Elvira was arrested early in July, and at first her trial was pushed with speed, as she was pregnant, but her confinement, August 31st, caused a delay of three months. She admitted not eating pork, but attributed this to medical advice, for a disease communicated to her by her husband, which she desired to conceal. Little stress was laid on the other charges and she strenuously asserted her orthodoxy. Of the twelve witnesses against her she identified six, but her effort to disable them for enmity failed, except as regarded the two most damaging ones, Collados and Diego Hernández. Of thirteen witnesses for character, consisting of ecclesiastics and neighbors, all but one--who professed ignorance--gave emphatic testimony as to her being a good Christian, attentive and regular in all religious duties, obedient to the precepts of the Church, and in no way the object of suspicion. There was evidently nothing to do but to torture her. This, as we have seen above (p. 24) was administered twice, and resulted in her stating that when she was eleven years old her mother had told her not to eat pork and to observe the Sabbath, and she knew this to be against the Christian Law--but, as her mother had died when she was eleven years old, we can not unreasonably doubt its truth. The next day a ratification was obtained in the shape that her not eating pork, changing her chemise and observing the Sabbath, were in pursuance of the Law of Moses as taught her by her mother; she had never mentioned this to anyone, for her father would have killed her and she feared her husband. On the strength of this, in the consulta de fe, there was one fanatic who voted her relaxation, but the rest agreed upon reconciliation with its disabilities, confiscation and three years of prison and sanbenito, which were duly imposed in an auto of June 13, 1568, but, in a little more than six months, the imprisonment was commuted to spiritual penances, and she was told to go where she chose. Thus, besides the horrors of her trial, she was beggared and ruined for life, and an ineffaceable stain was cast upon her kindred and descendants. What became of the infant born in prison is not recorded, but presumably it was fortunate enough to die. Trivial as may seem the details of such a trial, they are not without importance as a sample of what was occupying the tribunals of all Spain, and they raise the interesting question whether in truth the inquisitors believed what they assumed in the public sentence, that they had been laboring to rescue Elvira from the errors and darkness of her apostasy and to save her soul. The minute points on which the fate of the accused might depend are illustrated by the insistence with which they dwell on her abstinence from pork, on her refusal to eat buttered cakes, on her use of two stewing-pots, and on the time at which she changed her chemise and baked her bread.[669] [Sidenote: _ERADICATION OF JUDAISM_]