Page:Mexico in 1827 Vol 1.djvu/181

Rh Crown and of the Europeans. Disputes ran high between the Municipality and this body, during the months of July and August, and the beginning of September (1808), when the Audiencia, finding that the Viceroy was inclined to side with their opponents, and to admit the Creoles to a share in the government, determined to arrest, and depose him, in order to cut short a project, which they regarded as fatal to their own authority. This resolution, the principal promoters of which, were the Oidores Aguirre and Bataller, was carried into execution on the night of the 15th of September, when Iturrigaray was surprised in bed, in his own palace, by a band of Europeans, (mostly merchants,) headed by Don Gabriel Yermo, a rich Spaniard, the proprietor of some of the finest sugar estates in the valley of Cuĕrnăvācă. No resistance was made by the guards, who would not fire upon their countrymen, and at midnight the Viceroy was conveyed to the prisons of the Inquisition, while his Wife and Family were confined in a neighbouring convent.

To the populace, a suspicion of heresy was assigned as the cause of this measure; while, to the better informed, the Audiencia attempted to justify it, by one of the laws of the Code of the Indies,