ERECTION AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ROYAL AUDIENCE, OR HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE, OF LIMA.
The disorders, disturbances, and injustices inseparable from a spirit of conquest, were productive of loud complaints which reached the throne of Spain. Worldly ambition, and the insatiable thirst of riches, revived in America those disastrous times, recorded in the sacred writings[1], "when there was not any king in Israel; but every man did that which was right in his own eyes." The implacable hatred subsisting between the partizans of Almagro and Pizarro, rendered the wisest provisions of little efficacy, and perpetuated the anarchy and confusion which are at all times destructive of the prosperity and growth of a rising state. It became necessary to apply a powerful remedy to these evils; and the establishment of an audience, or high court of justice, in the capital of Peru, was considered as the one the most appropriate to such circumstances.
By a royal schedule, dated in March 1543, the Emperor Charles V. suppressed the audience of Panama, which had been erected, in 1538, to administer justice in all the Spanish possessions of Terra Firma, Rio de la Plata, New Castille, and Toledo; and ordered, by another schedule of the same date, the establishment of an audience at Lima. The inhabitants of Peru were thus freed from the painful necessity of seeking, at so great a distance, a redress of their grievances.
The number of complainants was considerable in every part
- ↑ Judges, chap. XVII. v. 6.
