Under the reign of this monarch, the power of the Crown was extended to cover powers not before recognized and while it is difficult to concede how citizens reared under the broad influence of the common law, could be brought to consent to such unusual and cruel punishment for any crime, the inhuman crime which brought about this harsh statute was such as to call for unusual handling, if not for such barbarous punishment as this act provided. One Richard Roose had placed poison in a vessel of yeast in the Bishop of Rochester’s kitchen and as a result of eating bread in which this yeast was used, seventeen persons in the family of the Bishop and others of his friends were poisoned. The enormity of the crime caused wide-spread indignation and such crimes were made treason and the offender subject to attainder. Roose was ordered to be boiled to death and in order to deter others similarly situated from perpetrating such a cruel crime, it was also provided by the act that henceforth, every wilful murder by poisoning, should be high treason and that all such offenders should be boiled to death.[48] Shakespeare makes the indignant Paulina, refer to this statute, in her reproachful speech to the Lords, after the good Hermione’s incarceration, in Winter’s Tale, when she asks: “What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me? What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling In leads or oils? What old or new torture Must I receive, whose every word deserves To taste of thy most worst?”[49] Margaret Davy, a young woman, convicted of murder by poisoning was also boiled to death, as provided by this statute, in 1542,[50] but this was the last victim to suffer such inhuman punishment and the act was soon afterward repealed. The misguided efforts of the Church of Rome to punish heresy by use of the _Inquisition_, brought about untold suffering and misery in the world. _The Inquisition_, was a tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church, for the discovery, repression, and punishment of heresy, unbelief and other offenses against religion. The emperors, Theodosius and Justinian, appointed officials known as Inquisitors, to look out and punish such offenders. They proceeded however in the name of the Emperors, in the secular courts, and no regular tribunal for the handling of this kind of alleged criminals, existed until the year 1248, after the fourth Lateran Council, held in the reign of Innocent III., when Innocent IV., established a permanent court for the prosecution and punishment of this class of offenders. The prosecutions under this constitution were purely in the ecclesiastical courts, and for the next century, in France, Italy, Spain and Germany, the Pope, by appeal, regulated the severity of the punishments inflicted by the local authorities and the punishments were not so severe as they afterwards became.