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An Irishman before the Mexican inquisition, 1574-51
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2017
Extract
John Martin the Irishman was described by one of his shipmates as the unluckiest man in the English fleet. He himself, appearing in turn before the inquisition in Mexico, complained that he was ‘ the unluckiest mortal on board, as all he knew was how to sweep the ship, and everybody ill-treated him, and called him St Peter or St Patrick and a thousand other names ’. A little later, the inquisition scribe noted that Martin ‘ remained a while sighing and grief-stricken, and then said that he was surrounded by a thousand dangers in this trial which far from going in his favour appeared to be taking him on the road to the devil, and he wished to God he had not married in this country and brought trouble on others as well as on himself, because he saw that he was doomed to die ’. Again, on 1 February 1575, Martin told the inquisitors ‘ that he was tired of being admonished so many times and that he called God to witness that he wished he might be doomed body and soul if he had anything further to say, and although his tears might be of no avail here on earth they might still serve him with God ’. His gloomy prognostications were fully justified. At the second auto-da-fé in Mexico city, on 6 March 1575, Martin was garrotted and his body burnt: no other person was done to death on this occasion. Out of the hundred or so members of the English fleet captured by the Spaniards in 1568, only four were executed for heresy, and only two of these in New Spain. George Reaveley who died in the Mexican auto of 1574 has been termed ‘ one of the first martyrs of the protestant cause in America ’.
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- Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1971
Footnotes
1
This essay is based on documents in the Mexican national archives. All papers therein relating to English subjects before the inquisition were transcribed and translated into English by agents of the late G. R. G. Conway, a British engineer living in Mexico in the 1920s. Sets of over thirty volumes of inquisition transcripts and translations, together with many other volumes of related papers, were later deposited in the Library of Congress, and in Aberdeen and Cambridge university libraries. We have used the set in Cambridge, which is listed in J. Street, ‘The G. R. G. Conway collection in Cambridge University Library : a checklist’, in Hispanic American Historical Review, xxxvii, 1957, pp 60–81. Conway's transcripts often fail to supply the original foliation, and many of the manuscripts when copied were in such poor condition that it was doubted whether they could be consulted again. Our references are, therefore, not to the originals, but to the transcripts at Cambridge; checklists published in the H.A.H.R. in 1955 and 1956 enable referenceto be made from volumes of the Cambridge set to corresponding volumes at Washington or Aberdeen. The inquisition records relating to three of the Englishmen, David Alexander, William Collins, and Miles Phillips, have been published, almost fully, in Julio Jiménez Rueda (ed.), Corsarios francescs e inglescs en la Inquisitión de la Nucva España, sigh XVI, Mexico, 1945, and in Boletin del Archivo General de la Natión, xx, 1949, pp 467–517, 615–63; xxi, 1950, pp 115–72. The names of all the English subjects involved in the trials of 1572–5 are given in G. R. G. Conway, An Englishman and the Mexican inquisition 1556–60 (Mexico City, 1927), pp 155–62. A recent work, R. E. Greenleaf, The Mexican inquisition of the sixteenth century (Albuquerque, 1969), is based on the original archives, but its brief references to the subject of the present essay (on p. 166) are not wholly accurate.
References
2 Cambridge University Library, Add. 7263, p. 98. On the English expedition of 1567–8, see J. A. Williamson, Hawkins of Plymouth (2nd ed., 1969), ch. 7–9, and on some of its moral implications, Hair, P. E. H., ‘ Protestants as pirates, slavers and proto-missionaries: Sierra Leone 1568 and 1582 ’, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxi, 1970, pp 203-24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the members of the expedition in Mexico, see Aydelotte, F., ‘ Elizabethan seamen in Mexico and parts of the Spanish Main ’, in American Historical Review, Iviii, 1942, pp 1–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The expedition and its Mexican aftermath are also described in Rayner Unwin, The defeat of John Hawkins (i960), which makes extended use of the Conway transcripts, but unfortunately provides no references and ekes out the documentation with some literary licence.
3 Add. 7238, p. 265. The text reads: ‘ San P° ’ which normally stands for ‘ San Pedro ’, not ‘ San Patricio ’; and the inquisitors thought that the nickname was a protestant reference to the See of St Peter. However, Martin stated that he was called this, ‘ because the Irish were devoted to San P° who travelled over Ireland ’; which makes it seem that, whatever he actually said in Spanish, he had St Patrick in mind.
