“The third difficulty opposed to the conversion of the Indians is, that the system of oppression and cruelty followed in dealing with them, makes them curse the name of God and our holy religion: as the friars in Chiapa write me, nothing short of a miracle can make the Indians believe in Jesus Christ, when they see the execrable and manifest contradiction that exists between His gentle and beneficent doctrines and the conduct of the Christians, their enemies. What a scandal is it for them to see the faith preached by fifteen or twenty monks who are poor, despised, miserably clad, and reduced to begging their bread, while the crowd of so-called Christians living in opulence, arrayed in silks, mounted on their horses, inspires respect, submission, and fear everywhere, and acts in defiance of the law of God and the teachings of His ministers!” The Bishop expresses the hope that Carranza will read any passage of his letter, or indeed the entire composition to the King, if he judges it wise. An analogous letter on the same subject, written shortly afterwards by Las Casas and Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas jointly, was addressed to Philip II. Victory crowned the Bishop’s efforts, for the royal decision, given after King Philip’s return to Spain, was adverse to making the encomiendas hereditary or perpetual. Although he had chosen San Gregorio as his residence, Las Casas must have been frequently and for lengthy periods absent from Valladolid. A royal order dated from Toledo on the fourteenth of December, 1562, and signed by Philip II. directs that the Bishop of Chiapa, on account of his services to the late Emperor and of those he continues to render to the King, shall always be provided with lodgings suitable to his rank, in Toledo or wherever else in the Spanish realm the court may happen to reside. The attendance of Las Casas at court would seem, from this document, to have been frequent. In 1563, the annual life pension of 200,000 maravedis granted him by Charles V. in 1555, was increased by Philip II. to the sum of 350,000 maravedis. In the early months of 1564 Las Casas was in Madrid, lodged in the Convent of Our Lady of Atocha just outside the city walls. It was on the seventeenth of March of that year that he there formally delivered a sealed document, which he declared to be his signed will, in the presence of a notary, Gaspar Testa, and seven other witnesses.(74)