Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 2.djvu/201

 with them a cedula, signed with the royal name of Your Majesty. By this latter the said Governor Francisco de Garay was commanded not to meddle in the affairs of the said river region, or in any way where I had settled, as Your Majesty desired that I should hold them in Your Royal name; for which I kiss the royal feet of Your Caesarian Majesty a hundred thousand times. The arrival of this cedula interrupted my journey, which was of  damaged, and, meanwhile, their imaginations had been so fired by the alluring tales of Alvarado and Ocampo that the majority were deaf to their leader's commands and entreaties. They had the technical excuse that they had engaged for an expedition to Panuco under certain stipulated conditions, but for nowhere else, and, as to Panuco, Garay could not go, their contract no longer bound them. Ocampo, to whom Garay appealed to uphold his authority, made a show of beating the country for fugitives, but was careful to collect only the least desirable men, those known as adherents of Velasquez, whom he was glad to see leave the country. Reduced to these straits, Garay went to Mexico where Cortes played the magnanimous, receiving him as an old friend and arranged a marriage between his daughter Catalina and Garay's eldest son.

On Christmas eve, Garay assisted at midnight mass with Cortes and breakfasted with him afterwards; the same day he was seized with violent pains and died a few days later; so opportune did his death seem to some, that whispers of poison were not wanting. The rising of the Indians of Panuco provoked by Garay's lawless followers under command of his son, whose authority they ignored, was one of the most formidable of its kind, and its suppression by Alvarado was marked by the ferocious cruelty characteristic of him. Ocampo, as lieutenant of Cortes, presided as judge at the sham trial, passing barbarous sentence on about four hundred prisoners, the chiefs and principal men of the tribes. Of these some were burned, while others were hanged, and, in order that the lesson might not be lost on the Indians, they were compelled to be present at this ghastly execution which took place en masse.

The proposed marriage between Doña Catalina and the son of Garay never took place, for she is mentioned in the bull of legitimisation, in 1529, as a maiden: and, in her father's will, made in 1547, she is mentioned as being in a convent in Coyohuacan. It is difficult to identify her mother, for Archbishop Lorenzana says she was the daughter of Cortes 's first wife Catalina Xuarez; others affirm that her mother was Marina de Escobar, and still others that she was the daughter of Doña Elvira (daughter of Montezuma), in which case she would have been an infant at the time of her betrothal to Garay.