sent to Illescas, where Avellaneda was, and had him brought in a cart to the common prison here; the Duchess being sent to the royal convent of nuns of St. Domingo el Real,[8] where she still remains. Cabra, who had caused all this trouble, was also imprisoned, and his wife as well, though she in her justification said: 'Why punish me, who try to live in the grace of God?--let them look to those who live like strumpets'; and amongst those who did so she {271} mentioned the Dowager Duchess of Pastrana. The affair has caused dreadful scandal, but has been hushed up. The good old Cardinal (Zapata) has taken so much to heart the misfortune of his niece, who, after having been committed to the custody of an Alcalde de Corte, has been sent to a nunnery, that ill-meaning people say that she is really his daughter. He is so troubled about it that he has moved to six different houses in six months, and much mistrust exists. Another thing has arisen out of the affair. The great distaste to the house of Peñaranda has caused the Duke to retire from Court. The King was quite willing for him to go, but did not like his wife to go with him. She is the daughter and heir to the Marquis of Valdonquilla, the uncle of the Admiral (of Castile), who, without taking any notice of the King's displeasure, forced her to follow her husband. But they say the commerce is established." This budget of scandal sent to the King of England shows how utterly rotten was the moral condition of the Court, when it sufficed for one disgraceful episode to be made public for a whole string of others to follow touching the honour of those who stood highest. This scandalous immorality, arising apparently from the absolute degeneration of religion into a formula, and of its ceasing to be a guide of conduct, extended to all classes of society, and terrified stories were told of horrible irreligious rites being carried on in the conventual houses themselves by a secret society called the "illumined ones" (_alumbrados_). The particulars of one awful scandal of the sort, which {272} was investigated by the Inquisition at this time (1633), caused great excitement in Madrid. It related to the proceedings of the nuns of St. Placido of Madrid, who were pronounced by the Benedictine chaplain, Fray Garcia, to be nearly all possessed of the devil; and on the pretext of exorcising them he was with them almost day and night. This went on for three years, when the fact that twenty-eight out of the thirty nuns in the convent were said to be possessed appeared so strange and suspicious, that the Inquisition intervened; and, in the course of a long inquiry and much torture of the chaplain, uncovered an appalling story of sacrilege, black magic, and immorality combined, for which all the persons implicated were severely punished; though a few years afterwards (1638) an attempt was made to whitewash the condemned.[9]