two hundred men, vagabonds, loafers, and tapsters, of whom few were labourers and none fit for colonists. These unpromising recruits were gathered in Seville, where the officials of India House were at a loss to know what to do with them; they finally sailed, but, as the colonial authorities had received no notice concerning them, they landed, dest.i.tute and worthless, in Hispaniola, where their arrival was unwelcome. Many of them died and the others scattered in various parts. It fell to Las Casas to interest himself in their behalf and to relieve their miseries, but the meal and wine he obtained for them arrived in Hispaniola too late, as the intended beneficiaries were either dead or widely dispersed.
It appears, according to Las Casas's own account, that emigrants were attracted to his scheme, not so much by the liberal conditions, or because their circ.u.mstances were not prosperous, but by their desire to escape onerous feudal conditions still prevailing in Spain. It was chiefly, therefore, from amongst the dwellers on great estates that his emigrants were recruited, for many such said they desired to leave their children free in a free country under the King's protection. The great n.o.bles were ill-pleased at this desertion of their feudatories, and Las Casas soon found himself at loggerheads with the Constable of Castile, whose villagers at Berlanga were inscribing themselves in great numbers; the Constable ordered him to quit his estates. On an estate called Rello, belonging to the Count of Coruna, out of thirty householders twenty-nine put down their names as emigrants. As may be supposed the number of the clerigo's enemies in high quarters was increased by this state of things, though his success in recruiting emigrants enabled him to triumph over the Bishop, who had foretold that he would never get together the necessary people. He was able to say on his return to Zaragoza that not only three thousand but ten thousand people would willingly go if the Bishop would provide the means.
Cardinal Adrian listened sympathetically to the report of what had been done and addressed to Las Casas the observation in Latin, Vere vos tribuitis aliud regnum regi.
The King and his Court left the kingdom of Aragon at this time to visit the princ.i.p.ality of Cataluna, making his formal entry into Barcelona on the fifteenth of February, 1519. The Jeronymite fathers had arranged for the sale of the royal haciendas in Hispaniola, and Las Casas, ever on the alert to secure advantages for his colonists, presented a pet.i.tion asking that they should be maintained for one year at the royal expense. The vexation of the Bishop of Burgos augmented visibly at this fresh claim for a.s.sistance, and he roundly declared such a concession would cost the Crown more than an armada of twenty thousand men, which provoked the pertinent retort from Las Casas: ”Does it appear to your lords.h.i.+p that after you have killed off the Indians, I should now lead Christians to death? Well, I shall not.” As the Bishop, according to Las Casas, was no fool, he hoped that he understood this plain answer.
Without the a.s.sistance which he was convinced was indispensable to the success of his undertaking, Las Casas refused to move, though every effort was made to start him off; an attempt was even made to secure another leader for the undertaking, but the news of this design was not slow in reaching him, and he promptly published far and wide, in the district where his recruits were waiting his orders to start, that they should on no account accept the leaders.h.i.+p of another, who would only conduct them to failure and starvation in the colonies.
Events of great importance were occurring at this time which absorbed the attention of the King and his counsellors to the exclusion of American affairs. By the death of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian, the succession was open, though both Francis I. of France and Henry VIII. of England aspired to the imperial dignity. The royal interest therefore centred in Germany and the coming election, and Las Casas and his Indian schemes were put to one side.
CHAPTER IX. - KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN SPUR. THE COURT PREACHERS. FURTHER CONTROVERSIES
As has been heretofore explained, Las Casas perceived that his efforts to obtain support for his project would come to naught, unless it could be made plain to the Council that some material benefit would accrue to the royal revenues; he therefore turned his attention to forming a plan which should comprehend the conversion of the Indians by gentle and peaceful means and likewise yield a profit to the Crown. He conceived the idea of forming a species of order of knighthood, whose members were to be known as Knights of the Golden Spur. They were to number fifty selected men, each of whom should furnish two hundred ducats, which he deemed would amount to a sufficient sum for the expenses of founding the colony. The knights were to wear a dress of white cloth, marked on the breast with a red cross, similar to the cross of Calatrava, but with some additional ornamentation. The purpose of this costume was to distinguish them in the eyes of the Indians from all other Spaniards.
