School for Scandal

Has it never struck you as odd that the world’s oldest profession has no professional qualification?  If doctors and lawyers, the second and third oldest, have recognised occupational standards why not prostitutes? 

Well, yes, I know; the intuitive response must be - who needs this?  Sex, after all, is the sort of thing that comes naturally.  We all like to think we can do it, free of instruction, at least with a little, ahem, hands on practice.  In prostitution practice surely makes perfect. 

But this is all wrong; at least it is according to Trabajo Ya! (Work Now), a prostitution school set up in the Spanish city of Valencia, the first in the country.  It offers, according to its prospectus, a “basic instruction in professional prostitution with maximum discretion”, all at a reasonable $120 fee for a week-long course. 

Students of both sexes are offered training in the Kama Sutra, the use of sex toys and the best posture to please clients.  Daily two hour theory and practice session, the script goes, “will almost certainly guarantee work afterwards.”  Yes, of course, the more discerning clients are bound to want to examine the graduate diplomas.  After all, those who dabble in the complex contortions of the Kama Sutra (have you looked at it?) really have to know their stuff, otherwise serious injury may result. 

Alas, no sooner had the school opened, attracting some ninety-five students, than it occurred the ire of the Valencian regional government, who filed a case with prosecutors.  The allegation was that the school promoted prostitution, which is illegal in Spain.  A school for prostitutes that promotes prostitution; my, how shocking.  Next the accusation will be raised that medical school promotes doctoring! 

Actually, like across so much of Europe, prostitution is one of the grey areas of the law.  Paradoxically prostitution itself is not illegal, just the promotion of prostitution.  In Spain the women and men in the trade are not generally penalised, though pimps can be fined or jailed. 

Last week the Valencian case was thrown out by the courts after prosecutors said there was not any evidence that a criminal offence had been committed because advertisements for students did not promote prostitution, constitute fraud and were not aimed at minors.  Perhaps the local government went about things in the wrong way.  They may have had better success if the school had been accused of pimping! 

Brendon Morales, one of the teachers at the school (or is that professor?), who has been in the trade for nine years (prostitution, that is, not professing), says that the course is positive.  “I want to give a guide to people who want to join this profession”, he said.  “Prostitution is still a taboo in Spain, but the whole world knows it exists.  I want to inform prostitutes so they don’t depend on anyone but they do it for themselves.” 

The promise is that what the students learn in class will enable them to earn a lot of money, very easily (easily!) and very quickly.  “Although 'the beautiful get more work, don't count yourself out if you're ugly; the important thing is attitude.”  You bet it is!   

The attraction is obvious, given the level of unemployment in Spain, given that a struggling and low-value economy is absurdly tied into the inflated and high-value euro.  Perhaps a case could be made that the biggest pimps of all are those who manage the European Central Bank. 

Anyway, the school for scandal is true to its word.  Graduates are offered immediate employment – they become teachers in the school, where they can help in the ‘practical’ classes.  Practical classes? – hmm, no, I think it best if I don’t go there.  I’ll leave it to your imagination.  

Beyond the Economics of the Madhouse

Both the Economist and the Spectator this week have discovered a banal but obvious truth: that there is pain in Spain, yea, even so far as the word itself.  It’s not true, though, that the pain in Spain falls mainly in the plain; the pain falls everywhere, mountain and plain alike.  The pain is the euro. 

The euro crisis is a rolling comedy of false hopes and deeper errors.  And I’ll tell you this much – you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.  Writing in the Spectator, Daniel Hannan, one of my favourite observers on the European farce, rightly points out that that the troubled economies of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus amount together to less than 5% of the Community’s economy.  Greece, in other words, was a sideshow. 

Spain is different; Spain is the main act.  Here the banks are massively exposed.  Not only would a crash swamp the whole of the European economy but a rescue package would drink deep, ‘twoud drink the cup and all.  Drawing again on my Shakespearean well, it may be the point where German taxpayers cry hold, enough! 

There is a form of madness here that I find almost impossible to comprehend. Economics and finance, I freely and wholeheartedly confess, are well beyond my comfort zone.  But at least I can understand the basics, which is more than Spanish politicians seem able to do.  Here is a truth I cannot make any simpler: Spain’s present economic woes are all down to the euro. 

