earnest example of attending carefully to outward observances of religion, and in particular to kneel in adoration of the Host. The edict was registered on Sept. 3rd, 1551, and immediately put in force. Six years later, the King had to confess that its stringent provisions had failed to arrest the spread of the Protestant faith. He proposed to establish the Inquisition in France, moved thereto by the Cardinal of Lorraine and Pope Paul IV.; and was prevented only by the strenuous opposition of his _Parlement_.[193] He had to content himself with issuing the Edict of Compiègne (1557), which, while nominally leaving trials for heresy in the hands of the ecclesiastical courts, practically handed them over to the civil courts, where the judges were not allowed to inflict any lesser punishment than death. They were permitted to increase the penalty by inflicting torture, or to mitigate it by strangling the victims before burning them. Armed with this legislation, the work of hunting out the Reformed was strenuously carried on. Certain prisons were specially reserved for the Protestant martyrs--the Conciergerie, which was part of the building of the Palace, and the Grand Châtelet, which faced it on the opposite bank of the Seine. They soon overflowed, and suspects were confined in the Bastille, in the Petit Châtelet, and in episcopal prisons. The cells of the Conciergerie were below the level of the river, and water oozed from the walls; the Grand Châtelet was noted for its terrible dungeons, so small that the prisoner could neither stand upright nor lie at full length on the floor. Diseases decimated the victims; the plague slew sixty who were waiting for trial in the Grand Châtelet in 1547. Few were acquitted; almost all, once arrested, suffered death and torture.[194] § 6. _The Organisation of the French Protestant Church._