The Colegio de Niñas Expósitas de Santa Cruz de Atocha was a school for foundlings in colonial Lima, Peru (“the City of Kings”). It was run by the Spanish Inquisition. Because of its unusual administrators, the school had some odd quirks, even by the standards of tyrannical charity schools. It’s a really interesting adventure site for you to file the serial numbers off and plunk down into your ongoing campaign.
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Foundlings were children of unknown parentage left anonymously as newborns outside a church or the home of a well-off family. In the case of a wealthy family, they might raise the child as their own (rare, and only if the child were white), as a servant (more likely), or as a slave (if the infant looked Black or Indigenous). More often, though, especially for foundlings left with a church, the foundling went to one of Lima’s orphanages, where wet nurses found temporary employment suckling newborns. As the children grew, some of them found homes with willing families (often with the wet nurses who suckled them), while others stayed in what modern Americans would call “the system.” Depending on a child’s age, sex, and race, different institutions might step in to look after them.
Some girls found their way into the Colegio de Niñas Expósitas de Santa Cruz de Atocha (Holy Cross of Our Lady of Atocha Foundling Girls’ School). Someone had to apply on their behalf, and witnesses had to testify that the girls were definitely abandoned, were definitely white, and that whichever benefactor or institution had raised them so far had done so in a Christian manner. To confirm the girl’s race, witnesses (or records, in the case of churches) were called upon to describe exactly the clothing the foundling was dropped off in as a newborn. Was it European-made or of a European style? Preference was given to girls whose current situation exposed them to too much sex and sexuality, so they might be placed on a more Christian path. Girls who could read, write, and do chores were also more likely to be admitted. Due to funding constraints, the school could only admit about a dozen girls a year.
Soon after the school’s founding in 1653, the Spanish Inquisition took it over. The members of Lima’s Tribunal of the Inquisition became its patrons, responsible for its charter. The school reported only to the Inquisition, not to the archbishop, the viceroy, or any other local authority. The reason for the Inquisition adopting the school was likely simple charity, but given the Inquisition’s ill reputation, the mind leaps immediately to gameable motives. One odd consequence of the school being an arm of the Inquisition was that breaking the school rules was deemed a mortal sin. If a student broke the rules badly enough, she might be excommunicated: barred from receiving sacraments and thus potentially doomed to hell.
Students were cut off from the outside world. They couldn’t leave. They couldn’t receive guests. They couldn’t send or receive letters. If some exigency absolutely forced a student to communicate with someone outside the school, it was done through the grate at the church in the presence of the headmistress. An intentional consequence of this policy was that the students saw men and boys as infrequently as possible. The only teacher was a woman. If a physician had to be summoned, he was accompanied at all times by the headmistress and the teacher, and spoke only to the patient. If a male porter was needed to bring in something heavy, he too was escorted. Every night, the headmistress, the teacher, and two of the older girls verified the dormitory was locked up tight.
The students worked fifteen hours a day. Ten of that was devoted to religion: prayers, masses, reading, and lectures. Every two weeks, they confessed and took communion. Thursdays were exempt from religious work, but the other five hours of daily labor remained: cooking and washing, mostly, plus every Saturday they cleaned the school. The students had an hour of free time before bed, provided they used it virtuously. Each student slept in her own bed. To do otherwise was, interestingly, not seen as chaste.
The school set aside some of its limited funds for dowries for its students. Dowries could be spent on a husband or to become a nun. Convents in Lima required a dowry before letting you marry God. Because school rules made courtship impossible, the distribution of dowries was done by seniority. Senior students who wanted to enter monastic life found having the Inquisition as a patron smoothed the way to a position in one of New Spain’s most prestigious convents. Senior students looking to marry had their wooing replaced by a review board. Men who wanted to marry a student at the college had their applications scrutinized by the Tribunal of the Inquisition, and if they passed muster, they were matched with one of the senior students. If the marriage didn’t work out, or if the new bride didn’t bear any children before she died, the husband had to return the dowry.
We don’t know much about these husbands, but we can surmise they weren’t Lima’s wealthiest bachelors. Most white women in Lima didn’t cook or clean or wash. They had servants, both enslaved and free, to do that for them. The school’s documents make clear that having the students cook and clean and wash wasn’t done for the good of their souls or to save money on servants. It was done to make them better wives. So either the Tribunal of the Inquisition didn’t know what skills were valuable in an upper-class marriage (not impossible, given the whole “vow of chastity” thing), or the students would be cooking and cleaning in their married lives too.
The dowry was a great work of charity, and consequently a terribly effective threat. Students who misbehaved could and did have their promised dowries stripped from them. With the convents and respectable marriage out of reach, they were in the same position as most of Lima’s population. Probably the best they could hope for was life as a servant, and even that might be a long shot. But because they were subject to the Inquisition, there was an added wrinkle. An expelled student who tried to make contact with her former schoolmates could be forcibly exiled from Lima to the coast.
If you drop a fictional charity school based on the Colegio de Niñas Expósitas de Santa Cruz de Atocha in your ongoing campaign, you don’t have to decide right away whether its board of trustees is up to any funny business. Let your players feel it out first. Get a sense for which version of the school they’d enjoy more. For example, the party might be approached by a young man who’s fallen in love with a student he sees through the window. They’re mutually and terribly infatuated, but the school has denied his request to wed her. Won’t the party help him spring her? If the party investigates, they find that the student also loves him (they’re eighteen; cut them some slack). The party could help the lovebirds and earn their undying, albeit penurial gratitude. Or the PCs could rat the couple out to your version of the Inquisition and gain a favor they can call in someday.
Later, if you do want the school to be up to some funny business (and if the players would enjoy circling back to it), you have options.
One fun possibility is a Man in the Iron Mask scenario, where one of the students is someone your Inquisition-analogue wants to keep out of public knowledge. She might be the true heir to a disputed throne. She might be someone kidnapped as an infant to blackmail her important parents to stay in line. Or she might be living proof of an embarrassment the Inquisition-analogue would like covered up. Someone in the Inquisition-analogue records office stumbles upon the documentation of what clothes the then-infant was “found” in and a description of a distinctive birthmark or physical attribute. The clerk approaches the party about getting the student out of the school.
Another possibility is much more straightforward: the school produces super-agents. Most of the students are whom they seem, but children who show promise as spies, assassins, X-Men—or whatever your campaign needs—are sent to the school for further development in secrecy. The new headmistress is actually some villain whose minions the party tangled with in a previous adventure. The PCs either never saw her face or, as headmistress, she always wears a mask. If the party goes after her now, though, she’ll be backed up by her most talented students, while her less-talented students unwittingly serve as human shields.
Regardless of whether there’s funny business or not, graduates of the school can then pop up in later adventures. Nuns (or government employees, or whatever the equivalent is in your setting) from prestigious convents are liable to have come from the school and have maintained their Inquisition-analogue contacts. Ordinary women, some of whom might have outlived their arranged husbands, might be sleeper agents or informants still on the payroll of the Inquisition.
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Source: Private Passions and Public Sins: Men and Women in Seventeenth-Century Lima by María Emma Mannarelli (1993, English translation published 2007)