Note 110 — The Pardo Controversy

Thus in the text, but it should read “forty-eighth.” Salazar there relates how Vargas, “in the same year in which he banished the archbishop,” suffered the confiscation at Acapulco of all the goods that he had shipped, “with little credit to his reputation and notable expense to his estate;” and, as excommunicated by the Church, Vargas had much to atone for and to suffer until his death. The auditor Grimaldos died, soon after Pardo’s banishment, “from a painful disease, in which the tongue with which he had spoken so much evil of his illustrious Lordship became rotten, and the arm with which he had seized the anointed of the Lord was withered.” The auditor Viga, who went to seize the Dominican provincial, Calderon, died in exile, in Cagayan, without having consented to make his confession. He and his colleague Bolivar had been sent there “for a certain sedition which they were plotting” against Cruzalaegui. [Murillo Velarde says (fol. 344) that they were plotting to put Zalaeta in the governor’s place.] The wife of Bolivar “died at Orion, impenitent, unwilling to confess; when her husband heard of this, he performed condign penitence for his sins, and publicly professed his detestation of his transgressions, and thus he gained absolution from the censures—but, returning from his exile, he died on the way.” Calderon “also died very suddenly, although at the hour of death he acknowledged his errors, and, to secure absolution from the censures, made the usual profession of detestation.” The fiscal Alanis, “the only one who experienced, while living, the punishment from the king our sovereign which deprived of their offices all the members of the royal Audiencia, died in Mexico in great poverty and humiliation. The same fate befell the usurping dean,” Miguel Ortiz de Covarrubias. The cantor Figueroa was sentenced to degradation, and to be delivered to the secular powers, “which was afterward commuted, for valid reasons, to perpetual banishment to the Marianas Islands, where he ended his days in a thousand miseries.” The bishop of Cagayan died so suddenly that he could not be confessed or absolved. The Jesuit Ortega died at sea, while en route to Madrid to complain of Pardo; and although he received the viaticum, his mind was so occupied, first and last, with accusations against the archbishop, that he scandalized all the people in the ship. He died practically an excommunicate, not having rendered his accounts for the executorship to the archbishop, and having been absolved only by “the usurping Dean, who had no jurisdiction.” “The two soldiers who carried out the father provincial died suddenly,” being stabbed to death, one by an infidel Chinese, the other on leaving the house of his mistress. A man who wounded the provisor—in trying to murder him; his name was Manuel Ortafán, and his wife had brought suit against him for divorce, before the ecclesiastical tribunal (Diaz, Conquistas, p. 766)—was sentenced to a short exile; “but God was not satisfied with that light punishment, and accordingly took upon Himself vengeance against that man, afflicting him with leprosy. This made him blind, and he finally reached the utmost poverty, begging alms, with a boy to guide him, before the gates of the convents.”

The spirit of this account is echoed—rather curiously, for so late a date as 1891—in Reseña biográfica, i, pp. 478–480.