Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/76

56 such that the Queen expressed a wish to have them, and, had not Cortes forestalled the royal desire by presenting them to Doña Juana de Zuñiga as a marriage gift they would doubtless have passed into the crown jewels of Spain.

In the meantime, while Cortes was being lionised and honoured in Spain, his enemies in Mexico were not idle, for Nuñez de Guzman from the moment of arriving there had begun secretly to collect information against him, and by unscrupulous and inquisitorial methods easily succeeded in forming a voluminous budget of accusations, among which figured the alleged poisoning of Luis Ponce de Leon, the conspiracy to establish himself as independent sovereign in Mexico, defrauding the royal fisc, and incitement of the Indians to rebel against the royal authority while he was absent in Spain. Encouraging the enemies of Cortes to depose against him on the one hand, Guzman found excuses for persecuting his friends on the other, even to the extent of imprisoning, torturing, and hanging them on one pretext or another. Things reached such a pass through the violence of the president's conduct, that the Bishop Fray Juan Zumarraga, a man whose exemplary life gave him great influence, and the Franciscan monks, sent a vigorous protest to Spain against Guzman and his auditors, praying that he be deposed. This petition provoked an order from the Empress-Regent and the Royal Council, to take their residencia, and that they be imprisoned if found guilty of the abuses imputed to them. The bishop himself was appointed, ad interim, president of the new audiencia, which was composed of Quiroga, Salmeron, and Ceynos pending the arrival of the permanent president, Don Sebastian Ramirez de Fuenleal, then Bishop of San Domingo, and afterwards of Cuenca.

Nuñez de Guzman sought to evade the issue by organising, against the Chichimecas, an expedition which he