The Signoria had no intention of handing over their captives to Rome, but appointed a commission of seventeen--including Doffo Spini and several of Savonarola's bitterest foes--to conduct the examination of the three friars. The third, Fra Silvestro, a weak and foolish visionary, had hid himself on the fatal night, but had been given up on the following day. Again and again were they most cruelly tortured--but in all essentials, though ever and anon they wrung some sort of agonised denial from his lips, Savonarola's testimony as to his divine mission was unshaken. Fra Domenico, the lion-hearted soul whom the children of Florence had loved, and to whom poets like Poliziano had turned on their death-beds, was as heroic on the rack or under the torment of the boot as he had been throughout his career. Out of Fra Silvestro the examiners could naturally extort almost anything they pleased. And a number of laymen and others, supposed to have been in their counsels, were similarly "examined," and their shrieks rang through the Bargello; but with little profit to the Friar's foes. So they falsified the confessions, and read the falsification aloud in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, to the bewilderment of all Savonarola's quondam disciples who were there. "We had believed him to be a prophet," writes Landucci in his diary, "and he confessed that he was not a prophet, and that he had not received from God the things that he preached; and he confessed that many things in his sermons were the contrary to what he had given us to understand. And I was there when this process was read, whereat I was astounded, stupified, and amazed. Grief pierced my soul, when I saw so great an edifice fall to the ground, through being sadly based upon a single lie. I expected Florence to be a new Jerusalem, whence should proceed the laws and splendour and example of goodly living, and to see the renovation of the Church, the conversion of the infidels and the consolation of the good. And I heard the very contrary, and indeed took the medicine: _In voluntate tua, Domine, omnia sunt posita._"