Yet this reactionary tendency was accompanied with an increasing disposition to enforce the subordination of the Inquisition and to render it an instrument of the Government. A royal cédula of December 12, 1807, takes additional precautions to prevent illegal increase in the number of familiars and officials and to give the secular authority a closer supervision over them. When secular assistance, moreover, was called for, it could no longer be commanded as a right, except in matters of faith; if the temporal jurisdiction was concerned, the Inquisition was put on a level with other ecclesiastical courts, and the magistrate was instructed to examine the merits of the case and to give or withhold his aid accordingly.[532] As agitation in Mexico increased with the news of the abdication of Carlos IV and the Napoleonic usurpation, foreshadowing the Revolution, the political importance of the Inquisition, as an agency of repression, became greater and its so-called sacred functions were more and more subordinated. Successive edicts of August 27, 1808, and April 28, June 16 and September 28, 1809, were directed against all proclamations and emissaries seeking to pervert the loyalty of the colonists in favor of the ambitious schemes of the French, and the doctrine of popular sovereignty was denounced as manifest heresy[533]--a doctrinal definition which was effectively used during the debate on the suppression of the Holy Office, in the Córtes of Cádiz, which had affirmed that sovereignty. Even in a matter so foreign to politics as solicitation in the confessional, it is suggestive to observe that, in the trial for that offence of Dr. Pedro Mendizabal, cura of the parish of Santa Ana (1809-1819) his correct political conduct is urged upon the inquisitors as a matter for their favorable consideration--which may possibly have conduced to his escape in the face of convincing evidence.[534]