It is satisfactory to be able to say that, as a rule, the interference of the Suprema with the tribunals was on the side of mercy rather than of rigor. It is true that torture, then the universal solvent of doubt, was frequently ordered, but there seems to have been a fairly conscientious discharge of the responsibilities which it had grasped. In the Valladolid records of the seventeenth century, the modifications of sentences are almost uniformly mitigations, especially by the omission of scourging, which the tribunals were accustomed to administer liberally, and there would seem to be especial tenderness for the offences of the clergy.[488] A typical instance of this moderation is seen in the case of Margarita Altamira, sentenced by the Barcelona tribunal, in 1682, to appear in an auto de fe, to abjure de levi, to receive a hundred lashes through the streets and to seven years' exile from Barcelona and some other places, the first two of which were to be passed serving in a hospital without pay. All this the Suprema reduced to hearing her sentence read in the audience-chamber and to four years' exile from the same places.[489] This mitigating tendency is especially apparent in the restored Inquisition, from 1814 to 1820, where the sentences are almost uniformly revised with a reduction of penalties. Scourging is more rarely prescribed by the tribunals and, when it is ordered, it is invariably omitted by the Suprema, the power of dispensing with it being attributed to the inquisitor-general.[490] * * * * * As the functions of the tribunals thus gradually shrank to mere ministerial duties, the appellate jurisdiction lodged in the inquisitor-general and absorbed by the Suprema, of which we heard so much in earlier times, became less and less important. The bull of Leo X, in 1516, prescribes that appeals shall be heard by the inquisitor-general in conjunction with the Suprema and that, pending the decision, the case shall be suspended.[491] This indicates that appeals were suspensive, although subsequently the Inquisition eluded this by arguing, as in the matter of Villanueva, that they were merely devolutionary--that is, that sentences, in spite of them, were to be promptly executed, thus practically rendering them useless.[492]