*21
[Footnote 21: Carta de Espinall, Ms. - Montesinos, Annales, Ms.,
ano 1538.
Bishop Valverde, as he assures the emperor, remonstrated with
Francisco Pizarro in Lima, against allowing violence towards the
marshal; urging it on him, as an imperative duty, to go himself
at once to Cuzco, and set him at liberty. "It was too grave a
matter," he rightly added, "to trust to a third party." (Carta al
Emperador, Ms.) The treasurer Espinall, then in Cuzco, made a
similar ineffectual attempt to turn Hernando from his purpose.]
On the day appointed, a strong corps of arquebusiers was drawn up
in the plaza. The guards were doubled over the houses were dwelt
the principal partisans of Almagro. The executioner, attended by
a priest, stealthily entered his prison; and the unhappy man,
after confessing and receiving the sacrament, submitted without
resistance to the garrote. Thus obscurely, in the gloomy silence
of a dungeon, perished the hero of a hundred battles! His corpse
was removed to the great square of the city, where, in obedience
to the sentence, the head was severed from the body. A herald
proclaimed aloud the nature of the crimes for which he had
suffered; and his remains, rolled in their bloody shroud, were
borne to the house of his friend Hernan Ponce de Leon, and the
next day laid with all due solemnity in the church of Our Lady of
Mercy. The Pizarros appeared among the principal mourners. It
was remarked, that their brother had paid similar honors to the
memory of Atahuallpa.
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