Don Melchior Macanaz continued to live in exile. His trial became important, from the great number of denunciations which were made against different works which he had written: in some of these he inveighed against the abuses which were committed at the Court of Rome, against those of the immunities of the clergy and of the ecclesiastical tribunals, and called the public attention to the fatal effects of increasing the number of monks and other societies. The qualifiers, in judging his works, clearly showed the spirit of hatred and revenge which actuated them. In the trial of Macanaz, one of his works, called _A Critical Defence of the Inquisition_, is mentioned; the inquisitors qualified it as _ironical_, because they found some things in it which were not true. They were confirmed in their opinion some time after, by another work of Macanaz, called _An Apology for the Defence of Fray Nicolas Jesus de Belando, in Favour of the Civil History of Spain, unjustly prohibited by the Inquisition_. Although the inquisitors treated him with so much severity, Ferdinand VI., and the inquisitor-general Don Manuel Quintano Bonifaz, permitted Macanaz to return to Spain, and the king sent him to Aix-la-Chapelle as his ambassador. In 1768, the inquisitors endeavoured to obtain the right of trying persons for polygamy: Charles III. ordered that the cognizance of this offence should belong to the secular judge, except when the criminals thought that it was permitted. It was his pleasure that the inquisitors "should only punish heresy and apostasy, and, above all, that none of his people should be subjected to the disgrace of an arrest, if they had not been previously convicted of a crime." In 1771, the Council of the Inquisition represented to the king, that the simple fact of marrying another person, while the first wife was alive, was sufficient to create a suspicion that the persons guilty of it erred in faith on the article of marriage. For this reason the inquisitors continued to receive the denunciations on this pretended heresy, and to take cognizance of it. In 1781, the inquisitor-general commanded that the confessionals in the convents of nuns should be placed within sight of the persons in the churches. This was done by the inquisitors, without consulting the archbishops and bishops of the dioceses; they were extremely offended at this conduct, but dissembled their anger, that the public tranquillity might not be disturbed.