4. Various decrees of their Majesties, your holy father and your prudent grandfather, order that a convalescent ward be made in the royal hospital of the Spaniards. Since my predecessors did not carry out this plan, I began it with two thousand pesos, of which a governor of the Sangleys of the Parian made your Majesty a gracious gift. It was advisable to have this ward pass through certain small cells which the brothers and religious chaplain had in the said hospital. I courteously requested the provincial to withdraw them to his convent while the said ward was being built; but he refused to do so. I again requested him to remove the most holy sacrament--which was deposited in a ward under the principal one of the infirmary and exposed to indecency, because the filth and water from the sick, fell from above--to a place above, where mass was said to the said sick. He also refused to do that; on the other hand, he went to the archbishop, who began a suit before the ordinary. Although the royal Audiencia (the said archbishop refusing to give the regimental chaplain-in-chief permission to administer the holy sacraments to the soldiers and others, and refusing to give it, and [the chaplain] having appealed to royal aid from the fuerza), declared that he should do what I had asked, the archbishop, nevertheless, refused to give the said permission--until that, after he had been exiled from these kingdoms for having refused to obey the decrees of your Majesty (as I shall recount in another letter), the bishop of Camarines, who came by act of the royal Audiencia to govern during his absence, granted to the said chaplain-in-chief the said permission to administer the sacraments. For these and many other reasons, of which I shall give your Majesty an account, I made the said religious leave the royal hospital of the Spaniards, and the regimental chaplain-in-chief ministers to the sick for the present, until a chapel is finished (which I ordered to be built in which to bury the soldiers), and quarters [for them], at the expense of their pay, which they have graciously given, without any expense to the treasury of your Majesty. And when the said chaplain-in-chief shall go to exercise his duty in the said chapel, another chaplain shall be appointed for the said royal hospital. Sire, the reasons which have existed for changing the religious of this hospital are those which your Majesty will please have examined in the papers which I herewith enclose. At the same time, I petition your Majesty, with all humility, to be pleased to grant permission to the brothers of [St.] John of God to come to serve in these hospitals in place of the same discalced religious, and at their own petition--because of the disorderly acts that the brothers must have committed in visiting private houses in the city in the quality of surgeons, and in methods from which, they tell me, proceeded the relaxation of the order, as well as other things that deserve correction.