It was essential that both inquisitors should be present, and a single inquisitor was forbidden to celebrate a public auto in the absence of his colleague. The day selected must be a feast-day--ordinarily a Sunday--in order to insure a larger attendance. It sometimes chanced, however, in the eccentricities of spiritual jurisdiction, that the city lay under an interdict on the day appointed and, in such case, the Inquisition had to yield. In 1582 the Suprema instructed the tribunals that, when this occurred, they should endeavor to have the interdict lifted for the occasion, but, if those who had cast it refused, the inquisitors must not assume to lift it of their own authority, and must postpone the auto or do the best they could.[629] In all other respects the inquisitors were masters of the situation. Repeated royal cédulas, commencing in 1523, addressed to the authorities of the cities, made the inquisitors virtual rulers for the time. They were authorized to erect stagings in the public plazas, to regulate the police arrangements of the towns, and even to assign to the secular and clerical officials such seats and precedence as they saw fit. The climax would appear to be reached when Philip II empowered them to distribute at their will the windows of the private houses overlooking the scene. Against this, in 1595, the president and judges of the Audiencia of Granada protested, begging that house-owners should be allowed to rent their windows, and pointing out the hardship of a gentleman of high degree securing the use of a window for his family, and being turned out because the inquisitors chose to give it to a notary for the use of his wife. Philip, however, held good, except in so far that he gave the inquisitors instructions to have special consideration for the houses of the judges and alcaldes.[630] How the tribunals exercised the police power thus conferred on them is exemplified in the Seville auto of September 24, 1559, when they forbade any one, between the preceding midnight and the close of the solemnity, to carry arms or ride on horseback in the city, under penalty, for common folk, of a hundred lashes, and for gentlemen, of forfeiture of the horse or mule, thirty days of prison, and a fine of fifty thousand maravedís.[631] * * * * *