A grant of one thousand leagues of coast, beginning one hundred leagues above Paria, and with no limits in the hinterland, was asked for the colony, in return for which concession a payment of fifteen thousand ducats was promised to the Crown during the first three years, which sum should afterwards become an annual income until the seventh year; from the seventh to the tenth year, the income would be thirty thousand ducats, and beginning with the eleventh year, it would reach the sum of sixty thousand. The foundation of three fortified towns, with at least fifty Spaniards in each, was promised within the first five years. The religious propaganda was to be carried on by twelve Franciscan and Dominican friars, whom Las Casas was to be allowed to choose: for this purpose the King was asked to solicit the necessary faculties from the Holy See. Such, in brief, was the plan which Las Casas conceived for spreading civilisation on the American coast and winning the Indians to Christianity. His own jurisdiction within the conceded territory was to be absolute, and all Spaniards whatsoever were to be forbidden by royal command, and under pain of severe penalties, to cross its borders. The only discoverable road to liberty lay through absolutism, under a benevolent despot.
The most obvious flaw in this scheme was the difficulty-amounting indeed to impossibility-of finding the fifty knights. Las Casas, like many enthusiasts and reformers, failed to reckon with the realities of human nature. His colony was to be a Utopia, peopled by lofty-minded Spaniards, who were free from the prevalent thirst for gold, and only preoccupied in cultivating sentiments of the purest altruism: mixed with them were to be gentle-mannered Indians, in whom shone all the qualities of primitive man, unspoiled by contact with the evils of civilisation, and who were thirsting to know the truth and to embrace it. These idyllic barbarians were to furnish the human material on which the knights were to exercise their virtues and all were to be thus united in bonds of loving fraternity and disinterested industry, under the benign government of a dozen monks, who had long since renounced this world and who would give their exclusive attention to leading their flock from a terrestrial into the celestial paradise. A Fra Angelico might have grouped these interesting types into a picture of soul-stirring beauty. Even had the fifty been found, all with the proper dispositions and in harmonious unanimity of purpose, there was little chance that they would remain unaffected by the unbalancing and corrupting influences of a new country, where they would be absolute masters over an inferior race of people. Many excellent men of the highest principles and best intentions went from Spain to America in those times, but few resisted the temptations which beset them.
Las Casas kept his plan a profound secret until he had secured the approbation of the new Chancellor, Gattinara, and that of several of the influential Flemings. It was then laid before the India Council, where it was met with a storm of objection and ridicule. It was promptly shelved, and not all the urging of Las Casas, the discontent of the Flemings, nor even the efforts of the Chancellor himself to induce the Bishop of Burgos to study the matter, sufficed to have it taken into serious consideration.
The different features, as they became known, provoked mirth, and much fun was made of the white robes, red crosses, and golden spurs of the knights.
Baffled by the inertia of the Council and the failure of his powerful friends to obtain serious attention for his project, Las Casas had recourse to other influences. The oppression of the Indians and the violation of their rights as free men not only revolted the humanitarian instincts of their Protector, they offended justice and const.i.tuted a grave crime against morality, by which the King was inculpated and for which he would have to answer at the bar of divine justice. No utilitarian ends could justify criminal means, and that Indian slavery was profitable to the Crown was in no sense a palliation of its essential wickedness.
The King's confessor, as keeper of the royal conscience, had already in Ferdinand's time been prevailed upon to explain to his Majesty the grave responsibility he incurred in tolerating a state of things so contrary to divine and natural laws. Now Las Casas, in his extremity, turned to the court preachers, who were eight in number, laying before them the entire case as a problem in morals, upon which it was within their duty as the spiritual instructors of the sovereign to p.r.o.nounce. The part which these ecclesiastics took in the matter was brief but not unimportant nor without results Two of them were secular priests, the brothers Luis and Antonio Corodele, both religious and learned men, doctors of the University of Paris; another was Fray Miguel de Salamanca, also a doctor of Paris; there was Father Lafuente of the University of Alcala, a Franciscan, Fray Alonso de Leon, an Augustinian, Fray Dionisio, and two others whose names Las Casas was not able to recall when writing his history some forty years after these events occurred. This body of learned men represented everything that was most authoritative in theological and canonical opinion of the times and const.i.tuted a most formidable ally against the Bishop and Council. Meetings of the eight preachers and Las Casas were held in the convent of Santa Catalina, at which several other men of importance a.s.sisted, one of whom was Fray Alonso de Medina, of the Dominicans; while another, a Franciscan friar who had spent much time in the Indies, is described as a brother of the Queen of Scotland. These meetings, which were secret, were held at the same hour of the day as the sittings of the India Council.
Religious dogma was held in that age to be axiomatic and incontrovertible; all science was interpreted through the medium of the one universal science of theology, and the civil law of the times drew its sanction from the principles of canon law, from which indeed it was scarcely separable.