4 Add. 7238, p. 280.
5 Add. 7238, p. 288.
6 Conway, op. cit., p. ix.
7 He said he was the son of Peter Martin, son of James Martin, and Juliana Demorales, daughter of Leonor and sister of Daniel and Mary (Add. 7238, p. 158). His father, who died c. 1559, must have been sacristan in the early years of Bishop Roger Skiddy (1557–66), and, if he held the office for any time, in the later years of Bishop Dominick Tirry (1536–56). Unfortunately, records of Cork cathedral which might give the names of sacristans do not appear to be extant. A Cork sacristan at this period might well have been an Englishman, or of recent English extraction, and he might, like Bishop Tirry, have accepted without protest some of the changes in the English church establishment and order, but is unlikely to have been an active protestant. The history of the bishops of Cork in the mid-sixteenth century is obscure, but when Martin referred to a bishop called ‘ Ricart (Richard?) who bore a crozier and mitre ’, he certainly got the name wrong, for among the various known bishops, royal and Roman, there was no ‘ Ricart ’. However, Martin further informed the inquisitors that this bishop was ‘ a clergyman who had a dispute with a certain Franciscan friar as to who should be bishop, and although Ricart enjoyed the income, his consecration had not been sent [sic] by Rome, and so the friar who had gone personally to Rome to get it obtained the bishopric ’ (Add. 7238, p. 167). This sounds like a confused echo of an historical event. ‘ While Dominick Tyrre governed this see, one Lewis Mac-Namara, a Franciscan Frier, obtained a provision to it from Pope Paul III on the 24 of September 1540; but Lewis dying at Rome a few days after, John Hoyeden, Canon of Elphin, was appointed to succeed, by provision also from the pope… . Yet, notwithstanding that provision, Bishop Tyrre … received the profits all his time and sat about twenty years ’ (quoted from Ware in W. M. Brady, Clerical records of Cork, iii, 1864, p. 46). Perhaps Martin as a child of six or seven lived in Bishop Tirry's household and heard the story of a rival bishop appointed by Rome.
8 Add. 7238, p. 203.
9 Add. 7238, pp 202, 211, 283.
10 Add. 7238, p. 208 (bocal = bozal, a term normally applied in the Americas to newly-arrived slaves from Africa and meaning ‘ ignorant and stupid, stupefied by contact with advanced society’); cf. ‘ The reputation of the Irish for wildncss extended to Spain ’, in Quinn, D. B., The Elizabcthans and the Irish (Ithaca, 1966), p. 26 Google ScholarPubMed.
11 Add. 7238, pp 72, 161.
12 Add. 7238, p. 161. It is of course unlikely that Martin, during his Cork childhood, spoke no English, or indeed, that Irish was his mothertongue.
13 Add. 7238, p. 119. Suarez lived in the Calle de Melchor de Valdes, and was surgeon to the Venereal Hospital (Hospital de Amor de Dios) (ibid., pp 81, 118).
14 Add. 7234, pp 59–60; Add. 7238, pp 203, 271. Martin told Morgan about a friend, William Brown, who had broken images in Mexico when drunk (Add. 7234, pp 41–2).
15 Add. 7238, pp 4–6.
16 Richard Hakluyt, The principall navigations …, (1589), p. 574. The witness, Miles Phillips, heard a sentence of death on Cornu, a Frenchman, and misheard the name as Cornelius. Phillips reported that sixty Englishmen were flogged, but he exaggerated the number; the inquisition records indicate that about forty were tried, and about a dozen received light penalties not involving flogging.
17 Add. 7263, p. 96.
18 Add. 7238, p. 159.
19 Martin's father-in-law, though poor, was a free man, Christianly married. Several of Martin's English shipmates married negresses (Hakluyt, op. cit., p. 575).
20 Add. 7238, pp 147–8.
21 Add. 7238, pp 146–53. One councillor stated that he had known Martin for four years, having previously met him in the city of Antequera, but apart from this the evidence covered only Martin's two years in La Trinidad. Unfortunately, Martin's declaration at the beginning of the testimony contained a copying error which the inquisitors may have considered further evidence of his untruthfulness. It reads: ‘ it is public knowledge that I have lived in this town for eight years …’ (p. 143). The public writer who prepared the testimonial charged no fees, ‘ owing to the poverty of the applicant ’.
22 Add. 7238, p. 154.
23 Add. 7238, p. 155.
24 Add. 7238, pp 155–7. ‘A mi Señor o marido Juan martin surujano a la ciudad de mexico.’
25 Add. 7238, p. 118.
26 Add. 7238, pp 119–23.
27 Add, 7238, p. 125.
28 Add. 7238, pp 201, 275: Martin admitted that he had discussed with another Irishman, John Brown, whether a marriage in England, by a heretical priest, was void in New Spain, but claimed that the circumstances were those of the other man (p. 178). (Brown did re-marry in Mexico, Add. 7230, p. 228.) The inquisitors chose not to believe Martin and a charge of bigamy formed part of the final accusation (p. 189).
29 Add. 7238, pp 134–5.
30 The Spaniards called all protestants ‘ Lutheranos ’, which we translate ‘ Lutherites’ rather than ‘ Lutherans ’ since the modern term has a more limited meaning.
