It seems to have been one of the weaknesses of Philip the Second's character to have but little confidence in men. With such examples as we have just seen, it may, nevertheless, have been an evidence of his wisdom that he did not rely upon the courtiers who usually surround a king. He had doubted, in reality, the actual guilt of the Marques de Falces, and was, therefore, not surprised when he learned the truth upon these weighty matters in the year 1568. The government of Muñoz, his visitador, was, moreover, represented to him as cruel and bloody. The conduct of the previous Audiencia had been humane when compared
with the acting governor's. The prisons, which already existed in Mexico were not adequate to contain his victims, and he built others whose dark, damp and narrow architecture rendered incarceration doubly painful to the sufferers. Don Martin Cortéz, the half brother of the Marques del Valle, who remained in the metropolis as the attorney and representative of his kinsman, was seized and put to torture for no crime save that the blood of the conqueror flowed in his veins, and that he had enjoyed friendly relations with the suspected conspirators. Torture, it was imagined would wring from him a confession which might justify the oidores. The situation of New Spain could not, indeed, be worse than it was, for no man felt safe in the midst of such unrestrained power and relentless cruelty; and we may be permitted to believe that outraged humanity would soon have risen to vindicate itself against such brutes and to wrest the fruits of the conquest from a government that sent forth such wicked sattelites. Even the Audiencia itself,—the moving cause of this new and bad government,—began to tremble when it experienced the humiliating contempt with which it was invariably treated by the monster Muñoz.