The Inquisition Dungeon of Stephen F. Austin

By Guest Contributor: Bruce Clavey, Author of The Inquisition of Stephen F. Austin.

Few Texans of the colonial era could boast of having entered a dungeon of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. By extraordinary fate, empresario Stephen F. Austin did so twice: once in 1822 as a distinguished visitor to a political prisoner, and again 12 years later after his arrest on suspicion of sedition. In February 1834, Austin opened his diary and sketched the floor plan of his prison ─ Mexico City’s famed Palace of the Inquisition ─ with its principal courtyard at the top and the corridors of its patios and dungeons below. A key provided symbols for its entrances, courtyards, stairs, trees, and the lone fountain of the complex. He identified his cell as “Dungeon 15” of the main lower patio. [1]

Halfway home from Mexico City to Texas in January 1834, Stephen F. Austin was arrested on suspicion of sedition against the supreme government. Left: On two consecutive pages of the blank book that became known as his Prison Diary, Austin maintained a daily itemization of the towns in which his escort paused for lodging over their 24-day journey. Right: A map of Mexico, published in Paris in 1831 and claiming to be contemporary to the “diverse decrees the Mexican General Congress has made of the territory,” shows Austin’s route that set out from Monterrey, Nuevo León on January 20 and ended at his prison in Mexico City on February 13. Sources: “Prison Diary,” Briscoe Center for American History (The University of Texas at Austin) also identifier foth_0042; Mapa de los Estados Unidos Mejicanos, Paris: Rosa, 1831, Map #00940, Map Collection, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, TX. Reproductions of this map (GLO Map #79291) are available for sale at the GLO courtesy of TSLAC.

Austin expanded on these details ten weeks later in a letter to his family. His world now was a room “about 16 feet by 13 very high ceiling” whose entry was fitted with two doors, “one flush with the outside surface of the wall, the other near the inside surface and within the wall, which is about 3 feet thick of large hewn stone.” His cell was windowless, but it had “a very small skylight in the roof which barely afforded light.” Outside of his door “are 19 similar dungeons in … an oblong patio or open court about 120 by 60 feet which has a varanda or gallery all around it supported by pillars and arches — a fountain of good water from the aqueduct in the centre.” The letter addressed a set of connected patios that his sketch had depicted beyond the high outer walls of his prison courtyard, describing them as solederos or “sunning places” where Inquisition prisoners were once led for quiet daylight recreation. Austin saw “another extensive range of dungeons in the 2d story of the main building which communicates with this patio by a dark passage and much darker stone staircase.” Importantly, he acknowledged the rumor that the building had “four other patios or open courts that … formerly communicated with each other by obscure passages which are now closed.”[2]

On the page of the Prison Diary dated February 26, 1834, Austin sketched a floor plan of the historic building where he was held in political captivity, the Palace of the (ex-)Inquisition in Mexico City. Austin identified the courtyard in the lower right corner as the location of his prison block and labeled “Calaboso No 15” (Dungeon 15) as his cell. Source: Stephen F. Austin, “Prison Diary,” Austin Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Box 2a153.

Students of Austin’s two-year absence from Texas find few other details from which to reconstruct his incarceration in Mexico City. The precise location went obscured for the next 183 years after his release from the prison. Users of his drawing as a literal key to existing architecture must conclude that his cell was obliterated in the intervening centuries of palace demolitions and renovations. Those who acknowledge possible imperfections in his accounts wonder if it is possible to overcome major impediments of the investigation — the blank spots in Austin’s exposure to palace architecture, the inaccuracies in his sketch — to find Dungeon 15 still intact. Fortunately, where documentation tapers off in Texas history resources, the inquiry progresses through records relating to the Inquisition of New Spain.

Top: This eastward view of Mexico City, published in 1671, reflects 150 years of Spanish colonization. Bottom: Four blocks north of the principal cathedral, the Inquisition was conducted at the plaza identified in the key as the convent of Santo Domingo. The palace was added to the site 60 years later. Source: John Ogilby, Nova Mexico, London, 1671, Map #95132, Map Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.

