Guatemala (colony). Audiencia

An unpublished collection of 56 royal decrees signed by Felipe III

      Valladolid, Madrid, San Lorenzo, etc., 18 May 1600 - 15 June 1628. The decrees have been very carefully removed from a bound volume and, now stored in Mylar sleeves, are housed in a blue cloth slipcase with blue morocco spine labels. This major source for the study of the Royal Audiencia of Guatemala is in very good condition.. Folio. 100 ff. (some blank). . The audiencia (or high court) was, according to Clarence Haring (the dean, during the 1940s and 1950s, of American scholars of colonial Latin America), "the most important and interesting institution in the government of the Spanish Indies." He rightly points out that "It was the center, the core, of the administrative system, the principal curb upon oppression and illegality of the viceroys and other governors."#11; The first audiencia was established in Santo Domingo in 1508 with others springing up as the Spaniards discovered and settled North and South America. The Audiencia of Guatemala came into existence on 20 November 1542 through the New Laws and had a troubled and peripatetic beginning: The documents that compose this collection do not deal with things quite as dramatic as either the judicial insanity or the big-time smuggling of those earliest years, but they do, nonetheless, document various unstudied aspects of the presidencies of Dr. Alonso Criado de Castilla (1598-1611), Don Antonio P!rez Ayala Castilla y Rojas (1611-26), and Dr. Diego de Acu!a (1626-33). The royal cedulas fall into three broad categories: requests for information, demands for action, and orders ending existing practices.#11; An example of the Crown's requests for information is a decree of 4 December 1601. The king would sometimes receive complaints that were best handled extrajudicially, often involving political activities of clerics, over whom the civil and criminal courts did not have jurisdiction and with whom, the authorities felt, the ecclesiastical courts would deal ineffectively. In one case, the governor of Honduras had complained to the king that the dean of the church in Comayagua was disrupting attempts to recruit men for the defense of the port of Trujillo: The king, investigating, expects that the audiencia's information will be unbiased because of its physical and emotional distance from Honduras and its local politics and squabbling.#11; Another, much more ominous, request was handed down on 28 June 1621. The king has "discovered" that "foreigners" are living in the New World. Since they are there illegally, he wants a list of them and correlated inventories of their possessions and land holdings. This was the beginning of the oppression of Portuguese settlers who had moved to the New World during the "Babylonian captivity" of Portugal by Spain.#11; The royal demands for action were usually grants of royal patronage or largesse. On 10 July 1600 the king orders the audiencia to administer the terms of his decree granting a one-time-only gift of money to the cathedral in Santiago, and on 4 July 1601 he orders the court to give the mission church in Trinidad de Sonsonate a chalice and a bell.#11; The Crown was fully aware that the physical distance between it and its New World provinces would result in the development of local customs and practices, and to a large extent it tolerated these deviations from "the norm." For example, on 31 May 1600, Felipe III officially accepts the local custom of the audiencia's appointing the majordomo of the Royal Hospital. But at other times the Crown felt put upon and ordered the end of "local practices." On 12 December 1619 the king orders the audiencia to stop subdividing encomiendas and parcelling the subsections out as parts of government pensions.#11; The documents in this remarkable collection are unpublished. They are an important unused source for the history of the high court during the first quarter of the 17th century. Through them we find out what the "local customs" of patronage and of usurpation of royal prerogative were. Through the reiteration of previously issued decrees we discover which decrees the court was ignoring, using the famous doctrine of "obedezco pero no cumplo." Through these decrees we glimpse royal patronage and royal displeasure.