This indicated a desire to resume the close watchfulness of Ferdinand which had long since been forgotten in the turmoil and absences of Charles V and the secluded labors of Philip II, over despatches and consultas. A bureaucracy was establishing itself in which the various departments of the government were becoming more or less independent of the monarch and Philip for the moment appeared disposed to reassert his authority, for, in 1603, we are told that he made many appointments of inquisitors, fiscals, and even of minor officials.[750] If so, he was too irresolute, feeble, and fitful to carry out a definite line of policy for when, in 1608, he issued the customary instructions to a new inquisitor, Sandoval y Rójas, he merely repeated the injunctions of 1595, with the addition that transfers should also be communicated to the Suprema.[751] Yet in one case he even exceeded Ferdinand by intervening in a case of faith. When he went to Toledo with his court to witness the auto de fe of May 10, 1615, he asked to see the sentence of Juan Cote, penanced for Lutheranism, and made some changes in the _meritos_, or recital of offences, altered the imprisonment to perpetual and irremissible and added two hundred lashes. The tribunal consulted the Suprema, which approved the changes on the supposition that the inquisitor-general had participated in them, but the day after the auto Cote was informed that the Suprema had mercifully remitted the scourging.[752] [Sidenote: _POWER OF APPOINTMENT_]