Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera (1635–44) had been Governor of Panamá before he was appointed to the Philippines. During his term of office here he had usually sided with the Jesuits on important questions taken up by the friars, and on being succeeded by Diego Fajardo, he was brought to trial, fined ₱ 25,000, and put into prison. After five yearsʼ confinement he was released by Royal Order and returned to Spain, where the King partially compensated him with the Government of the Canary Islands.
Juan Vargas (1678–84) had been in office for nearly seven years, and the Royal Commissioner who inquired into his acts took four years to draw up his report. He filled 20 large volumes of a statement of the charges made against the late Governor, some of which were grave, but the majority of them were of a very frivolous character. This is the longest inquiry of the kind on record.
Acting-Governor José Torralba (1715–17) was arrested on the termination of his Governorship and confined in the Fortress of Santiago, charged with embezzlement to the amount of ₱ 700,000. He had also to deposit the sum of ₱ 20,000 for the expenses of the inquiry commission. Several other officials were imprisoned with him as accomplices in his crimes. He is said to have sent his son with public funds on trading expeditions around the coasts, and his wife and young children to Mexico with an enormous sum of money defrauded from the Government. Figures at that date show, that when he took the Government, there was a balance in the Treasury of ₱ 238,849, and when he left it in two years and a half, the balance was ₱ 33,226, leaving a deficit of ₱ 205,623, whilst the expenses of the Colony were not extraordinary during that period. Amongst other charges, he was accused of having sold ten Provincial Government licences (encomiendas), many offices of notaries, scriveners, etc., and conceded 27 monthsʼ gambling licences to the Chinese in the Parian without accounting to the Treasury. He was finally sentenced to pay a fine of ₱ 100,000, the costs of the trial, the forfeiture of the ₱ 20,000 already deposited, perpetual deprivation of public office, and banishment from the Philippine Islands and Madrid. When the Royal Order reached Manila he was so ill that his banishment was postponed. He lived for a short time nominally under arrest, and was permitted to beg alms for his subsistence within the city until he died in the Hospital of San Juan de Dios in 1736.
The defalcations of some of the Governors caused no inconsiderable anxiety to the Sovereign. Pedro de Arandia, in his dual capacity of Gov.-General and Chief Justice (1754–59), was a corrupt administrator of his countryʼs wealth. He is said to have amassed a fortune of ₱ 25,000 during his five yearsʼ term of office, and on his death he left it all to pious works (vide “Obras pias”).
Governor Berenguer y Marquina (1788–93) was accused of bribery, but the King absolved him.
In the last century a Governor of Yloilo is said to have absconded in a sailing-ship with a large sum of the public funds. A local Governor was then also ex-officio administrator; and, although the system was afterwards reformed, official extortion was rife throughout the whole Spanish administration of the Colony, up to the last.
A strange drama of the year 1622 well portrays the spirit of the times—the immunity of a Gov.-General in those days, as well as the religious sentiment which accompanied his most questionable acts. Alonso Fajardo de Tua having suspected his wife of infidelity, went to the house where she was accustomed to meet her paramour. Her attire was such as to confirm her husbandʼs surmises. He called a priest and instructed him to confess her, telling him that he intended to take her life. The priest, failing to dissuade Fajardo from inflicting such an extreme penalty, took her confession and proffered her spiritual consolation. Then Fajardo, incensed with jealousy, mortally stabbed her. No inquiry into the occurrence seems to have been made, and he continued to govern for two years after the event, when he died of melancholy. It is recorded that the paramour, who was the son of a Cádiz merchant, had formerly been the accepted fiancé of Fajardoʼs wife, and that he arrived in Manila in their company. The Governor gave him time to confess before he killed him, after which (according to one account) he caused his house to be razed to the ground, and the land on which it stood to be strewn with salt. Juan de la Concepcion, however, says that the house stood for one hundred years after the event as a memorial of the punishment.
In 1640 Olivarez, King Philip IV.ʼs chief counsellor, had succeeded by his arrogance and unprecedented policy of repression in arousing the latent discontent of the Portuguese. A few years previously they had made an unsuccessful effort to regain their independent nationality under the sovereignty of the Duke of Braganza. At length, when a call was made upon their boldest warriors to support the King of Spain in his protracted struggle with the Catalonians, an insurrection broke out, which only terminated when Portugal had thrown off, for ever, the scourge of Spanish supremacy.
The Duke of Braganza was crowned King of Portugal under the title of John IV., and every Portuguese colony declared in his favour, except Ceuta, on the African coast. The news of the separation of Portugal from Spain reached Manila in the following year. The Gov.-General at that time—Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera—at once sent out an expedition of picked men under Juan Claudio with orders to take Macao,—a Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Canton River, about 40 miles west of Hongkong. The attempt miserably failed, and the blue-and-white ensign continued to wave unscathed over the little territory. The Governor of Macao, who was willing to yield, was denounced a traitor to Portugal, and killed by the populace. Juan Claudio, who was taken prisoner, was generously liberated by favour of the Portuguese Viceroy of Goa, and returned to Manila to relate his defeat.[3]
The Convent of Santa Clara was founded in Manila in 1621 by Gerónima de la Asuncion, who, three years afterwards, was expelled from the management by the friars because she refused to admit reforms in the conventual regulations. The General Council subsequently restored her to the matronship for 20 years. Public opinion was at this time vividly aroused against the superiors of the convents, who, it was alleged, made serious inroads on society by inveigling the marriageable young women into taking the veil and to live unnatural lives. The public demanded that there should be a fixed limit to the number of nuns admitted. An ecclesiastic of high degree made strenuous efforts to rescue three nuns who had just been admitted, but the abbess persistently refused to surrender them until her excommunication was published on the walls of the nunnery.