Now that our rights and our minds are known to your Lordship,
also our equipment of artillery, munitions, friends, and arms
and the rest, as well as very stout wills to attack against
odds, we supplicate you, again and again, for some fair
arrangement for peace. Being all in agreement, we unanimously
ask this from your Lordship in the name of God and his Majesty,
with all the respect we owe and are under obligation to observe.
If it be refused, we protest that all the harm, shortages,
deaths of men, losses of land and of its natives, deterioration
of royal fifths and estates, will lie at the doors of your
Lordship and of those who are banded with you, as persons who
on account of their private interests do not desire peace, but
neglect the service of our King for the sake of profit, and do
not support the Governor and Ministers. So then we approach you
betimes and peacefully, and, finding your Lordship, as we are
informed, thus committed to war against subjects of his Majesty
among whom you were sent here to preserve harmony, we ask for
that which it is your bounden duty to promote.
And why is it that Pero Alvarez and Tordoya, and the passionate
men who went from here in their company, and have now been
received into yours, are now urging you to come against Don
Diego and us who follow him, giving you to understand that
of the people who favour him, some, on hearing the King's
name, will go over to your Lordship, and others will make off
to Chile, so that you would be able to become a great lord
and acquire land without risking anything? To this we reply
that Don Diego, and we who are with him, have the will of his
Majesty, and the good of his service more at heart than our own
lives and properties. We, therefore, support his royal decrees;
and since you have sheltered yourself under the protection
of our enemies and come against us in such ruthless fashion,
seeking to destroy us and put to death those of us whom they
list, we now assure your Lordship that, in the hour when we hear
that your Lordship is moving against Don Diego, we shall march
to do battle with minds galled by the ill treatment we have
received and expect to receive, from your Lordship, if we do not
defend ourselves. It seems to us that in this course we fulfil
a duty we owe to God and to our King, so that we at no time
fail to be deemed his true subjects and vassals, and jealous
guardians of his honour like faithful servants. And wishing to
be the same towards your Lordship we cannot exaggerate the boon
we should feel it if your Lordship would ponder this deeply and
become a mediator, and not remain partial on the side of the
most unjust cause in the world. But if peradventure you will not
reconsider it, we trust that God will make his justice manifest,
as in the past. Feeling sure that your Lordship will see that
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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