Under succeeding sovereigns the Holy Office was still favoured and supported, but the reign of Philip III witnessed loud and frequent remonstrances against its operation. The Cortes of Castile implored the king to put some restraint upon the too zealous inquisitors, but they still wielded their arbitrary powers unchecked, and Philip sought further encouragement for them from Rome. The accession of Philip IV to the throne was celebrated by an _auto da fé_, but no victim was put to death, and the only corporal punishment inflicted was the flogging of an immoral nun who professed to have made a compact with the devil. She was led out gagged, and, wearing the _sanbenito_, received two hundred lashes followed by perpetual imprisonment. Philip IV strove for a time to check the activity of the Inquisition, but he was too weak and wavering to make permanent headway against an institution, the leaders of which knew precisely what they were striving for, and pertinaciously pursued it. A graphic account of what purport to have been the painful experiences of a poor soul who fell at a later date into the clutches of the inquisitors is related by himself in a curious pamphlet printed in Seville, by one Carcel, who was a goldsmith in that city. Evidently there is the work of another hand in it, however, as it is written with too much regard for the dramatic to have been his own composition. The description of the _auto_ is also unusual, and not according to the usual procedure. He says that he was arrested on the 2nd of April, 1680, at ten o'clock in the evening, as he was finishing a gold necklace for one of the queen's maids of honour. A week after his first arrest Carcel was examined. We will quote his own words:--