A letter addressed to the king by his grand almoner, Don Luis Manrique, told the truth in plainer terms, such as had not often reached the royal ear. "Your majesty's subjects everywhere complain," he says, "of your manner of doing business; sitting all day long over your papers, from your desire, as they intimate, to seclude yourself from the world, and from a want of confidence in your ministers.[406] Hence such interminable delays as fill the soul of every suitor with despair. Your subjects are discontented that you refuse to take your seat in the council of state. The Almighty," he adds, "did not send kings into the world to spend their days in reading or writing, or even in meditation and prayer,"--in which Philip was understood to pass much of his time,--"but to serve as public oracles, to which all may resort for answers. If any sovereign have received this grace, it is your majesty; and the greater the sin, therefore, if you do not give free access to all."[407] One may be surprised to find that language such as this was addressed to a prince like Philip the Second, and that he should have borne it so patiently. But in this the king resembled his father. Churchmen and jesters--of which latter he had usually one or two in attendance--were privileged persons at his court. In point of fact, the homilies of the one had as little effect as the jests of the other. The pomp of the royal establishment was imitated on a smaller scale by the great nobles living on their vast estates scattered over the country. Their revenues were very large, though often heavily burdened. Out of twenty-three dukes, in 1581, only three had an income so low as forty thousand ducats a year.[408] That of most of the others ranged from fifty to a hundred thousand; and that of one, the duke of Medina Sidonia, was computed at a hundred and thirty-five thousand. Revenues like these would not easily have been matched in that day by the aristocracy of any other nation in Christendom.[409] [Sidenote: POMP OF THE NOBLES.]