The, Regent issued a fresh edict upon the 24th May, to refresh the memories of those who might have forgotten previous statutes, which were, however, not calculated to make men oblivious.  By this new proclamation, all ministers and teachers were sentenced to the gallows.  All persons who had suffered their houses to be used for religious purposes were sentenced to the gallows.  All parents or masters whose children or servants had attended such meetings were sentenced to the gallows, while the children and servants were only to be beaten with rods.  All people who sang hymns at the burial of their relations were sentenced to the gallows.  Parents who allowed their newly-born children to be baptized by other hands than those of the Catholic priest were sentenced to the gallows.  The same punishment was denounced against the persons who should christen the child or act as its sponsors.  Schoolmasters who should teach any error or false doctrine were likewise to be punished with death.  Those who infringed the statutes against the buying and selling of religious books and songs were to receive the same doom; after the first offence.  All sneers or insults against priests and ecclesiastics were also made capital crimes.  Vagabonds, fugitives; apostates, runaway monks, were ordered forthwith to depart from every city on pain of death.  In all cases confiscation of the whole property of the criminal was added to the hanging.

This edict, says a contemporary historian, increased the fear of those professing the new religion to such an extent that they left the country “in great heaps.”  It became necessary, therefore, to issue a subsequent proclamation forbidding all persons, whether foreigners or natives, to leave the land or to send away their property, and prohibiting all shipmasters, wagoners, and other agents of travel, from assisting in the flight of such fugitives, all upon pain of death.

Yet will it be credited that the edict of 24th May, the provisions of which have just been sketched, actually excited the wrath of Philip on account of their clemency?  He wrote to the Duchess, expressing the pain and dissatisfaction which he felt, that an edict so indecent, so illegal, so contrary to the Christian religion, should have been published.  Nothing, he said, could offend or distress him more deeply, than any outrage whatever, even the slightest one, offered to God and to His Roman Catholic Church.  He therefore commanded his sister instantly to revoke the edict.  One might almost imagine from reading the King’s letter that Philip was at last appalled at the horrors committed in his name.  Alas, he was only indignant that heretics had been suffered to hang who ought to have been burned, and that a few narrow and almost impossible loopholes had been left through which those who had offended alight effect their escape.