Sire:
This capital having been taken by assault, October 5, 62; your archbishop-governor, auditors, troops, and citizens having been made prisoners; the fort of Santiago and port of Cavite having been surrendered; all the islands having been ceded afterwards, and four millions of pesos; and the city having been sacked with the greatest severity for the space of forty-eight hours: I having declared myself that same day, in the province of Bulacan, where I was, as royal Audiencia, governor, and captain-general of said islands, in accordance with the law, very great was the effort of your archbishop to efface this image of your Majesty which had remained in these islands, represented, although unworthily, in my person. In order to show that more conclusively, I enclose his own manifest letters with the testimony. Those letters gave motive to this your royal governing Audiencia to form an informatory process from them of pure and naked fact, in order to instruct your royal mind. I shall not refer to them in extenso in this my representation which is directed to your Majesty. Upon examining them, will you please state which of the two proceeded more in accordance with right, law, and religion, to the love and fidelity which each one owes his sovereign as a good vassal: the reverend archbishop, who tried by so many methods, to cast to the earth this legitimate image which represented and defended your royal rights, even to the point of declaring him a traitor, rebel, and disobedient to his own sovereign, and to that of Gran Bretaña; or I, who suffering and enduring all these things, made use of your royal power, insulted and abased by so many enemies and traitors, by making you truly recognized again in these vacillating fields of Christianity, until you became the terror of all the many enemies who had declared against you, reducing the greatest and most principal from a victorious conqueror to a truly starving prisoner. For the latter did not even have more than nor even as much as the balance of the cannon of the fort which he occupied, a limit set for his soldiers under pain of losing life if they went beyond it.[1] Thus did I redeem not only the relief and liberty of this most afflicted community and its environs, but what is more yet, its wealth and the most principal thing, the religion and the honor due your Majesty, which being so exposed seemed about to be entirely lost.
I protest, Sire, that whatever I say in this my representation and advance in my treatise, is not for the purpose of injuring that venerable prelate whom I have ever regarded with the respect due the prince of the Church; and if I transgress in any way, and do not express myself with that moderation suitable, I protest that my words may not serve as an offense to his dignity, and that I have been actuated in this by only a real affection, with the desire that your Majesty may be informed of the acts of turbulence which have occurred in these domains, in order that you may better provide for the best government and relief of them.
So far as I am concerned, I claim or desire no other satisfaction than what I have in this as I have desired to serve your Majesty, since the greatest satisfaction is for your royal piety to consider itself as well served by me if you find it consistent.[2] But if it should appear to your supreme comprehension that the so public excesses of your reverend archbishop, as appear from the said testimony, of which I shall enclose some here, merit satisfaction, this alone concerns your Majesty.
I am unaware as to the motives of said prelate, that made him, although it had no bearing on the end, for which he despatched me from the fort, and so to the injury of your Majesty’s interests, when finding himself a prisoner of war with my associates, order me in a letter of October 10, 62, among other things: “to observe faithfully the treaties which were being arranged with the British chiefs in Manila.” Although I answered him from the province of Bulacan in the most courteous and fitting terms, this was not sufficient to restrain his pen, and on the twenty-sixth of the same month he wrote me pouring out instead of ink, blood and rage against my loyal procedure.
In the so great consternation in which the loss of Manila placed your vassals, and for this reason many of the criminal class having fled from prison, and continuing their depraved morals, they threw into disorder the environs of this city and its immediate villages. Your reverend archbishop did not allow the perverse Orendain and Don Cesar Fallet[3] the declared enemies of your Majesty, to stir from his side. They, availing themselves of the disturbances caused by these malevolent persons, painted those disturbances to his Excellency, saying that there was sedition and unrest among all the Indians, who, having conspired against the Spaniards, were persecuting them as wild beasts; that already in one province one of them had elevated himself as emperor and refused obedience to your Majesty; that the province of Bulacan was in the same condition; that all the others would follow their example; that one of these days they would have Señor Anda tied up, if they did not first deprive him of life; that consequently, as it was advisable to the services of both Majesties and for the public quiet, and so that so much Christian blood might not be shed, his Excellency ought to yield all the islands, and cause Señor Anda to descend; that if he did not condescend to do so, nothing else would result than the ruin of all these domains, the loss of Christianity, and the execution by the English of the sentence that had been pronounced of putting to the sword all the Spaniards; that your Majesty would never be able to consider yourself as well served; and that consequently he should have a regard to his conscience.
I understand well, Sire, how if he considered all those motives, and that from them would follow the total ruin of these islands, he should then on that account have condescended to redeem them [from ruin] by ceding them, in regard to the fact that this could not be of any service to the English, since it only concerns your Majesty. But to give credit to these two traitors, who knowingly exaggerated these disturbances to him, and not to proceed, with more knowledge, to write me in place of the letters ordering the Spaniards to descend, to inform him regarding the condition of the provinces, and advise me, for my course, of what was happening in Manila, by directing prudently so glorious an end after the twenty odd days that the fort had been taken; and continuing the obligation to surrender these domains with the tenacity which his above-cited letters show, (although the most of the suggestions of the two traitors were now seen to be false, as the provinces were quiet), he proceeded to sign the cession, and even after seeing the Catholic arms so flourishing and powerful, whose victories, patent to all the world, were incredible to his Excellency, yet he prosecuted this undertaking even to the grave.[4] In truth, Sire, I do not know what apology that venerable prelate can give your Majesty for such actions.
In view of an anonymous letter which your royal Audiencia received in Bulacan, in regard to the English having offered a reward to whomever would take them my head, and other methods, in which apparently the reverend archbishop was prudently walking, I despatched to this latter a request and petition asking him to abstain from such procedures and not to summon the alcaldes, natives, or Spaniards who had retired, both because his powers had expired, and because although he did possess such powers, they ought to be used to the benefit of your Majesty, and not in opposition to you. But this did not even restrain him in the idea that had taken possession of him, since already from the twenty-third day, he had ordered me to descend to Manila, and although he saw my resistance in my accommodating myself to his ideas, which were so opposed to your royal rights, he wrote me lastly on the fourth of November in the terms that his said letter shows,[5] and which I myself am ashamed to mention, referring myself to the enclosed testimony.
He ordered the alcalde-mayor of Bulacan, Don José Pasarin, who recognized me from the first as your royal Audiencia, to cause all the Spaniards and their families to descend to Manila, even threatening him with censures if he did not obey. This order included among the Spaniards my assembly secretary, my advocate, my fiscal, and Doctor Don Domingo Arañaz,[6] one of the advocates of this city. But neither they nor said alcalde-mayor, recognizing the very great service which was being done for his Majesty and for religion in [not] consenting to the ideas of the reverend archbishop to deprive me of those whom I considered capable of some aid in sustaining the weak remnants of your Majesty’s adherents, would pay any attention [to the order]. On the contrary, they were the ones, who with my attendants accompanied me in all my labors, and formed my only consolation in the total abandonment and persecution which I suffered during the first six months. For all the other Spaniards who were in that province, carried away either by these persuasions, or through their terror and the threats of the enemy, or from seeing the many atrocities committed by the Indians against them through some trouble that they had had with them, at the most, I am sure, by their natural inclination to live according to their own wishes, or for the reason of the party of your Majesty being so few in numbers, went down, and some with their possessions, to render obedience to the English.
He ordered the marquis of Monte Castro to return to Manila; and Don Andres Blanco, who could not do so through his indisposition, to send his son, availing himself, in order to oblige them the more, of the expressions which may be seen in the letters of testimony which are worth your Majesty’s attention.