In this he would seem to be mistaken. I have never met with a case, later than those alluded to, in which conversion professed after sentence secured reconciliation. The tendency to rigor was too strong. The Instructions of 1561 make no allusion to such a possibility, as they grudgingly allow mercy for earlier confession. Peña forbids it; he admits that it was the ancient custom, but such conversions are not to be trusted and experience shows that such penitents are only rendered worse.[565] It was the universal practice to garrote those who professed repentance after sentence, and the dreadful alternative of death by fire, when thus impending so imminently, wrought so many conversions on the way to the _brasero_, even among those whose resolve had held out thus far, that burning alive became comparatively infrequent. In the first three autos held at Barcelona in 1488 and 1489, all the converts professed a desire to die in the Christian faith and all were strangled before burning.[566] At the great auto of May 21, 1559, at Valladolid where Dr. Cazalla and other Protestants suffered, there were fourteen relaxed in person, of whom only one, the Bachiller Herrezuelo, is characterized as a pertinacious heretic and consequently burnt alive, the rest being garrotted as repentant converts.[567] In 1571 there were hanging, in the parish church of Logroño, 157 sanbenitos, of which 101 were of those reconciled and 56 of those relaxed. Of the latter nine were in effigy and 47 in person, of whom only four are specified as burnt alive.[568] The weakness of human nature afforded but rare examples of those who could stand the final test of fiery martyrdom.