Note 3 — Chapter VII · THE AUDIENCIA AND THE GOVERNOR: THE MILITARY JURISDICTION

The conviction that the government should be pre-eminently military was not held by governors alone. Fernando de los Ríos Coronel, procurator of the Philippines at the Court of Madrid in 1597, urged that the government should be of a military character and that the practice of sending soldiers to govern the Islands should be continued.3 This opinion was also advanced by Fray Alonso Sánchez, procurator of the Islands at Madrid in 1589, and the emissary whose arguments were chiefly instrumental in bringing about the suppression of the audiencia.4 Francisco Leandro de Viana, the most efficient fiscal that the Islands ever had, and afterwards councillor of the Indies, recognized the military attributes of the governor’s position. He urged a separation of the spheres of the governor and the audiencia, recommending that the former should attend solely to war and government, while the latter should confine itself to matters of justice.5