"The inquisitor then quitted his seat, resumed his robes and followed by twenty priests, each with a staff in his hand, passed into the middle of the church and with divers prayers some of us were relieved from excommunication, each of us receiving a blow from a priest. Once, such an insult would have sent the blood in a rush to my head, and I had died but I had given a return buffet; now, so weak and broken-spirited was I, I burst into tears. "Now, one by one, those condemned to the stake, faint and staggering, were brought in to hear their sentences, which they did with a frightened vacancy, inconceivably touching, but the inquisitors were gossiping among themselves and scarcely looked at them. Every sentence ended with the same cold mechanical formula: That the Holy Office being unhappily unable to pardon the prisoners present, on account of their relapse and impenitence, found itself obliged to punish them with all the rigour of earthly law, and therefore delivered them with regret to the hands of secular justice, praying it to use clemency and mercy towards the wretched men, saving their souls by the punishment of their bodies and recommending death, but not effusion of blood. Cruel hypocrites! "At the word blood the hangmen stepped forward and took possession of the bodies, the alcaide first striking each of them on the chest to show that they were now abandoned to the rope and fire." Then he goes on to describe the scene at the _quemadero_, which, however, included nothing of importance not already mentioned elsewhere. After the death of Philip IV, and during the minority of his son, Charles II, Father Nithard, a Jesuit, who combined the two forces long in opposition, the disciples of Loyola and the descendants of Torquemada, was for a time inquisitor-general. The Holy Office was hotly opposed by Don John of Austria, a natural son of Philip IV, who rose to political power and would have fallen a victim to the Inquisition had not popular indignation sided with him against Nithard, who fled from Spain to Rome. He was stripped of all his offices but still kept the favour of the queen-mother who finally secured for him from Pope Clement X the coveted cardinal's hat. Don John was unequal to the task of curbing the power of the Inquisition, however, and the institution claimed wider and wider jurisdiction.