Note 63 — Chapter XIV

The governor, Don Gabriel de Curucelaegui, determined to restore the archbishop to Manila, sent to Lingayén as his agent for accomplishing this, General Don Tomás de Endaya; and the city of Manila sent a regidor, Sargento-mayor Don Gonzalo de Samaniego, and some citizens. With them went the past provincial of Santo Domingo, Fray Baltasar de Santa Cruz, commissary of the Holy Office, and many others, with an escort of soldiers. On November 16 the archbishop came back from his exile, to the general rejoicing of the entire city, which had been so long a time afflicted by the absence of its pastor and prelate. The artillery was fired [as a salute], from the castle, and from the wall adjoining the gate of Santo Domingo, by which the archbishop made his entrance; and after he had visited the church he went to the palace, to see his liberator, the Catholic governor—who said that, in case his proceeding should displease his Majesty and the royal and supreme Council of the Indias, he would regard it as a great glory to have a punishment, even were it capital, imposed upon him. This may be believed of him, as he was a man of a great soul, although small in body; Major in exiguo regnavit corpore virtus.63 What we saw in him was, that he was one of the best governors that these islands have had—affable, pious, magnanimous, and in the highest degree disinterested, and with this very liberal. And therefore he was wont to say that he had come to Filipinas to be poor, where other governors had come to be rich. This he said with truth, because in España and the Indias he had possessed much wealth, gained in the many voyages that he had made in command of the fleet and galleons to Perú and Nueva España, which had been consumed by his ostentation and liberality. We may therefore regard it as a punishment of God upon these islands that He removed him from us in the fifth year of his term of government—in which time he was severe with those only to whom he could not in justice be kind—unless it were that divine justice chose him for the punishment of those who had deserved it before his time.64