Page:Vol 4 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/349

Rh Proceedings were at once brought against the prisoners, and their trials conducted with the utmost haste. Six of them were condemned to death, and executed on the 29th of the same month. These were the licenciado Antonio Ferrer, Ignacio Cataño and José Maríano Ayala, subalterns of the commercial regiment, Antonio Rodriguez Dongo, in whose house the conspirators held their meetings, and Felix Pineda and José Maríano Gonzalez. The execution of Ferrer was little less than murder. The only evidence against him was the denunciation of one Manuel Teran, an official of the secretaría de cámara de vireinato, who stated that Ferrer on the morning of the 3d of August had invited him to go armed and on horseback that afternoon to the paseo de la Viga, and made him acquainted with the plans formed for the execution of the design. No other witness appeared against him, and he strenuously denied Teran's assertions, maintaining in his declaration that he knew nothing of the plot before that morning. So weak was the charge that the fiscal, José Ramon Oses, only ventured to propose the punishment of six years imprisonment. The Spanish party, however, were loud in their demands for his death. Ferrer was a lawyer, and too many of that class were attached to the cause of independence. The viceroy was importuned so urgently that he declared if the criminal court did not impose capital punishment upon Ferrer he would do so himself. The president of that court, the oidor Bataller, a Spaniard, wished to save his life, but the two alcaldes, Yañez and Torres Torija, both Americans, pronounced the sentence of death, and Bataller unwillingly signed the death-warrant. When Ferrer heard the sentence read to him, he fell senseless in the court, overwhelmed with the injustice to which he was victim. ''Alaman, Hist. Mej''., ii. 370, 372-3; ''Zerecero, Mem. Rev. Mex., 424-8; Bustamante, Cuad. Hist''., i. 300. A declaration asserted to be written by him 'sin sugestion ni seduccion de nadie,' before his death and recognizing the justice of his sentence, was published in the official gazette two days after his execution. ''Gaz. de Mex''., 1811, ii. 784-5.

Among those arrested were three Augustinian friars, Juan Nepomuceno de Castro, Vicente Negreiros, and Manuel Rosendi. Castro was degraded by the ecclesiastical court, and handed over to the secular power; the other two were deposed from their religious dignities, and sentenced to confinement in the convents of their order in Manila. The criminal court, however, demanded the surrender of all three. This gave rise to disputes between the two jurisdictions, and the viceroy, deeming it impolitic to exhibit the spectacle of an ecclesiastic's execution in Mexico, finally sent them all to Habana, to be there confined. Castro, however, died on his way thither in the castle of Ulúa, where so many others under similar circumstances had been released from durance by death.