And how dreadful the miseries of this prison are, we have a famous instance given us by Reginald Gonsalvius Montanus.[247] In the age before the last, a certain English ship put in at the port of Cadiz, which the familiars of the inquisition, according to custom, searched upon the account of religion, before they suffered any person to come ashore. They seized on several English persons who were on board, observing in them certain marks of evangelical piety, and of their having received the best instruction, and threw them into jail. In that ship there was a child, ten or twelve years, at most, old, the son of a very rich English gentleman, to whom, as was reported, the ship and principal part of her loading belonged. Amongst others, they took up also this child. The pretence was, that he had in his hands the psalms of David in English. But, as Gonsalvius tells us, those who knew their avarice and cursed arts, may well believe, without doing any injury to the holy inquisition, that they had got the scent of his father’s wealth, and that this was the true cause of the child’s imprisonment, and of all that calamity that followed after it. However, the ship with all its cargo was confiscated; and the child, with the other prisoners, were carried to the jail of the inquisition at Seville, where he lay six or eight months. Being kept in so strait confinement for so long a while, the child, who had been brought up tenderly at home, fell into a very dangerous illness, through the dampness of the prison, and the badness of his diet. When the lords inquisitors were informed of this, they ordered him to be taken out of the jail, and carried, for the recovery of his health, to the hospital, which they call the Cardinal. Here they generally bring all who happen to fall ill in the prison of the inquisition; where, besides the medicines, of which, according to the pious institution of the hospital, there is plenty, and a little better care, upon account of the distemper, nothing is abated of the severity of the former jail; no person besides the physician, and the servants of the hospital, being allowed to visit the sick person; and as soon as ever he begins to grow better, before he is fully recovered, he is put again into his former jail. The child, who had contracted a very grievous illness from that long and barbarous confinement, was carried into the hospital, where he lost the use of both his legs: nor was it ever known what became of him afterwards. In the mean while it was wonderful, that the child, in so tender an age, gave noble proofs how firmly the doctrine of piety was rooted in his mind; oftentimes, but especially morning and evening, lifting up his eyes to heaven, and praying to him, from whom he had been instructed by his parents, to desire and hope for certain help; which the jailkeeper having often observed, said, he was already grown a great little heretic. ----- Footnote 247: P. 119. -----