Note 8 — VALLADOLID

Llorente, a bitter assailant of the Inquisition, gives the number of victims as 31,900. Llorente was traitor to his country during the invasion of the French and fled ignominiously on their defeat, pensioned during his later years by the freemasons of Paris; he falsified Basque history to win the corrupt Godoy's favour (von Ranke's statement); an ex-priest he assisted in church robbery. Would Benedict Arnold be accepted as an authority on the American Revolution? The Encyclopedia Brittanica, even in its ninth edition, has in its sketch on Spain, the following curious assertion—"bigotry and fanaticism which led to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of victims at the hands of the Inquisition." Even the political victims in the Netherlands under the inexorable Alba, who did to death some 18,000 people, cannot swell the number to a fraction of this statement. And if the Netherlands' victims are to be laid to the door of religious persecution, then must the massacres in Ireland of the inexorable Cromwell come under the same heading: as an Englishman judges Cromwell apart from his crimes, so a Spaniard sees more in Alva than his felonies. History presented to us in parallel columns would do much toward giving us fairer views.