consult learned and saintly men, with whose advice he would so provide that injustice should cease and meanwhile he would receive memorials as to abuses and projects of reform. The deputies made haste to give him ample information as to the tribulations of his subjects and the injury resulting to his dominions, and the outcome of the consultations of his advisers was a series of instructions to the officials of the Inquisition which, if carried into effect, would have deprived the Holy Office of much of its efficiency for persecution as well as of its capacity for injustice. Peter Martyr tells us that the New Christians, to procure this, gave to the high chancellor, Jean le Sauvage, who was a thoroughly corrupt man, ten thousand ducats in hand, with a promise of ten thousand more when it should go into effect, but that, fortunately for the Inquisition, he fell sick towards the end of May and died early in July.[591] The Instructions had been finally engrossed and lacked only the signatures; they were drawn in the names of Charles and Juana and were addressed not only to the officials of the Inquisition but to those of the state and secular justice, but nothing more was heard of them, for the new chancellor, Mercurino di Gattinara, was a man of different stamp, and Charles as yet was swayed by the influences surrounding him. The elaborate project is therefore of no interest except as an acknowledgement, in its provisions for procedure, of the iniquity of the inquisitorial process as we shall see it hereafter, and, in its prohibitory clauses, that existing abuses exaggerated in every way the capacity for evil of the system as practised. Thus it prohibited that the salaries of the inquisitors should be dependent on the confiscations and fines which they pronounced, or that grants should be made to them from confiscated property or benefices of those whom they condemned, or that sequestrated property should be granted away before the condemnation of its owners; that inquisitors and officials abusing their positions should be merely transferred to other places instead of being duly punished; that those who complained of the tribunals should be arrested and maltreated; that those who appealed to the Suprema should be maltreated; that inquisitors should give information to those seeking grants as to the property of prisoners still under trial; that prisoners under trial should be debarred from hearing mass and receiving the sacraments; that those condemned to perpetual prison should be allowed to die of starvation.[592] The general tenor of these provisions indicate clearly what a tremendous stimulus to persecution and injustice was confiscation as a punishment of heresy, how the whole business of the Inquisition was degraded from its ostensible purpose of purifying the faith into a vile system of spoliation, and how those engaged in it were inevitably vitiated by the tempting opportunity of filthy gains.