In 1478, Spanish monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I took over management of the Inquisition from the pope, which had functioned for three centuries throughout the Old World. By 1571, the Inquisition of New Spain was formally established on the plaza of Santo Domingo in Mexico City. The institution there had three basic components: a church and convent, an array of inquisitorial offices and residences, and dungeons to house the accused. The buildings in the latter category formed the first footprint of a zone that later became known as the Cárcel Perpetua, or “life-sentence prison,” though an indirect reference to them in 1589 insinuated that they were so “very dark, very strong and very small, that to be in them only one day was a very grievous penalty.”[3]

Santo Domingo was a site of ongoing architectural renovation and evolution toward a single, contiguous Inquisition complex. A 1657 proposal to reinforce the prisons offers a glimpse into the dungeons that would one day hold Austin and other political and religious prisoners. The plan declared that new walls were to be constructed “one vara in width,” or approximately three feet. Based on this width, “in each room or chamber … there has to be placed two doors of nailed wood” mounted at the inner and outer surfaces of the wall, and a window that “has to be high.” Mirroring the double-portal characteristic of the doors, “the windows have to be three quarters square with two iron bars in each window embedded in two frames.”[4]

The Inquisition ascended into grandness only decades later when noted architect Pedro de Arrieta fully enveloped the complex into a conjoined unit on Santo Domingo Plaza. The new Palace of the Inquisition provided inquisitors quartered in the second floor with a single point of access to their prisoners: a dark stairwell at the east end of the main building that descended to the Cárcel Perpetua zone. For the orange trees that grew in the prison yard below, the court became known as the Patio de los Naranjos.[5]

In 1820, the Inquisition of New Spain was abolished, and a Mexican picket squad was dispatched to end all operations at the Palace of the Inquisition. A journalist embedded with the soldiers sent to free the prisoners cataloged the many excesses that were found as they moved through the upper inquisitorial offices. When the journalist reached the lone access point to the secret prison, which became the site of Austin’s imprisonment a little over a decade later, his account rings with remarkable familiarity:

“Down the stairs that lead to the prisons, there is a room …. [with] two doors, one of which leads to a fairly spacious patio, in the center of which there is a fountain and some orange trees, and around which are 19 dungeons …. Most of the prisons are 16 feet long and 10 wide, although there are some smaller and others larger; two very thick doors; a hole or window with double bars that brings a hazy light in to them …. Behind the nineteen dungeons there are many little gardens that they call asoleaderos, where they bring the prisoners sometimes to take in the sun, but built so that it was impossible to be seen, one by another.”[6]

This northward view of Mexico City, published in 1830, presents the capital as it would have been known to Austin. Peter Maverick, Plano General de la Ciudad de Mexico. Levantado Por el Teniente Coronel Don Diego Garcia Conde en el Año de 1793. Aumentado y corregido en lo mas notable Por el Teniente Coronel retirado, Don Rafael Maria Calvo En el de 1830, New York, 1830, Map #95354, Map Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.

The account of prisoner liberation confirms that the dungeon of Stephen F. Austin was number 15 of the 19-cell Patio de los Naranjos of the old Cárcel Perpetua prison zone. Austin first entered the courtyard during his visit to Mexico City in 1822 as a newly-minted Texas empresario, placing him there two years after the abolition of the Inquisition and one year after Mexico gained national independence from Spain. The new government had assumed control of the Inquisition palace at the height of civil instability and transitioned it to housing for political opponents. The object of Austin’s visit was the revolutionary priest Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, incarcerated in Dungeon 15 for opposing Emperor Agustín de Iturbide. By coincidence, Austin was remanded to the same cell on his return to the courtyard as a prisoner in 1834.[7]

The Palace of the Inquisition, which filled virtually the entire square city block, sits without a label to the east of the convent of Santo Domingo between the avenues of Cocheras and Peretua.

Architect Joaquín de Heredia surveyed the palace in 1831 as a prospective location for the Academy of San Carlos fine arts school. The academy never moved into the vacated space, but Heredia’s floor plan became an essential snapshot of the building’s architecture. Source data from Plano de Heredia. Año de 1831. Planta baja, in Francisco de la Maza, El Palacio de la Inquisición (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, 1951) Adaptation appearing in this article rendered by Bruce W. Clavey.