Before the great crash of 2008 the country was running a surplus.  The national debt had been reduced to 42% of Gross Domestic Product.  This is where the real lunacy comes.  With the economy beginning to overheat one sure way of taking the pressure off is by raising interest rates.  But the Spanish could not do that because they were locked into the asylum of the euro.  Spanish governments thus had to apply the interest rates set by the European Central Bank (ECB), low even for the north, catastrophic for the south. 

Again as Hannan points out, in the decade prior to 2008 Spain actually manage to run a negative interest rate.   There it was - money for the taking, and how it was taken.  If you have been to Spain recently you can’t possibly have missed the results, a property crash that makes Ireland’s look like a picnic, unsold, half-completed developments everywhere, waste on a massive scale.  The banks did well, though, hugely over fulfilling their bad debts quota. 

So Spain is drowning because of cheap credit.  What’s the solution according to the gnomes of Brussels?  Why, more cheap credit. Mariano Rayoy, the country’s prime minister, was given a £100million loan to prop up the country’s troubled banks, a great ‘triumph' by his insane lights.  It was a ‘triumph’ alright for every household in Spain, which found they were now carrying an extra debt burden of £15000.  There has to be another solution.  Yes there is – another bailout.  The petrol dump is on fire.  Hurry; pour in more petrol. 

Now do you really want to see something scary?  Well, it’s this.  The Spanish government has to borrow at 7% to prop up banks that can borrow from the ECB at 1%, so they can lend the money back to the Spanish government at 7% so it can bail them out.  Confused?  Yes, I am too.  The expressions vicious circle and downward spiral might have been invented to explain such a crazy scenario. 

For Spain, though its politicians are blind to the truth, Europe is the problem, not the solution.  The prognosis, as the Economist reports, is bleak.  The economy is in serious recession, the public sector is cutting spending and the private sector is reluctant to invest.  Unemployment is among the highest in the Continent, with one person in every four out of work.  High unemployment, falling demand and low investment impacts on tax receipts, which in turn impacts on Spain’s ability to meet its debt repayment targets.  Weak banks, more bailouts, more and more austerity; down and down the spiral goes.  Wilkins Micawber would understand: the result is indeed misery. 

Then this really is the economics of the madhouse?  No, it’s far too insane for that.  

¡A mí la Legión!

The Spanish Civil War is more surrounded by a fog of myth and misconception than any other single event in history. For the political left it has the aura of a crusade, to me a rather delicious irony.

Here, at last, so the narrative went, the working class were making a stand against the onward march of Anti-Christ. Many of the benighted individuals who volunteered to fight in the communist International Brigades went without the first clue of the realities on the ground, without the first clue about Spain or Spanish history. They went at the behest of an even greater tyranny, a tyranny more ruthless towards its ‘friends’ than its enemies, as many were to discover during the Barcelona May Days of 1937, so memorably described by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia.

There were other volunteers, people who are not part of the martyrology because they chose the ‘wrong’ side; they chose to fight for Franco. I have in mind one particular individual, an Englishman by the name of Peter Kemp.

There is something wonderfully romantic about Kemp, something freebooting and uniquely English. He falls so easily into a buccaneering tradition, along with the likes of Sir Francis Drake and Lawrence of Arabia. Soldier, writer, adventurer, Kemp, was born in August 1915 in Bombay, where his father was a judge. Educated at Wellington School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he started to read for the Bar when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936.

Already alarmed by the menace of communism, Kemp, a High Anglican and self-styled Tory Radical, set off on the right direction, while Orwell, Auden, Spender, Hemingway and so many others set off on the left! In Spain he joined the Carlists, a royalist and legitimist faction within the Nationalist army, about as far removed from contemporary notions of fascism as is possible to imagine. The red-beret of the Requetés, the Carlist militia, a movement that harmonises so well with my own romantic and royalist vision, was just as important in the Nationalist camp as the blue shirt of the Falange.

