Whether the testimony acquired in the trials of the Lutherans was important or not, Inquisitor-general Valdés lost no time in using it to discredit Carranza in the opinion of the sovereigns. As early as May 12, 1588, in a report to Charles V at Yuste, his assistance is asked in obtaining the arrest of a fugitive, whose capture would be exceedingly important; he had been traced to Castro de Urdiales, where he was to embark for Flanders to find refuge with Carranza or with his companion Fray Juan de Villagarcia, where he was sure of being well received. That the real motive was to injure Carranza with Charles appears from Valdés repeating the story to him in a report of June 2, adding that the fugitive had escaped and that information had been sent to Philip in order that he might be captured.[151] It is reasonable to assume that whatever incriminating evidence could be obtained from the prisoners was promptly brought to the notice of the sovereigns and that inferences were unscrupulously asserted as facts. [Sidenote: _ARCHBISHOP CARRANZA_] At this critical juncture, Carranza delivered himself into the hands of his enemies. In England and Flanders he had employed the intervals of persecution in composing a work which should set forth the irrefragable truths of the Catholic faith and guard the people from the insidious poison of heretical doctrine. This was a task for which, at such a time, he was peculiarly unfitted. He was not only a loose thinker but a looser writer, diffuse, rambling and discursive, setting down whatever idea chanced to occur to him and wandering off to whatever subjects the idea might suggest. Moreover he was earnest as a reformer within the Church, realizing abuses and exposing them fearlessly--in fact, he declared in the Prologue that his object was to restore the purity and soundness of the primitive Church, which was precisely what the heretics professed as their aim and precisely what the ruling hierarchy most dreaded.[152] Worst of all, he did this in the vulgar tongue, unmindful of the extreme reserve which sought to keep from the people all knowledge of the errors and arguments of the heretics and of the contrast between apostolic simplicity and the splendid sacerdotalism of a wealthy and worldly establishment.[153] This he cast into the form of Commentaries on the Catechism, occupying a folio of nine hundred pages, full of impulsive assertions which, taken by themselves, were of dangerous import, but which were qualified or limited, or contradicted in the next sentence, or the next page, or, perhaps, in the following section.