Even before the arrival of the said delegate, various other investigations had been secretly made in the archiepiscopal court--not only against the regulars at large (de vita et moribus [i.e., "in regard to their lives and morals"], and as to their trading and trafficking, etc.), but against certain individual religious. In these cases, the provincials had, according to their rights, demanded from the archbishop that he refrain from further proceedings and surrender to them the documents therein, since the said provincials were the legitimate superiors and judges of those religious; but this received scant attention. It had also previously occurred that the father minister of the hospital of San Gabriel (who is a Dominican) refused to allow the episcopal visitation, and the [arch]bishop had declared him incontinent, and posted him as excommunicate, without paying any attention to the appeal which that father immediately made. The said father minister amended his conduct, in time; but his name was left on the list of excommunicates until, upon the arrival of the delegate, the matter was settled and the censure laid on him was raised. Upon the origin of so many storms in so short a space as eight months there was much gossip, with a variety [of opinions]. Some attributed the trouble to the influence of the bishop of La Puebla, [5] in whose palace the archbishop was a guest for several months; others to the promise that the latter had given, on leaving Nueva España, to various personages with whom he was intimate in La Puebla and Mexico, that he was coming to reduce the regulars of these islands to submission or else destroy them. Others blamed the bishop of La Puebla; for he had warned the archbishop, in order to render him firm, of the disparity of what had been accomplished there by Don Juan de Palafox--who met less resistance there because most of the regulars in Nueva España were natives of that country, while in Filipinas nearly all of them were born in other countries. Others (and these were the majority) blamed the senior auditor, Don Geronimo Barredo, because with little gratitude for the many thousands [of pesos obtained from the orders] as loans and gifts (although he had been so greatly benefited thereby), he had repaid the regulars by abandoning [them] to the two recently-arrived auditors, Don Francisco Guerruela and Don José Pabon. On the one hand, the Audiencia being inclined to the opposing side, the regulars were deprived of the recourse which they, as vassals, ought to have in the royal tribunal; and on the other, it was reported that the said senior auditor made exceedingly frequent visits, at unseasonable hours, to the archbishop's palace, which were returned by that prelate at the auditor's house. As the gossip ran, the auditor directed all the acts and proceedings of the archbishop's court.