Later he transferred to the Spanish Foreign Legion, where he rose to command a platoon, a unique distinction for a foreigner. He saw action on the Madrid front, in the Bilbao sector and in the great offensive of 1938 which drove the Republicans out of the Aragon area. Wounded several times, he stayed on duty until a mortar bomb broke his jaw that same year. Then Franco personally approved a long convalescent leave back in England. By the time he recovered the war was over.

His subsequent career was just as varied and distinctive. No fascist sympathiser, in the Second World War he served with distinction in the newly-formed Special Operations Executive, taking part in cross-Channel commando raids. In the Balkans he saw operations in Albania and carried out SOE missions in southern Poland. With the war in Europe coming to an end, he transferred to the Far East, helping to supply arms to French troops in Indochina, where they were fighting the Japanese, on the one hand, and the communist Viet-Minh, on the other.

Later still he was in Hungary during the anti-communist uprising of 1956, when he helped some students to escape into Austria from the advancing Russian forces.

In 1957 Kemp published Mine Were of Trouble, an autobiography covering his time in Spain. In the main this is an account of his military adventures, with little in the way of political apologetics. To the end of his life, though, he maintained that his cause was the just one, that communism was a far greater danger to Spanish civilization than the Nationalist right, far more conservative than fascist.

He also makes the unanswerable point that while Franco accepted Italian and German aid he never allowed them to direct his war in the way that the Republicans allowed the Russians to direct theirs, even importing the NKVD, the murderous Soviet security service, which used the opportunity to extend the Great Purge to Spain.

Kemp died in October 1993, having lived long enough to see the end of communism in Europe, the end of a struggle in which he, at the outset, had played a small but noble part. ¡A mí la Legión!

Speaking for Franco

I noticed from a report in the Times that there are plans to move the body of Francisco Franco, the one-time dictator of Spain, from its present position in the basilica in the El Valle de los Caidos - Valley of the Fallen – near Madrid. The former ruler is an embarrassment to the brave new Spain that has a tired old socialist government headed by Jose Zapatero in it.

A commission has been set up to decide if he should be exhumed prior to re-interment in the capital’s El Pardo cemetery. It will submit its report after the general election, scheduled for 20 November, which just so happens to be the anniversary of Franco’s death in 1975. With the right-wing Popular Party expected to win, the suspicion is that the possibility of a corpse eviction has been leaked; that – in combination with the electoral date itself – there is a subliminal message here: a vote for the right is a vote for Franco. Even those who have campaigned for justice for the victims of Franco accuse the government of using the mausoleum for electoral ends.

Meanwhile the decrepit relics of the International Brigades are set to gather in Madrid to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the formation of armed units that would have handed Spain to Stalin. One of these dinosaurs is quoted in the Times, saying that he fought because “he believed in democracy” and that “these things are still important to me and the Spanish today. There are still fascists who are against democracy.”

Yes, well, maybe there are, just as maybe there are some still around who remember the Barcelona May Days of 1937, when the communists and the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, demonstrated their enthusiasm for ‘democracy’, events that George Orwell wrote about in Homage to Catalonia.

In the light of hypocrisy and body snatching I have decided to reinter one of my corpses, a piece I wrote on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Caudillo’s death. Here it is, slightly updated. Hold on to your hats!

Marcus Ana Speaks!


Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So it was with Caesar…so it has been with Francisco Franco, one time regent of Spain, one time Caudillo de España, por la gracia de Dios. This year marks the thirty-sixth anniversary of his death, and while the left-wing junta that governs Spain today has done its best to wipe out his memory, removing the last statue from Madrid in 2005, its time to say a word or two his favour.

General Franco happens to be one of my political heroes. There, I’ve said it: I’m a fascist. No, I’m not, but, then, neither was Franco. He was conservative, deeply so, part of a Spanish tradition of conservatism going right back to the early nineteenth century. It was his task, as he understood it, to preserve Spain, to preserve Spanish traditions, to preserve Christian civilization, to defend it against the communist subversion of the Popular Front.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: the Spanish Civil War is one of the least understood conflicts in modern European history, a source of left-wing mythology, evidenced by Ken Loach’s tedious movie (did he ever make a movie that wasn't tedious?) Land and Freedom. The war was not a simple struggle between left and right, between workers and ‘fascists’. It was a complex event best understood in the context of Spanish history as a whole rather than set against contemporary events in the rest of Europe. The red-beret of the Requetés, the Carlist militia, a movement that harmonises so well with my own romantic and royalist vision, was just as important in the Nationalist camp as the blue shirt of the Falange.