In the years between Austin’s two visits, the Mexican government sought prospective buyers for the palace building and commissioned Architect Joaquín de Heredia to conduct what became the first civil survey of the premises. Heredia’s 1831 “blueprint” provides researchers with the awaited resource for comparison with Austin’s 1834 sketch. A side-by-side view of these floor plans does reveal solid similarities — notably, the building’s canted main entrance, a principal courtyard with columns, and an imperial stairwell. However, a problem arises comparing the plans for the purpose of identifying the location of Dungeon 15. Having been deemed architecturally unstable after centuries of earthquakes and sinkage, the courtyard corresponding to the location of the Patio de los Naranjos in Austin’s sketch was demolished and rebuilt as a modern lecture auditorium in the twentieth century. [8] Moreover, the eastern half of the two plans below the principal patio (at bottom in the figures of this article) show significant differences, introducing a paradox in the attempt to confirm Austin’s diagram as a literal match to palace architecture: his sketch proves authentic in its portrayal of a patio with 19 dungeon cells, a fountain, and set of sunning patios; while the Heredia survey bears the veracity of being prepared by a professional surveyor. Can they both be correct?

Francisco de la Maza, mid-twentieth century authority on Mexico City’s palaces, provides a clue that ultimately dispels the mystery. “The plans,” he writes of Heredia’s 1831 survey, “are exclusively of the inquisitorial building, with its courtyards, halls and houses, without taking into account the prisons.” Maza delimited Heredia’s depiction more precisely as “the body of the building between Cocheras and Perpetua Streets [where] there are two small courtyards surrounded by a large number of rooms, and looking eastward toward the prisons, a room with a stairwell that runs between them and the Inquisition.” The relative position of the stairwell is the key here; ergo, the Cárcel Perpetua exists to the east ─ that is, beneath ─ the bottom edge of Heredia’s surveyed area. [9]

The Heredia survey (1831) and Austin sketch (1834) were drafted within a relatively short time frame. A comparison reveals significant similarities between them; however, references placing the “dark stair” to the east of the inquisitorial offices and to the west of the Cárcel Perpetua hint at the reason for the striking visual disparity between these two depictions. Austin spoke of the inquisitorial sector only in rumor, and its non-appearance in his sketch fed the perplexity over the precise location of his cell until only recently.

From this, it is apparent that Austin’s sketch did not represent the inquisitorial offices as described by Maza. His omission of this palace sector is consistent with his awareness only by a rumor of the “four patios connected to each other by obscure passages.” His sketch becomes a diagram whose accuracy is verified in two halves. The principal courtyard and imperial stair of its upper portion were features that Austin easily represented by memory from his arrival through the main entrance in 1822. The lower portion containing the Cárcel Perpetua was the current environment into which he entered through the south prisoner entrance. A modern survey of the building (known since 1854 as the Palace of the School of Medicine) demonstrates that Austin represented the edifice with significant accuracy when his sketch is “un-collapsed” into the two portions of architecture to which he had been exposed. It signifies also that Dungeon 15 was not in the portion of the edifice that was gutted and remodeled in the twentieth century.

A modern survey of the Antiguo Palacio de la Escuela de Medicina provided by the site’s modern conservator is overlaid with Heredia survey data to produce this 1834 rendition of the Palace of the (ex-)Inquisition. Source plan courtesy of Arq. Inés González, Department Chief of Historic Properties, Directorate General of Heritage of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City; 1834 adaptation appearing in this article rendered by Bruce W. Clavey.

The Patio de los Naranjos exists today. In fact, the range of five dungeons comprising its north facade — including Austin’s cell — is among the final portions of palace architecture that still exist in primitive form. Almost 200 years after Austin departed the Inquisition prison, details that he recorded meticulously in his diary were reexamined against the backdrop of the Inquisition of New Spain, and in February 2017, an investigation led to the onsite verification of Dungeon 15 as the 1834 habitation of Austin in the Palace of the Inquisition. The confirmation brings a welcome Mexican context for events traditionally viewed through a Texas lens. Moreover, it satisfies the intent of Austin to enlighten those who “may have some curiosity to know how I am lodged, and what sort of a place an inquisicion prison is.”[10]

[left] Inside view of the entrance to Dungeon 15 occupied by Stephen F. Austin. Two doors were once mounted three feet apart in the lower part of the opening, topped by a horizontal lintel that restricted the upper opening to a two-foot square “skylight” equipped with bars and shutters. The disappearance of ceilings and upper veranda walkway along the entire north facade permit sunlight to flood a cell that was previously extremely dark. [right] Both Austin and the anonymous journalist who attended the liberation of Inquisition captives in 1820 remarked that the prison courtyard cells had a uniform 16-foot depth and were of variable width. This is the 13-foot rear wall of Dungeon 15, where Austin spent five of the 18 months that he was detained by the Mexican government. Photos: Bruce W. Clavey.

