Note 37 — Chapter VIII

At last the time for the chapter-session arrived, and when the voting fathers from the four provinces were assembling, with great peace and harmony, suddenly a storm arose, which they feared would occasion the destruction of peace within the order, and produce divisions and contentions very difficult to adjust; and from which might originate great losses to the religious and their ministries. The trouble was this: some of the religious who were born in Nueva España, and others born in these islands, where they had assumed the habit of our order, attempted to renew the old controversy over the alternate elections37—which arose in the year 1637, as we have related in book ii, chapter 26—incited to this by having found a copy of the first bull of Gregory XV, and the royal decree for its passage by the supreme Council of the Indias, attested by Don Diego Núñez Crespo, at that time court secretary of the royal Audiencia. With this slight foundation, without heeding that the matter had already been decided by apostolic authority—by the legate of his Holiness, that is, the archbishop of Manila who was then in office—according to the bull of his Holiness Urban VIII, issued “at Castel Gandolfo, diocese of Albano, May 18, 1634” (of which they probably were not aware), [they made this claim]. They had on their side many citizens of Manila, and employed as their leader Doctor Don José Cervantes Altamirano, a cleric in minor orders—who afterward was married, and at his death was alcalde-mayor of the Parián of the Sangleys, and chief clerk of the cabildo and municipality of Manila; he had a very keen mind, and with that he would, if he had been master and disciple of himself, have made a great jurisconsult.