In the end the Falange, the ‘fascists’, if you prefer, though there were major differences between the Spanish and the German and Italian versions, were no more than an ideological and ceremonial gloss on Franco’s conservative dictatorship.

Do I then defend dictatorship? No, I do not but I think Franco was a historical necessity. If he had not begun the military rebellion in 1936, or if the Nationalists had lost the Civil War, the course of the Second World War might have been very different, no, let me be more precise: it would have been very different.

With the likes of that Stalinist apparatchik Dolores Ibárruri, the appalling La Pasionaria, in control of Spanish affairs Hitler would have had all the excuse he needed to invade after the occupation of France in 1940. With Spain gone Gibraltar would have gone. With Gibraltar gone the Mediterranean would have been an Axis lake. In that event the war would have taken a very different course.

Spanish ‘democracy’ under the murderous Popular Front was an illusion. Even without the intervention of the Nationalists the country was torn between gangs of anarchist thugs - people who specialised in the mass murder of priests and nuns - on the one hand, and the communists on the other, all presided over by a weak liberal centre. The government continued to depend on Stalin for political and military support. Even Julian Besterio, a moderate socialist politician, admitted at the time that if the Civil War had been won by the Republic the communists would have taken full control, which would have been a disaster “for every other element of our democracy.”

So, yes, Franco saved Spain. In his long rule after the conclusion of the war in 1939 he also brought peace and stability, the basis for the Spanish Miracle, the sustained period of economic prosperity from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. At the time of Franco’s death in November 1975 the rate of Spanish economic growth was second only to that of Japan.

I admire Franco as much as I admire Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; I admire him for all the reasons I have given. The fact that his memory was condemned by the European Parliament, the fact that the Polish MEP who spoke in his favour was shouted down as a “Nazi” – by a German socialist, ironically - simply adds to the mix. If the European Parliament condemned the Devil I would look for arguments in his favour.

Franco’s time is past but his country has every reason to be grateful for him and what he achieved. It’s thanks to him that Spain was not wrecked by the communists in the same way that they wrecked Russia and the lands of Eastern Europe.

A Past Buried in Sex

I happened to mention in a discussion recently that the first time that I ever saw a hard core porn movie was on mainstream Spanish TV in the Hostal de los Reyes Catolicos in Santiago de la Compostela in north-west Spain.

There is a special irony in this, for though it is now a luxury hotel, or paradour, to use the Spanish expression, it was founded in 1499 on the orders of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs recalled in the name. Its purpose was to serve as a hostel and a hospital for pilgrims who had completed the journey to visit the shrine of Saint James in the town’s cathedral. So, a place created by the most Catholic of monarchs for this most Christian of reasons was hosting the most profane of entertainments!

I was nineteen years old. I had come to Spain with a group of close friends from my old school to walk the more interesting parts of the Camino, an adventure I blogged about in May of last year (I was a Pilgrim; yes, I was). Once in Santiago we had decided to relax for a day or two before returning to England, staying in Los Reyes Catolicos, a beautiful building and a splendid hotel.

What about the porno, you ask? We had been out late. I was sharing with one of the girls. We were just a bit tipsy. Before going to bed we did a spot of channel surfing, to see what Spanish TV had on offer. Let me stress that it was TV and not the hotel’s movie channel, though that would have been bad enough. We couldn’t quite believe what we were seeing, for what we were seeing was – how can I say this without sounding vulgar? - lodsacock! The whole thing was just too, too funny and my friend and I were overcome with waves of hysterical laughter.

The humour soon passed, though, as the repetitive, urgent inning and outing, upping and downing began to get boring. There was some Spanish dialogue but, quite frankly, I rather suspect that words are quite superfluous in this particular medium. What then struck me was the ugliness of the whole thing, unlovely, unromantic, even, oddly enough, passionless. It made sex look like some awful and tiresome chore. I suppose that might have been in consequence of the ‘acting’; that the people involved were engaged bodily but not spiritually or emotionally. Besides the whole thing was not even about pleasure; so far as I can see it was about degradation, the degradation of the women involved. We switched off after about half an hour, the mood of elation gone.

