..., but the most significant point is that most of the material is from the 15th to 17th centuries and it would appear that by the beginning of the 19th century the Inquisition had lost much of its power.>Towards the close of the eighteenth century various documents show that all ideas of resistance and all pleas of exemption had been abandoned. ...<
This would suggest that abolition should have been fairly straightforward and that if the abolition did cause hostility it may have been badly handled. Curiously, the Inquisition was revived at the Restoration, though apparently with reduced powers.
I'm sorry that the format is indeed a bit clunky. I thought it was shorter than the whole volume, which would naturally be more complete. This one part had to do only with the exemptions from secular law claimed, and I intended it as an illustration of the nature of the institution only.
Yes, there is a lot of material which sets the stage - as in any good proof. The examples you selected have to do only with the exemptions claimed from personal taxation. You don't mention the exemptions claimed from internal customs duties (a whole different set of taxes) or from the restrictions on bearing arms. Related to the internal customs duties is the exemption from having "shipments" generally (such as documents, books, and other miscellany clearly not bulk commodities such as grain) sealed from inspection by civil authorities -- or for that matter from casual technical checks by the transport workmen loading and unloading them.
For your examples, I think you may have overlooked that even by 1800, compliance was not universal nor willing.
There is the whole book to pick over, and then we could move on to other books -- then to the revisionist history.
Meanwhile, the institution had certainly diminished. There were no longer witches, Jews and Muslems to burn. Protestants demanding a place for public worship certainly had to be foreigners, so the watch for heretics was atrophied. There were far fewer (I suppose) prisoners with dangerous ideas to be cared for. However, the institution was still recognized as a faithful servant of the monarchy in the task of broadly censoring the "media" (whatever it was then & there). It still provided a living to some 'considerable' number of officials and familiars, even if they had no powers and nothing to do other than breathe life into the institution.
Abolition would have caused hostility in at least three identifiable groups: