Since May, 1547, Ugolino waited in daily expectation of orders to start, but it was not until December 1st that he left Rome with the bulls that decided the fate of Portugal. It was probably in January, 1548, that he reached Lisbon, where fresh delays occurred in settling details, and only on March 24th was the agreement respecting Silva's temporalities signed; João grumbled at the assignment of the accrued revenues to the fabric of St. Peter's; he had not agreed to surrender them and did not intend to do so, but he finally submitted. The pardon was published in Lisbon, June 10th, the prisons were emptied and the abjurations, we are told, for the most part were private.[719] Thus, after a contest lasting through seventeen years, the Inquisition was fastened upon Portugal and, in reviewing the kaleidoscopic vicissitudes of the struggle, we cannot trace, in any act of the Holy See, a higher motive than the sordid one of making, out of human misery, a market for the power of the keys and selling it to the highest bidder. [Sidenote: _INQUISITION OF PORTUGAL_] The New Christians promptly sought to save a fragment from the wreck, by obtaining the publication of the names of witnesses, based on the canonical provision that they were to be suppressed only in the case of powerful delinquents, who could wreak vengeance on accusers. With this view they procured from Paul III a brief of January 8, 1549, defining that New Christians and others could only be deemed powerful men, in respect to the communication of witnesses' names, provided they were nobles exercising jurisdiction over vassals, public magistrates, or officers in the royal palace. There seems to have been some delay in the publication of this but, when it came to the knowledge of the king, he sent, August 13, 1550, a copy of it to Julius III, with an urgent request for its revocation as it would prove the total destruction of the Inquisition.[720] A long struggle ensued between the Portuguese ambassadors and the New Christians, in which, for some time, the latter were successful. Into these details it is not worth while to enter, but the final incidents are too illustrative of the course of business in the papal court to be passed over. Paul IV succeeded to the pontificate May 23, 1555; while yet a cardinal he had expressed opposition to the brief, and the ambassador, Affonso de Lencastro, with the assistance of the Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Alessandrino--the future Pius V--had not much difficulty in winning him over. The brief of revocation was drafted and approved and sent to the dataria for despatch. The deputy there chanced to be a Castilian New Christian and, when the ambassador's secretary called for the brief, he was told that Paul III had done a just and holy thing, and that in Portugal the inquisitors wanted to burn everybody. The brief was withheld and, when complaint was made to the pope that his datary refused to obey orders, he promised to look into it.