I’ve not got a lot of experience of hardcore pornography, but I don’t think the kind of thing we saw on terrestrial TV in Spain would be allowed in the England, even on specialist, subscription only channels. There may be other countries in Europe that allow this as a sign of the more relaxed attitudes towards sexual matters on the Continent; I simply don’t know. But it’s worth reflecting on the Spanish case in particular. There is a danger of over-intellectualising the matter – after all it may just be a question of ratings – but I rather suspect sex here, explicit sex in a popular medium, is as much about politics as anything else. More specifically, it’s a reaction against a highly conservative past.

It’s as well to remember that Spain was a dictatorship until the death of General Franco in 1975. Francoism was not fascism, as many people suppose: it was, rather, a reaction against the modern world. Franco’s victory in the Civil War had the effect of preserving Spain in a kind of limbo. It was to remain in a reactionary Catholic past for over thirty years while the rest of Europe moved in to a different world. In catching up it had to run twice as fast. Modern Spain came not to praise Caesar; it came to bury him. It buried him in excess.

Lovers long ago

You’ve decided to fly south; you’ve decided to go and see Andalucía in the sun. Your flight arrives at Malaga, the town where both Picasso and Antonia Banderas were born. From there you drive west on the road to Gibraltar. And what do you see? Why, mile after mile of costal development, apartment blocks without interruption, developments completed and developments abandoned for lack of cash. Welcome to the Costa del Sol, possibly the least romantic place on the face of the earth.

Some parts admittedly are worse than others. Torremolinos is not my idea of hell; Torremolinos is hell. But one thing is sure – Laurie Lee would never recognise the coast he once walked along on his distant Spanish adventure; it’s gone. Still, do not despair. The damage is bad but it’s fairly superficial. Turn inland and one can indeed find something of the old Andalucía, of the ancient kingdom of Al-Andalus, from the Alhambra in Granada to the Mezquita of Cordoba.

But it’s another place I want to write about, a place that I assume most people stuck on the coast will ever have heard of. It’s Antequera, the city of the mountains that lies to north of Granada. From the Alcazba, the Moorish castle at the highest point of the town, I looked out La Pena de los Enamorados – Lover’s Rock – a great sphinx-like face if viewed from a side angle, an Indian lying on his back. It gets its name from a romantic, Romeo-and-Juliet-style legend going back to the days when Andalucía was still under the control of the Moors

The story is that a Christian from Antequera fell in love with a Muslim girl from nearby Archidona. Leaving together, they were pursued by Moorish soldiers. To evade them the lovers took refuge on the limestone crag, standing almost nine hundred meters above sea level. Rather than surrender they leapt from there to their deaths. The story was later adapted by the poet Robert Southey in Lalia and Manuel. True or not I really don’t care; the story appeals to my romantic sensibilities. I looked on that great face with a sense of loss, a sense of old, unhappy, far-off things, and lovers long ago.

Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

The Dream and Lie of Picasso

There is one certain truth about Pablo Picasso: he was first, second and last an egoist. But he was a great man of principle, the objection comes, a communist, a lover of freedom, a hater of fascism. After all, this was a man who depicted the horrors of Nationalist Spain in such works as The Dream and Lie of Franco. Alas, it has now come to light that he was actively involved in negotiations with representatives of that same regime in the 1950s with a view to having a retrospective exhibition of his work mounted in Madrid!

If such an exhibition had been held it would have been a major coup for the Falangists, destroying Picasso’s sainted reputation among the left. The Spanish foreign ministry agreed that the talks should go ahead, but on the grounds of absolute secrecy. When details were leaked to the press the whole project was simply abandoned, while official denials were released. But they were sufficiently far advanced for members of Picasso’s circle to write pleading that he should resist the temptation, according to a note left by Jean Cocteau in his diary.

These details are set to be released by John Richardson and Gijs van Hensbergen, working on the fourth volume of Picasso’s biography. Seemingly his views on politics, like so many other things, were a lot more subtle that usually assumed. He apparently told Cocteau of the communists that “I have joined a family, and like all families, it’s full of shit.”

