In addition to these instructions, a special edict had been issued on the 26th April, 1550, according to which all judicial officers, at the requisition of the inquisitors, were to render them all assistance in the execution of their office, by arresting and detaining all persons suspected of heresy, according to the instructions issued to said inquisitors; and this, notwithstanding any privileges or charters to the contrary.  In short, the inquisitors were not subject to the civil authority, but the civil authority to them.  The imperial edict empowered them “to chastise, degrade, denounce, and deliver over heretics to the secular judges for punishment; to make use of gaols, and to make arrests, without ordinary warrant, but merely with notice given to a single counselor, who was obliged to give sentence according to their desire, without application to the ordinary judge.”

These instructions to the inquisitors had been renewed and confirmed by Philip, in the very first month of his reign (28th Nov. 1555).  As in the case of the edicts, it had been thought desirable by Granvelle to make use of the supposed magic of the Emperor’s name to hallow the whole machinery of persecution.  The action of the system during the greater part of the imperial period had been terrible.  Suffered for a time to languish during the French war, it had lately been renewed with additional vigor.  Among all the inquisitors, the name of Peter Titelmann was now pre-eminent.  He executed his infamous functions throughout Flanders, Douay, and Tournay, the most thriving and populous portions of the Netherlands, with a swiftness, precision, and even with a jocularity which hardly seemed human.  There was a kind of grim humor about the man.  The woman who, according to Lear’s fool, was wont to thrust her live eels into the hot paste, “rapping them o’ the coxcombs with a stick and crying reproachfully, Wantons, lie down!” had the spirit of a true inquisitor.  Even so dealt Titelmann with his heretics writhing on the rack or in the flames.  Cotemporary chronicles give a picture of him as of some grotesque yet terrible goblin, careering through the country by night or day, alone, on horseback, smiting the trembling peasants on the head with a great club, spreading dismay far and wide, dragging suspected persons from their firesides or their beds, and thrusting them into dungeons, arresting, torturing, strangling, burning, with hardly the shadow of warrant, information, or process.

The secular sheriff, familiarly called Red-Rod, from the color of his wand of office, meeting this inquisitor Titelmann one day upon the high road, thus wonderingly addressed him—­“How can you venture to go about alone, or at most with an attendant or two, arresting people on every side, while I dare not attempt to execute my office, except at the head of a strong force, armed in proof; and then only at the peril of my life?”

“Ah!  Red-Rod,” answered Peter, jocosely, “you deal with bad people.  I have nothing to fear, for I seize only the innocent and virtuous, who make no resistance, and let themselves be taken like lambs.”