Note 29 — Chapter VIII · THE AUDIENCIA AND THE GOVERNOR: CONFLICTS OF JURISDICTION

Disregarding the advice of this learned body, turning a deaf ear to the protestations of the archbishop, and heeding only the counsel of the Jesuits, which was more favorable to his wishes, Bustamante proceeded to execute his own will in a manner which proved distasteful even to the order whose advice he was following.29 He arrested and imprisoned the guilty magistrates and created a new tribunal out of his own clientele, leaving only Villa, a former magistrate, in office. The latter protested against the action of the governor, and retired to the convent of Guadalupe, near Pásig. Informed that there was a conspiracy against his life and needing the counsel of some person, or persons, on whom he could rely, Bustamante was well-nigh desperate. His government, as it then stood, lacked the complexity of legality which the presence of one oidor of royal nomination would have given it. In order to remedy this defect he released Torralba, the guiltiest of the former magistrates, and the man under arrest for the defalcation of 700,000 pesos of the king’s revenue. Torralba’s crimes had been notorious, and the act of Bustamante in associating himself with a person of the unsavory reputation and the unpopularity of Torralba not only divorced him from whatever popular sympathy he might have had among the residents of the colony, but it aroused the hostility and antagonism of the Jesuits who had been heretofore the governor’s friends. Aside from the unfortunate character of the act, it was also illegal, being contrary to the law which directed that in case an oidor were suspended from his place he should not be restored without the consent of the king and the Council of the Indies.30