One of the greatest services that the cabildos and corporations can perform for your Majesty is to advise, inform, and report concerning the deserving persons who attend to your Majesty’s service.  For, as the matter passes before so many eyes, they cannot do else than to write with great consideration and exactness of truth.  One of the men who has served your Majesty in these islands with ardor, eagerness, and care, and who has occupied, since the day of his entrance into this city, posts of great importance (as will appear in detail by his papers), is General Don Andres Perez Franco.  The limitations of a letter do not allow us to mention his good qualities as a skilled and successful soldier; for besides being that, God has given him good fortune in feats of war.  In matters of government and of peace, he is so excellent and accomplished that he has been considered by most of the people of Cavite, where he has been chief commander most of the time, as a father rather than as a commander.  God has endowed him with affability, valor, and ability to govern and command with generosity, and actions which make him loved, feared, and respected.  That is apparent to this cabildo, and we know that it is public and notorious.  Will your Majesty please honor him according to his many good services, so that others may imitate him, and that they may be encouraged by his example to serve your Majesty. [In the margin:  “Consult the memorial.”]

Your Majesty granted this archbishopric to Don Fray Hernando de Guerrero, bishop of Nueva Segovia, an aged religious, and one well known in these islands.  He presented in this cabildo the ordinary decree which the royal Council generally gives to the persons presented by your Majesty, in order that the government might be given into his charge until the bulls come from his Holiness.  Inasmuch as this cabildo is at present deprived of this jurisdiction—­given to it by a canonical law by special brief and indult of his Holiness, obtained by your Majesty, ordering the senior bishop to govern, by virtue of which the reverend father, Fray Pedro Arce, archbishop of Zubu, is governing this church, a holy person and one of blameless life—­this cabildo answered that no one can give what he does not possess; that the said bishop had the government; and that this cabildo had nothing more to answer.  However the said archbishop insisted upon it as he was deceived by certain ill-informed lawyers.  He even went to the royal Audiencia, who delayed undeceiving him for many days and after many meetings.  All that was with the object of giving him to understand that they were doing something for him.  That had the end and object that the auditors know; and it is not unknown that the archbishop wrote in their favor to the royal Council.  That was almost self-evident, for the explicit manner in which Licentiate Don Francisco de Rojas y Onate, visitor of these islands, enlightened him was not sufficient, when the visitor said that