“The prisoners that are to be burnt alive besides a familiar, which all the rest have, have a Jesuit on each hand of them, who are continually preaching to them to abjure their heresies; but if they offer to speak anything in defence of the doctrine, for professing which they are going to suffer death, they are immediately gagged, and not suffered to speak a word more. This I saw done to a prisoner presently after he came out of the gates of the Inquisition, upon his having looked up to the sun, which he had not seen before for several years, and cried out in rapture, ‘How is it possible for people to behold that glorious body, to worship any being but Him that created it?’ After the prisoners come a troop of familiars on horseback, and after them the inquisitors, and other officers of the court, upon mules, and last of all comes the inquisitor-general, upon a white horse, led by two men, with a black hat and a green hatband, and attended by all the nobles that are employed as familiars in the procession. “In the _Terceiro de Paco_, which may be as far from the Inquisition as Whitehall is from Temple Bar, there is a scaffold erected, which may hold two or three thousand people; at the one end sit the inquisitors, and at the other end the prisoners, and in the same order as they walked in the procession, those that are to be burnt being seated on the highest benches behind the rest, and which may be ten feet above the floor of the scaffold. After some prayers, and a sermon, which is made up of encomiums on the Inquisition, and invectives against heretics, a secular priest ascends a desk, which stands near the middle of the scaffold, and who, having first taken all the abjurations of the penitents, who kneel before him, one by one, in the same order as they walked in the procession, at last he recites the final sentence of the Inquisition upon those who are to be put to death, in the words following:--