Just as it was sought to sustain Galileo's proposition concerning the revolution of the earth by an appeal to theology, and just as theologians were considered competent to p.r.o.nounce on the soundness of the theories of Columbus, so was it admitted, with far greater reason, to be within their competence to p.r.o.nounce upon the question of the extension of slavery in the Indies, although that matter was treated as one of secular policy, belonging to the India Council. Kings and governments contended, when they could, for the exercise of their royal powers in temporal matters, independently of the spiritual control, but the line of distinction was a fine one, not easily drawn, and the basis of Spain's claim to the Indies and to the exercise of jurisdiction in America was the Bull of Alexander VI. issued in May, 1493. The express condition on which the Pope granted the Bull was, that the conversion of the Indians should be the primary care of the Spanish government, and this condition was so clear and binding that it amounted to a reservation to the Pope of an oversight of the means to be adopted for that end. As it was within the recognised power of the Pope to grant such rights and jurisdiction, and to attach conditions thereto, it was equally within his power to annul or withdraw them if the Spanish sovereigns failed to fulfil those conditions. Hence the government of the Indies, in all that pertained to the moral well-being and religious instruction of the natives, was, beyond question, within the legitimate exercise of ecclesiastical control. The exposition of the case by Las Casas, supported by the ma.s.s of evidence he was able to furnish and the testimony of the Scotch Franciscan and others, convinced the theologians that their duty, both to religion and to the King bound them to intervene and to correct abuses in open violation of the declared intentions of the sovereigns from the time of Isabella that the Indians should be free men, whose conversion to Christianity was their first duty.
The theologians bound themselves by a common oath, that no opposition should discourage them, and that each and all of them would not desist from their single and united efforts, until success had crowned them. It was decided that the first step should be to exhort the members of the Council: this failing of result, they would address their remonstrances to the Chancellor, after him to M. de Chievres, who was nearest the person of the King, and in the last resort the monarch himself should be made to understand his responsibility. Should nothing come of their exhortations, they bound themselves to preach openly against the government, instructing the public conscience on the subject and a.s.signing to the King his just share of the wrong-doing.
Action followed swiftly upon the adoption of this resolution, and the India Council, under the presidency of the redoubtable Bishop of Burgos, was stupefied by the apparition of the theologians at one of its sittings.
Fray Miguel de Salamanca, after asking for permission of the President, made the following brief but energetic discourse: ”Most ill.u.s.trious gentlemen and most reverend sir: It has been certified to us, the preachers of the King our lord, by persons whom we are forced to believe, and it also appears to be notorious, that men of our Spanish nation in the Indies commit great and unheard-of evils against the natives of those parts; such as robberies and murders, thereby giving the greatest offence to G.o.d and bringing infamy on our holy faith, and by which such an infinite number of people have perished that large islands and a great part of the mainland are now depopulated, to the great ignominy even of the Royal Crown of Spain; for the Holy Scripture testifies that in the mult.i.tude of the people consists the dignity and honour of the King, and in their diminution is his ignominy and dishonour. We have marvelled at this, knowing the prudence and merits of the ill.u.s.trious persons who compose the Council for the government of those countries, to whom G.o.d appears to have confided such a great world as they are said to const.i.tute, and for which they will have to render a strict account; on the other hand, learning that there can have been no reason why those nations, which lived peaceably in their countries, owing us nothing, should have been destroyed by us, we know not what to say, nor do we find any one to whom to impute such irreparable evils, other than to those who until now have governed them. Since it is inc.u.mbent upon us, by virtue of the office we hold at court, to oppose and denounce everything that is an offence and a dishonour to the Divine Majesty and to souls and, to the extent of our powers, to exhort until all such be extirpated, we have decided, before adopting other measures, to come before your lords.h.i.+ps and make our purpose known, and to supplicate you to consent to explain to us how it has been possible to permit such a great evil without remedying it; and that since it has not until now been stopped-for it goes on to-day with full license-you should devise means to remedy it. It is manifest that by so doing, your lords.h.i.+ps will receive signal recompense, while by refusing, you will, on the contrary, receive terrible torments, for you bear on your shoulders the heaviest and most dangerous burden, if you well consider it, of any men in the world to-day. We likewise beseech your lords.h.i.+ps, with all due humility and reverence, not to attribute our coming to temerity, but to accept and judge it by the spirit that has prompted it, which is the wish to act according to G.o.d's precepts as we are obliged to do.”
The Council-composed of such dignitaries as the Grand Commander of Castile, Don Garcia de Padilla, the distinguished man of letters, Peter Martyr, Francisco de los Cobos, and others-listened aghast to this speech, which was followed by a moment of silence that none of them felt prepared to break. The Bishop, whose wrath had waxed during the discourse, rose with an air of great authority and majesty to reply.
”Great indeed,” he said, ”has been your presumption and daring to come to correct the Council of the King. Casas must be at the bottom of this; who puts you, the King's preachers, to meddle in government affairs which the King entrusts to his Councils? The King does not maintain you for this, but to preach the Gospel.”