Generally speaking, the governor of the Philippines occupied the same relative position, within and without the colony, as did the viceroy in New Spain, and during the greater part of the history of the Islands he was independent of the government of New Spain and was responsible to the Spanish court directly, in the same manner as the viceroy. [371] The independence of the Philippine government may be said to have been practically complete, with such exceptions as will be mentioned in a subsequent chapter, treating of the ad interim rule, after the re-establishment of the audiencia in 1598. The governor was the chief administrative official of the colony, and the provincial governments derived their authority from him; he was the royal vice-patron, and in this capacity he bore the same relation to the church in the colony as the king did to the church in Spain. Likewise as the king was the theoretical head of the state, and was limited and assisted in the exercise of his authority over the empire by the Council of the Indies, so the governor and captain general of the Philippines (and the viceroy in New Spain and Perú) was the head of the colony, and was limited by the audiencia. The audiencias of all the colonies were equally dependent on the Council of the Indies. Professor Bourne very aptly characterizes the office of governor of the Philippines and its relations to the audiencia. He writes: The Philippine Islands were constituted a kingdom and placed under the charge of a governor and captain general, whose powers were truly royal and limited only by the check imposed by the Supreme Court (the Audiencia) and by the ordeal of the residencia at the expiration of his term of office. Among his extensive prerogatives was his appointing power which embraced all branches of the civil service in the islands. He also was ex officio the President of the Audiencia. His salary was $8000 a year, but his income might be largely augmented by gifts or bribes. The limitations upon the power of the Governor imposed by the Audiencia, in the opinion of the French astronomer Le Gentil, were the only safeguard against an arbitrary despotism, yet Zúñiga, a generation later pronounced its efforts in this direction generally ineffectual. [372] Juan José Delgado, who gives us perhaps the most comprehensive and realistic survey of the Philippines of any of the ecclesiastical historians of those Islands, describes the nature of the office of governor as follows: