Note 1 — LETTER FROM ANDA TO CARLOS III

This capital having been taken by assault, October 5, 62; your archbishop-governor, auditors, troops, and citizens having been made prisoners; the fort of Santiago and port of Cavite having been surrendered; all the islands having been ceded afterwards, and four millions of pesos; and the city having been sacked with the greatest severity for the space of forty-eight hours: I having declared myself that same day, in the province of Bulacan, where I was, as royal Audiencia, governor, and captain-general of said islands, in accordance with the law, very great was the effort of your archbishop to efface this image of your Majesty which had remained in these islands, represented, although unworthily, in my person. In order to show that more conclusively, I enclose his own manifest letters with the testimony. Those letters gave motive to this your royal governing Audiencia to form an informatory process from them of pure and naked fact, in order to instruct your royal mind. I shall not refer to them in extenso in this my representation which is directed to your Majesty. Upon examining them, will you please state which of the two proceeded more in accordance with right, law, and religion, to the love and fidelity which each one owes his sovereign as a good vassal: the reverend archbishop, who tried by so many methods, to cast to the earth this legitimate image which represented and defended your royal rights, even to the point of declaring him a traitor, rebel, and disobedient to his own sovereign, and to that of Gran Bretaña; or I, who suffering and enduring all these things, made use of your royal power, insulted and abased by so many enemies and traitors, by making you truly recognized again in these vacillating fields of Christianity, until you became the terror of all the many enemies who had declared against you, reducing the greatest and most principal from a victorious conqueror to a truly starving prisoner. For the latter did not even have more than nor even as much as the balance of the cannon of the fort which he occupied, a limit set for his soldiers under pain of losing life if they went beyond it.1 Thus did I redeem not only the relief and liberty of this most afflicted community and its environs, but what is more yet, its wealth and the most principal thing, the religion and the honor due your Majesty, which being so exposed seemed about to be entirely lost.