"All the rejoicings here consist only of eating and drinking, as they understand nothing else. The Queen spends 300,000 ducats (a year?) in food, and all the thirteen councillors and the Court favourites live in the palace, besides the lord steward, the lord chamberlain, the chancellor, and our people, with their servants. The ladies also have private rooms in the palace, with all their servants, and the Queen's guard of 200 men are also lodged there. Each of the lords has a separate cook in the Queen's kitchens, and as there are eighteen different kitchens such is the hurly burly that they are a perfect hell. Although the palaces are so large that the smallest of the four we have seen is infinitely larger, and certainly better, than the Alcazar of Madrid, they are still hardly large enough to hold the people who live in them. The ordinary (daily?) consumption of the palace is 100 sheep (which are very large and fat), twelve large oxen, eighteen calves, besides game, poultry, venison, wild boar, and a great number of rabbits. Of beer there is no end, and they drink as much as would fill the river at Valladolid." The writer is very indignant at the scant courtesy paid to his great kinsfolk the Albas, and at the fact that they have had to put up with lodgings that are considered below their dignity even in the villages. {168} "It is not enough," he says, "to deprive them of their office, but they must needs give them bad quarters as well.... These English are the most ungrateful people in the world, and hate the Spaniards worse than the devil, as they readily show, for they rob us in the town itself, and not a soul dares to venture two miles on the road without being robbed. There is no justice for us. We are ordered by the King to avoid dispute and put up with everything whilst we are here, enduring all their attacks in silence. They therefore despise us and treat us badly. We have complained to Bibriesca and the ambassador, but they say it is for his Majesty's sake that we must bear everything patiently."