31 Add. 7238, pp 94–6, 99.
32 Add. 7238, p. 238. The song, re-translated from the Spanish, was: ‘ Friar Louse, what have you done? I have thrown a vagabond into the water, which is now above his knees ’, p. 246. According to another version of the incident, Martin for participating was beaten by one Harry Keen or Quin (another Irishman?) (ibid., p. 71).
33 Cf. ‘ howbeit God so mercifully wrought for us by a secret meanes that we had, that we kept us still to our first answer, and would stil say that we had told the trueth unto them, and knew no more by ourselves nor any other of our fellowes then as we had declared …’ (Hakluyt, op. cit., p. 573).
34 Add. 7238, p. 218.
35 Add. 7238, p. 220. On 22 Dec. 1574, he asked for a hearing to complain of being kept in a dark cell, and on 28 Jan. 1575 said that lie ‘ had been in dark cells which had frightened and dazed him to such an extent that he did not know what he said ’ (ibid., p. 281). Cf. ‘ … sent as prisoners to the citie of Mexico, and there committed to prison in sundry dark dungeons, where we could not see but by candle light …’ (Hakluyt, op. cit., p. 573).
36 Add. 7238, pp 162, 164.
37 Add. 7238, pp 160, 177.
38 Add. 7238, p. 120. But he told another barber that he was taken from a ship at sea, which was most likely untrue (ibid., p. 118).
39 The only time he scored in the interrogation was when he remarked that ‘ in England they keep an eye on any Irishman—just as here they do on any foreigner who is suspected of being disaffected towards the faith ’ (Add. 7238, p. 173). His nicest comment was that lie entered English churches ‘ mostly to hear the organs ’, which were finer than the organs in Ireland (ibid., p. 286).
40 Add. 7238, pp 107, 201, 263. For the benefit of the inquisitors, he recited the Pater Noster, the Salve Regina arid the ten commandments in Spanish ‘ but did not know them well ’; he also recited the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria and the Credo in Latin (ibid., p. 159).
41 Add. 7238, p. 218.
42 Add. 7238, p. 307.
43 Add. 7238, pp 163–4. In Ireland, he thought, there were more people and they were more warlike than in England. In general, cf. : ‘ to the people of the Irish states the significant aspect of the [reformation] change was the spoliation of the monasteries ’ ( Dudley Edwards, R., Church and state in Tudor Ireland, 1935, p. 97 Google Scholar).
44 Add. 7238, p. 167.
45 Add. 7238, p. 166. Another Irishman aboard the fleet and in Spanish hands was John Brown of Waterford (Add. 7230, p. 212; 7234, p. 65). Some of the evidence against him appears in Add. 722g, pp 144–9, but unfortunately the main record of the proceedings against him has been lost.
46 Add. 7238, pp 26, 55, 67, 94, 118, 120.
47 Add. 7238, pp 209, 219.
48 Add. 7238, p. 308.
49 Add. 7238, p. 193.
50 Add. 7238, p. 202.
51 Add. 7238, p. 208.
52 Add. 7238, p. 210.
53 Add. 7238, p. 288.
54 Add. 7238, pp 95, 105.
55 Add. 7238, pp 260, 263, 274.
56 Add. 7238, pp 131, 275. However, Martin had second thoughts, and claimed later that the story of the rosary was true (ibid., p. 279).
57 Add. 7238, p. 288.
58 Details of the votes can be found in the documents reproduced in Libro primero de votos de la Inquisición de Mexico 1573–1600 (Arcliivo General de la Nacion, Mexico, 1949), on pp 53, 59; and in Add. 7238, pp 291, 311.
59 Add. 7238, p. 295.
60 Add. 7238, p. 297.
61 His earlier statement was that he went to England when about thirteen, and spent about six years there. Under torture, he said that he spent thirteen years in England and went there when six. It is unlikely that he was so young when he left Ireland, and the earlier statement may have been correct.
62 Add. 7238, pp 300–1.
63 Add. 7238, pp 307–9.
64 Add. 7238, p. 312.
65 Add. 7238, p. 285.
66 Add. 7238, p. 273.
67 Add. 7238, p. 121.
68 Add. 7238, p. 95.
69 Lea, H. C., A history of the Inquisition of Spain (1906), ii, 585-6Google Scholar. John Martin's trial conformed in most respects to procedures discussed in Lea's monumental work, e.g., sequestration and the effect on the family (ii, 495–500), inquisitorial concern for intention (ii, 576–7), inquisitorial suspicion of the vario or person who varied his confession (ii, 582).
70 Add. 7252, p. 96. The sambenito of ‘ Joan Brun yrlandes ’ who was reconciled also hung in the cathedral (ibid., p. 94).
71 For valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper, the writer is indebted to Dr Nancy Farriss of William and Mary College, Virginia; to Professor D. B. Quinn; and to members of the audience when the paper was read to the Irish Historical Society in Dublin in June 1970.