Yet the impression made at the time is reflected in the report of the Venetian envoy, Agostino Nano, in 1598, when he says that the king can be termed the head of the Inquisition, for he appoints the inquisitors and officials. He uses it to hold in check his subjects and to punish them with the secrecy and severity of its procedure, when he cannot do so with the ordinary secular authority of the Royal Council. The Inquisition and the Royal Council mutually help each other in matters of state for the king's service.[553] This was a not unnatural conclusion to draw from a case of this nature, but the royal power, by this time, was too securely intrenched to require such aid. It was only the peculiar features of the Aragonese fueros that called for the invention of a charge of heresy in a political matter. The Inquisition, as a rule, considered it no part of its duties to uphold the royal power for, in 1604, we find it sentencing Bartolomé Pérez to a severe reprimand, a fine of ten thousand maravedís and a year's exile for saying that obedience to the king came before that due to the pope and to the Church.[554] Thus the mere denial of the superiority of the spiritual power over the temporal was a crime. Sporadic cases occurred in which special considerations called for the aid of the Inquisition, but they were not numerous and were apt to be directed against ecclesiastics, whose privilege exempted them from the secular courts. Such was that of the Jesuit, Juan de Mariana, distinguished in many ways, but especially by his classical History of Spain. He had served the Inquisition well as a censor of books, but in his _Tractatus septem_, published anonymously at Cologne, in 1609, in an essay on the debased Spanish coinage, the freedom with which he reprobated its evils and spoke of the malfeasance of officials gave great offence to the royal favorite Lerma and his creatures. Had Mariana been a layman there would have been no trouble in punishing him severely, but to reach the Jesuit Philip invoked the papal nuncio Caraffa and the Toledo tribunal took a hand. The whole proceeding was irregular and the pope was asked to render sentence, but, after a year's imprisonment, Mariana was liberated, without an imputation on his character, and he died, in 1624, full of years and honor, at the age of 87.[555]