The fact is that his love of Spain, his desire for an exhibition there, was greater than his love of the Communist Party. But greatest of all was his love for himself. Less full of shit, I feel sure, than communism.

The Absent One

In his essay Inside the Whale George Orwell quotes some lines from Spain 1937, a poem by W. H. Auden. They go like this:

To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

We studied this poem at school. I read it before I read Orwell and was struck by exactly the same words, exactly the same sentiments: that there were people like Auden who could talk of the ‘necessary murder’ without having the first idea what this entails, no matter how poetic the language. If the 1930s was a ‘low dishonest decade’, as Auden later suggested in his poem September 1, 1939, he and his kind surly made a major contribution to the lowness and the dishonesty. They looked for the best, blind to the worst.

Their struggle, Auden’s struggle, Spender’s struggle and even Orwell’s struggle would not have been my struggle. I can’t help but sympathise with Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish Falange and himself a poet, who was the victim of a ‘necessary murder’ in November 1936, when he was shot by a Republican firing squad in Alicante. Why? Is it because I’m a fascist; is it because I sympathise with fascism? On both counts the answer is no. He appeals, rather, to my sense of romance, to my idealism, to my impractical love of all sorts of lost causes, from seventeenth century English Cavaliers to nineteenth century southern Confederates.

Ah, but his side won, the ‘fascists’ won, I can hear the reply. Whoever won it was not the cause of Primo de Rivera, who sought a solution to the Spanish problem that was neither Marxist nor reactionary. If his death was a ‘necessary murder’ it was a necessary murder as much for Francisco Franco as it was for the communist Republicans.

Though honoured as El Ausente (the Absent One) by the Franco regime, he was better as a dead saint than a living politician. The simple fact is that Jose Antonio was a dangerous opponent, a thinker and a radical, in every way different from Franco, a man who had little in the way of intellectual depth and no ideology beyond power. The death of a man he had dismissed as a ‘foppish playboy’ was highly convenient.

An ineffectual and meaningless symbol under the old dictatorship, he is fast being forgotten even as a memory in modern Spain, in many ways rather a pity.

Tweeting at Windmills

I read a story recently about a plan to post all of Don Quixote, the great masterpiece of Spanish literature, on Twitter. I’m sure most people know how Twitter operates, but for those who do not messages have to be posted within a 140-character limit. Now, Don Quixote comes in at close to five hundred printed pages, so this quixotic project will have to produce tweet on tweet on tweet, some 8,200 just to get to the end of the first volume alone!

The enthusiasts behind this scheme have grouped themselves as the Twijote project. It seems to me that we have people here whom Don Quixote himself might very well have understood, people driven mad by literature and romance. The first rule that has been set is that that the thousands of tweets required must come from one-off visitors to the Twijote site. There they are given the next block of 140 characters to post.

Pablo Lopez, a web designer from the city of Vigo who thought up this sand-sifting exercise, has estimated that it will take about a year to get to the end of volume one, if people stick with the project. “The idea”, he says, “is to show that culture can exist in social media-that it is not just the place for nerds and freaks.”

I’m so unfair, but it seems to me that this task is the very acme of what it means to be a nerds and a freak! Still, volunteers have signed on from across the Spanish-speaking world as well as from Finland. No, I don’t know why Finland either!

I suppose it is worthy of note that such a novel has sponsored such a task, a novel of a deluded man in search of the substance of his own fantasies. What’s the point, what purpose is served other than action for the sake of action, just another contribution to the endless stream of cyber babble? I rather think that dear old Pablo, the Cyber Knight of the Sad Countenance, rather needs just a little touch of realism, a little touch of Sancho Panza. Ah, well, never mind, it’s clearly a labour of love, and as the Don himself said everything is artifice or illusion.:-)

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!

I've read some rather ill-informed comments about the character and nature of the Spanish Inquisition, so time to set the record straight!

Anyway, there has been a lot of interesting work on this subject. I would make particular mention of H. Kamen's Inquisition and Society in Spain, one of the defining modern texts.

