Heresy in Lisbon
Hugo Gurgeny. By Mary Brearley. (Cape. 9s. 6d.) " The city of Lisbon, as seen from the deck of a ship entering the harbour, presents a very fair prospect, and on a morning in the early part of May, 1605, it must have been far lovelier than it is today. For then it was small enough to be held in a cup of green hills, and everywhere the straggling rows of white houses were broken by large gardens full of cypresses and flowering trees. The first glance about him that a man took on landing showed that he stood in one of those Market-places where the roads of world. traffic meet and cross. The crowd that pushed their way about, or merely loafed and spat, included types from four continents. . . . Among the crowd were silent men with quick-turning eyes and attentive ears. . . . Everyone knew they were the Familigres or Inquisition police."
So Miss Brearley sets her scene, in a city that she knows with the intimacy of many years' residence, and in a period that she has come to know well through the study of its documents. She is, or was, president of the Lisbon branch of the Historical Association, and those familiar with the periodical publications of this branch will have come on her admirable studies and reconstructions of past English life in Portugal. They are always lively and always scholarly ; she is a historian with an animating touch. Her new book shows this nice balance ; she deals carefully with the docu- ments of history, both English and Portuguese, and at the same time peoples her scene with live and often moving figures. She brings to life for us the Inquisition-dominated, Spanish-ridden Lisbon of 340 years ago, with its wary, watchful Jesuit priests, its Protestant (and Catholic) English factory of merchants and 'prentices, its irri- tated and excellent British consul.
Hugo Gurgeny was an English merchant who came to Lisbon on business for a visit ; he was a Protestant (whether Anglican or Calvinist is not altogether clear ; there seems some confusion in the evidence here ; baptised and brought up in the Established Church, he seems later, though apparently ordained, to have taken against bishops and preached outside the .Church). He was an Oxonian, a gentleman, and something of a theologian. Finding himself in Lisbon, he acceded to a request from some of his countrymen that he should read the Church of England service to them in a private house once a week. It was this that landed him in trouble, for it drew the attention of the. English priests in Lisbon (the pleasant and jolly Father Joseph Foster, of whom we have heard elsewhere ; he was confessor to the Brigittine nuns ; and the busy Father Lloyd, S.J., the British consul's bugbear), who denounced Gurgeny to the Inquisition for causing scandal to Catholics. Thus the long cam- paign against him was set in motion.
The trial and questioning and imprisonment lasted three years. It is given here almost in full ; the evidence of witnesses, how some- one had seen him keep his hat on during the Angelus and when the Host passed, someone else had seen him visit a dying youth to proselytise him, and so on. They tried to trap him into confessing that he had been " baptised a Christian" and had lapsed ; that he was, in fact, a Catholic heretic. Gurgeny stood up to it well for some time ; in the end, when sentenced to the flames, his. nerve
broke and he signed a confession and recantation. He was released from prison at last, crushed in health and spirit, and passes out of our sight. The gradual breaking down of the courage and will of a courageous but sensitive man is admirably realised ; it is not only a documentary and historical but a psychological study and holds one's interest to the enigmatic end. It is a fascinating world into which we are plunged.
I have only one complaint to make ; why does Miss Brearley com- pare the Inquisition in Portugal to the luckless Frankenstein? This
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