With all due respect to the great man, whom I do admire, he suggested in his book that the Pope was a "dumb-ass", to which the Pope responded by calling Galileo a "heretic." The Enlightenment took care of the rest of the hero-suffering-for-science hagiography.
But the confession which Galileo had made was not considered adequate (how could it have been?), neither by the members of the Holy Office nor by Urban VIII. Therefore, in order to ascertain Galileo's true intention, there was nothing left but, "the way of convincing him with reasons", that is, to be exact, the rigorous examination. But even in this rigorous examination there remains after all something of the "benign": torture will only be threatened, not actually applied. - Fantoli, op. cit., pg. 441