I suppose it's impossible to shift a myth once it takes on an independent life, and most people's understanding of the Inquisition will forever be mediated by the wonderful Gothic excesses of stories like The Pit and the Pendulum. But did you know that in the early seventeenth century the Inquisition introduced such a demanding standard of proof in accusations of witchcraft that brought burning for this crime to an end in Catholic Spain more than a century before the Protestant north?

Yes, there were horrors attached to the Inquisition, particularly in the pursuit of religious uniformity in Spain; but the country did thereby avoid the equal and greater horrors that followed from the religious wars in France and Germany.

After the excesses of the initial campaign against the Conversos, the Inquisition was transformed bit by bit into an arbiter of public morals more than anything else, a little like the rule of the Major Generals in Cromwellian England. As Kamen says "For most of its existence the Inquisition was far from being the juggernaut of death." For example, approximately 100 people were executed as suspected Protestants in the brief campaign against Lutheranism between 1559 and 1562. Contrast this with the 127 priests executed in England between 1570 and 1603. Yes, Catholic Spain was intolerant, but not more so than the rest of Europe at the time.

The Inquisition in Spain also had a unique relationship to the state, answerable to the crown, not to the Pope in Rome. As such it operated a little like a modern secret police force, always alert to the possibility of dissent. Yet, as Charles Petrie points out in his 1963 biography of Phillip II, it was "a very mild affair compared with the NKVD and the Gestapo."

We all, I suppose, associate the Inquisition with the most gruesome forms of torture. But it employed no unique methods, nothing that was not already in widespread use. Torture, moreover, was only used in a minority of cases, and only for the most serious offences. A doctor was always present on these occasions, and the process was such that no lasting physical damage ensued. Ugly, yes, but a standard better than that set by other practitioners of the art, both then and since.

I Was a Pilgrim; Yes, I Was!

Always looking for the unusual, in the summer of my nineteenth birthday I walked with a group of friends on the Camino de Santiago - the Road of Saint James - to Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain . This is an ancient pilgrimage route, one of the three most favoured in the Middle Ages, the other two being Rome and Jerusalem. But of the three Santiago was by far the most popular, attracting millions of people over the centuries, for the simple reason that there were dangers attendant on the other two, bandits in Northern Italy and Muslims in the Holy Land.

The cathedral at Santiago is supposedly the place where the remains of St James the Greater, the son of Zebedee, were laid to rest in the early Middle Ages. The story, true or not, served the interests of the Christian kingdoms of Spain in their ongoing struggle against the Moors, bringing much needed money and manpower. St James thus appeared in two forms: the apostle and in his new guise of Santiago Matamoros, the slayer of the Moors, a symbol and a presence, yes, a real presence, heading Christian armies in the Reconquista.

OK, let's be honest: when I say I walked I mean I walked in part! The full route, traditionally taken on foot, horseback and cycle would take weeks; we only had three. So, we hired a mini-van, taking turns to drive, and focusing only on the more interesting parts of the route, one of us going on to pre-arranged rendezvous.

The actual walking began from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the French Basque Country at the foot of the Pyrenees . It was really incredible. In parts we were completely shrouded in the mountain mists, so thick that one could only see a few yards ahead. But on we went, through the Pass of Roncesvalles , where Roland fought to the death in the rearguard of Charlemagne’s army. To be on that spot, to stand on that spot, remembering the Song of Roland, the greatest of the chason de geste, was incredibly moving.

So, on we went, through the ancient towns and cities of northern Spain ; through places like Pamplona , Burgos and Leon and on to Santiago . I should say I went for entirely profane reasons; I have not been a Christian since my mid-teens. But, even so, we met all sorts of remarkable people, from all over Europe and the rest of the world, some travelling like us, others on a genuine religious quest, carrying the Pilgrim’s Passport. The comradeship was the most memorable part.

We arrived towards the middle of the third week. I queued with the others and, in the spirit of the thing, I embraced the image of Saint James. And if you want to know, yes, I did have a scallop shell on my backpack!

GIVE me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.
Blood must be my body's balmer;
No other balm will there be given:
Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer,
Travelleth towards the land of heaven;
Over the silver mountains,
Where spring the nectar fountains;
There will I kiss
The bowl of bliss;
And drink mine everlasting fill
Upon every milken hill.
My soul will be a-dry before;
But, after, it will thirst no more.