Page:Vol 4 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/502

486 the first day were Colonel Bernardino Bonavía, and Captain Aristi. Lieutenant-general Gonzalez Saravia was captured three days afterward attempting to escape by the Guatemala road, disguised as a man of the lower class with a sheet round his person. On seeing that he was to be confined in a building generally used for common criminals, he asked Morelos to treat him as befitted his rank, and offered forty thousand dollars for his freedom and leave to embark for Spain, which proposition was declined. He was a man of mettle, generous, chivalrous, and when the auditor de guerra appointed by Morelos to try his case went to interrogate him, he called Morelos and his soldiers banditti, offered them amnesty, and refused to answer any questions. This hastened his doom, though perhaps only a few days. On the 2d of December, Saravia and Régules were shot in the plain of Las Canteras, the same spot where early in the revolution Lopez and Armenta, messengers of Hidalgo, had been executed. Bonavía and Aristi suffered death in the plaza de San Juan de Dios, where the royalists had wreaked their vengeance the previous year on Tinoco and Palacios for conspiracy in favor of independence. A young Guatemalan servant of Saravia was also put to death, because he tore from a wall and burned an edict of Morelos. The death of Régules was well deserved. The lives of the other prisoners were spared. But notwithstanding this and many other acts of kindness and magnanimity, Morelos, like Hidalgo, has been called cruel; but only by royalists and their sympathizers. This was a war without quarter, and with far greater strictness than the