The hatred, indeed, was quenchless which was not satisfied with what the Inquisition was doing. In 1623 we chance to hear of the tribunal of Evora arresting a hundred New Christians of the little town of Montemor o Novo.[757] The autos de fe were frequently conducted on a scale unknown in contemporary Castile. The tribunal of Coimbra held one, August 16, 1626, with two hundred and forty-seven penitents and _relaxados_, another on May 6, 1629, with two hundred and eighteen and another on August 17, 1631 with two hundred and forty-seven. The statistics between 1620 and 1640 are not complete, for there were ten autos of which the details have not been preserved but, even without these, the fearful aggregate is two hundred and thirty relaxed in person, a hundred and sixty-one in effigy and forty-nine hundred and ninety-five penanced--and this is in addition to several hundred prisoners discharged under two pardons granted in 1627 and 1630, which no doubt were heavily paid for.[758] Besides these pardons an Edict of Grace was published in 1622 but, as we have seen, such mercies were burdened with intolerable conditions, and only sixteen persons came forward under it--twelve in Lisbon and four in Evora--and all these had already been testified against.[759] In 1630, the royal confessor Sotomayor reported that, in interviewing the deputies of the New Christians, he found that they wanted no more Edicts of Grace; the last one, they said, had done them no good but much harm, as it brought infinite denunciations against them and filled the prisons.[760] There is very likely exaggeration, but nothing more than exaggeration, in the assertion of Luys de Melo that, in this period, the activity of the Inquisition had virtually depopulated the cities of Coimbra, Oporto, Braga, Lamego, Braganza, Evora, Beja and part of Lisbon, and the towns of Santarem, Tomar, Trancoso, Avero, Guimaraens, Vinais, Villaflor, Fundan, Montemor o Velho and o Novo and many other places, while the prisons of the three tribunals were always full and the autos so frequent that each tribunal celebrated one almost every year. One in Coimbra occupied two days, there being more than a hundred each day, and among them professors, canons, priests, curas with cure of souls, vicars-general, frailes, nuns, knights, including some of the Military Orders of kin with the highest of the land, and there was even a discalced Franciscan so pertinacious that he was burnt alive.[761] [Sidenote: _PORTUGUESE JEWS_]