Note 103 — The Pardo Controversy

But the controversy of that year was now ended, and the parties now reconciled, and therefore the cause of this action was not past but present disputes. These were: that his illustrious Lordship had refused to absolve a contumacious executor whose name he had posted as excommunicate; and that he had replied to the royal decrees with apostolic freedom and liberty—in both these acts displaying his constancy, and zeal for maintaining his jurisdiction unimpaired. [On March 29, 1683, the Audiencia decree that the sentence of banishment be carried out, but it is suspended for two days, that the necessary preparations may be made secretly, in order to avoid disturbances like those connected with Archbishop Guerrero’s banishment. Pardo is arrested at midnight, by a large body of officials and soldiers, and immediately deported to Pangasinán,103 “where the alcalde of that province had strict orders to detain his illustrious Lordship there, without allowing him to leave the provincial capital, or to perform any act of jurisdiction104 or authority pertaining to his episcopal dignity, or to correspond by letter with Manila.” On the same day, various persons are arrested as officials or near friends of the archbishop. The provisor takes refuge in the Dominican convent, which is at once surrounded by soldiers, an auditor threatening to demolish it with artillery; at this, the provisor surrenders himself to the assailants, but “with certain precautions and securities,” and is kept under guard in his own house. Guards are also placed “at the bell-towers of certain churches, so that the bells might not be rung for an interdict. All the household furniture and personal property [espolio] of the archbishop was confiscated, and placed in the royal magazines—scrutiny being first made of the most private papers of his illustrious Lordship, without finding in them anything by which his enemies could calumniate him.”]