A royal instruction not to let the vassals know the request was royal: the donativo protocol of 1574 and what the same emergency also sold
Asked to raise a loan at Guadalajara after the naval battle, the crown in 1574 told its own president to state the need, to remember that a superior's plea is commonly taken for a command, to proceed so as not to let the vassals understand it was a royal order, and to drop the effort if they did not give freely. Royal officials were to repay at the agreed terms. The same wars were financed by selling renounceable offices and legitimations, which the crown later had to undo.
Why this wins its question: The donativo is usually described, when it is described at all, as a forced loan with a polite name, and the description is fair for much of the seventeenth century. What is missing from every account in reach is a text showing that the crown itself understood the objection and wrote a procedure against it. This object supplies one: a royal order of 1574 telling the president of Guadalajara that a superior's plea is commonly taken for a command, that he must therefore proceed so as not to let the vassals know the request came from the king, and that he must abandon the collection if they did not give freely, with repayment on terms agreed with the lenders. It puts beside it, from the facing page of the same chronicle, what the same wars were paid for with instead: renounceable offices sold and the legal disabilities of mixed-descent children sold back to them as legitimations, an expedient the crown afterwards had to prohibit. Neither page is quoted in the standard literature, and the two together are worth more than either.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The instruction is the whole point of the entry and it is one sentence long. Page 312 records that even his Majesty, being master of the estates of his vassals, in order to avail himself of them by loan or by donative or by some imposition, represents the just motives that impel him; and that when the naval battle occurred the king ordered, by a cedula the author dates 2 May 1574, that the president of Guadalajara should of his office set before the vassals what indebtedness and expenditure had been left, and solicit from them some relief or loan towards the necessities that offered; and that, knowing that the plea of a superior is commonly esteemed as a precept, he warned him to proceed in such a way as not to give his vassals to understand that it was an order of his Majesty, and that if they did not give it of their own will he should suspend the proceeding. The document therefore names the coercion latent in an authority's request and prescribes a procedure against it.
The repayment side is on the same page and matters as much as the consent side. Page 312 records that at the same time it was ordered to the royal officials that they should pay what was lent at the terms they should agree. A loan raised under the protocol of claim one was thus to be repaid on terms settled with the lenders rather than absorbed. The author's own comment on the whole arrangement is that it was truly a Christian way of demanding and that no milder one can be devised; that judgement is his and is reported as his.
A second occasion is given with a figure and a receipt. Page 312 records that on another occasion Philip IV, for the urgency of the war against infidels, asked a donative; that having received thirty-eight thousand three hundred pesos he gave thanks to the city of Guadalajara and to that of Zacatecas, by an act the author dates 4 June 1624; and that he ordered the audiencia to give special thanks to those who had most distinguished themselves, offering to hold them present for reward. The mechanism is visible in that last clause: a voluntary contribution was reciprocated in the currency the crown had most of, which was preferment, and the audiencia was made the register of who had given.
The counterpoint is on the facing page and is the same emergency paying for itself by other means. Page 311 records that in order to found the fleet called of Barlovento in the ocean sea his Majesty gave several provisions that offices should be sold which were to be renounceable, and that legitimations should be granted of natural sons and bastard mestizos, who were then called montaneses and were sons of Spaniards or of Indian women, and were for that reason incapable of obtaining dignities and of inheriting from their fathers ab intestato; that the faculty was granted to Luis de Velasco by a cedula the author dates 1 November 1591; and that it was afterwards prohibited, it being ordered that those with such claims should have recourse to the royal and supreme Council of the Indies, so that the inconveniences that had been weighed should be repaired, since for small sums unworthy persons were being qualified and offices were provided in subjects who ought not to obtain them. Two things stand together here and neither cancels the other: a fiscal expedient that made the civil disabilities of mixed-descent children into a saleable commodity, and a crown that withdrew the expedient and moved the cases to its own council.
The same chapter shows the crown clawing back salaries in the other direction, which is the test of whether any of this was enforced. Page 312 records that at Guadalajara in those years alcaldes mayores, a procurador, the chief officer of the treasury, the royal standard-bearer, a physician and a royal scribe of the council were provided from among the regidores; that the crown attorney reported it; that it was ordered, by an act the author dates 27 May 1624, that all should return the salary except the standard-bearer, the regidores being capable of such employments as they serve them in person; that when the corregidor's post of Analco was provided to Pedro Palencia the king disapproved it and ordered the salary returned; and that the determination was carried so far that another cedula, which the author dates 23 May 1620, says that Palencia had nothing with which to pay the salary of corregidor of Analco, that he was in prison with the salary of his office attached, that this was well, and that he should not leave prison until he had paid. The dates of the two acts as printed do not run in the order the narrative gives them, and this entry reports them as printed.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 311 and 312 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742; the manuscript was not seen and the editors' transcription is not tested here. No original of any cedula named is quoted from an archive, and several of the dates the edition prints are internally inconsistent with the narrative around them, which is why the claims name the printed dates instead of asserting them. The naval battle of claim one is not named on the page and this entry does not name it either. Nothing here establishes whether the president of Guadalajara in fact followed the 1574 instruction, how much was raised on that occasion, whether the 1624 loan or donative was ever repaid, or how often the protocol was applied anywhere else. The author is a lawyer of the audiencia writing in praise of the mildness of his own monarchy, and the protocol he quotes is quoted by him precisely because it flatters that case; the counterpoint in claim four is drawn from his own pages for that reason.