Note 1081 — Chapter VI

The remains of Cortés have rested uneasily. They were buried at Seville; but in 1562 his son removed them to New Spain and placed them in a monastery at Tezcuco. In 1629 they were carried with pomp to Mexico to the church of St. Francis; and again, in 1794, they were transferred to the Hospital of Jesus (Prescott, Mexico, iii. 465), where a monument with a bust was placed over them. In 1823, when a patriotic zeal was turned into the wildness of a mob, the tomb was threatened, and some soberer citizens secretly removed the monument and sent it (and later the remains) clandestinely to his descendant, the Duke of Monteleone, in Palermo, where they are supposed now to be, if the story of this secret shipment is true (Prescott, Mexico, iii. 335; Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., pp. 219, 220; Bancroft, Mexico, iii. 479, 480). Testimony regarding the earlier interment and exhumation is given in the Coleccion de documentos inéditos (España), xxii. 563. Cf. B. Murphy on “The Tomb of Cortés” in the Catholic World, xxxiii. 24.