The northern facade of the Patio de los Naranjos, with Dungeon 15 at lower level center, is one of the final areas of Palace architecture whose primitive construction awaits conservation.

[left] View into Dungeon 15 from patio walkway. Construction characteristics as prescribed in the 1657 Plan and echoed in Austin’s description are observable from this angle, including walling at one vara in width and locations where double-doored and double-windowed casements were fit. The top edge of the skylight once sat flush with both the cell ceiling and the underside of the veranda, both of which are now missing. The perpendicular piping and tension bar indicate that the veranda that once ran at that level put the room’s high and only portal in deep shadow. [center] Upper-level view of the northern facade of the patio, where the same tension rods are positioned at the level of the missing veranda. Austin wrote of walking this section above his cell. Photos: Bruce W. Clavey. [right] Eastward view from Dungeon 19 of the Patio de los Naranjos, Stephen F. Austin’s five-month home in 1834. The white stucco finish on the east, south, and west facades and construction materials staged throughout the patio portend the renovations slated for the north facade. The construction panel bearing the green sign to the immediate left of the fountain fills the archway directly in front of Dungeon 15. Photo: Javier Pérez Siller.

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1. A digital image of this page of the journal kept by Stephen F. Austin between December 1833 and April 1834 is presented online at “Prison Diary,” Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, <http://www.cah.utexas.edu/db/dmr/image_lg.php?variable=foth_0071> [Accessed February 1, 2019]. Except as and if noted, translations of original Spanish-language texts into English are provided by the author.

2. Stephen F. Austin to James F. Perry, May 10, 1834, in Eugene C. Barker (ed.), The Austin Papers, (3 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1924–28) II, 1050, 1051.

3. For a good documentary approach to the descent of inquisitions from the medieval era to New Spain, see John F. Chuchiak, The Inquisition in New Spain, 1536–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1–12. Francisco de la Maza, El Palacio de la Inquisición (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1951), 28.

4. Colonial construction and maintenance projects for the Inquisition of New Spain are documented in Real Fisco de la Inquisición (Royal Treasury of the Inquisition) records at the Archivo General de la Nación at Mexico City. An exhaustive compilation of Real Fisco data relating to the 1657 renovation project at Santo Domingo appears in Martha Fernández, Arquitectura y gobierno virreinal: Los maestros mayores de la Ciudad de México, siglo XVII (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985). Portions of the Fernández research relating to the Cárcel Perpetua are found in Francisco Santos Zertuche, Señorio, dinero y arquitectura: el Palacio de la Inquisición de México (1571–1820) (Mexico City: el Colegio de Mexico, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 2000), 112–119.

5. Flavio Salamanca G. highlights the contribution of Pedro de Arrieta to the architectural evolution on Santo Domingo Plaza in the essay “Historia del edificio del Palacio de la Inquisición,” in Martha Fernández, Manuel González Galván, Carlos Viesca, and Flavio Salamanca G., eds., El Palacio de la Escuela de Medicina (Mexico City: Facultad de Medicina, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994), 59–69. See also Maza, Palacio de la Inquisición, 28–36.

6. The embedded eyewitness is the anonymous journalist of “Noticias de la inquisición de Méjico,” Seminario Político y Literario 1, №5 (August 9, 1820): 105–111].

7. Stephen F. Austin to James F. Perry, May 10, 1834, in Barker (ed.), Austin Papers, II, 1051.

8. For a textual description of the results of Heredia’s survey, see Maza, Palacio de la Inquisición, 52–54. Maza additionally reproduces architectural layouts for both floors of the palace in illustrations 34–35 of this reference. See also the insert for “Plano del Palacio de la Inquisición, 1823” in Fernández, et. al., Palacio de la Escuela de Medicina. The demolition of the Patio de Cocheras and subsequent auditorium construction is documented in Fernández, et. al., Palacio de la Escuela de Medicina, 141.

9. Maza, Palacio de la Inquisición, 52, 53.

10. Research access to the Palace of the School of Medicine (formerly the Palace of the Inquisition) in Mexico City was granted to the author by the site’s modern conservator, the Directorate General of Heritage of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Details of the February 2017 confirmation of Dungeon 15 as Austin’s habitat is recounted in Bruce W. Clavey, The Inquisition of Stephen F. Austin (Self-published, 2018), 36–43, 46–51. See Stephen F. Austin to James F. Perry, May 10, 1834, in Barker (ed.), Austin Papers, II, 1051.