Uprooting Excesses: Reforming Lima’s Royal Treasury and Its Administrators in the Late 17th Century

The royal treasury of Lima, the principal in the viceroyalty of Peru, underwent a long visita (audit) during most of the second half of the seventeenth century. This inspection uncovered various practices that the senior administrators committed abusing the prerogatives of their posts. One of them, Sebastian de Navarrete, comptroller of the royal treasury, stands out even against the excesses of his peer officeholders. Navarrete’s early career in the royal administration began when he was only fifteen years old when his father obtained a post in Lima’s Royal Treasury that young Navarrete would take once he reached legal age. Originally from Quito (Ecuador), he moved to the viceregal capital, building a rapid and successful career. He associated strategically with powerful local families and royal representatives, who supported his career advancement (Jimenez, 2019; De la Puente, 2006). Navarrete’s unwelcomed the visita, using his authority and local network to resist the royal inspectors’ activities for several years.

Nonetheless, Navarrete’s successful career drastically ended in 1679, when the king ordered his imprisonment, confiscating his belongings, and exile to New Spain. The ensuing investigation of Navarrete’s activities uncovered his mismanagement of the royal treasury and his criminal and immoral activities. Beyond illustrating the strategies colonial bureaucrats used to ascend socially and politically in Spanish America, Navarrete’s career demonstrates that the abuses of royal administrators were not unnoticed by the monarch and locals. Even when the visita did not eradicate all the malpractices of the royal treasury’s administrators, it halted some. At the same time, royal representatives introduced measures to improve the activities of this institution and its officers.