the twenty-sixth of the month of November,
one thousand six hundred and thirty-five, the reverend father Fray
Francisco de Herrera, commissary of the Holy Office in these islands,
declared that he is at present engaged in a cause pertaining to the
tribunal of the Inquisition, in regard to a protest which is reported
to be a defamatory libel against the holy Order of the Society of
Jesus, and other persons occupying places of dignity. The principal
witness in it is Alferez Diego de Rueda; and, for lack of him, the
service and execution of the Holy Office in investigating this cause
is suspended and prevented. Inasmuch as the pontiff Pius Fifth,
and other pontiffs order in very strict terms that the causes of
the Inquisition take precedence over all others, and that all causes
cease and be superseded until the Holy Office concludes its business:
therefore the said commissary ordered (and he did so order) Governor
Don Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera, who says in his letters that he has
arrested the said Diego de Rueda for having become an apostolic notary
when he was a royal notary, for the purpose of authenticating the
protest that is said to be a libel--an offense which by being committed
in connection with this cause, belongs by law to the Inquisition,
and to no other tribunal, as it is in regard to what is said to be a
defamatory libel against the said order and persons; and gives him a
time-limit of thirty hours within which to present Diego de Rueda at
the Holy Office, under penalty of major excommunication and a fine of
five thousand ducados for the expenses of this tribunal. And, under the
same penalties, he orders the said governor not to make any further
effort to demand or inquire about the said protest, since if it is,
as is asserted, a defamatory libel, it belongs to no other judge, but
only to the Holy Office; and the governor shall not molest the said
prisoner until the Holy Office has entirely concluded its cause. And
he thus decreed in this act, which he ordered and signed.

_Fray Francisco de Herrera_

Before me:

_Fray Ignacio Munoz_, notary."

The friar commenced to read his act, and, at the commencement of the
reading, the governor asked the friar to hand it to him. Seeing that
this was the beginning of disturbances in the community, he ordered an
adjutant to conduct those friars courteously to their convent at the
port of Cabite, and charge their superior to retain them there and
look afte