ip of withholding from his father the means of
maintaining a suitable establishment at Yuste. Charles, in truth,
settled the amount of his own income; and in one of his letters we find
him fixing this at twenty thousand ducats, instead of sixteen thousand,
as before, to be paid quarterly and in advance.[319] That the payments
were not always punctually made may well be believed, in a country where
punctuality would have been a miracle.

Charles had more cause for irritation in the conduct of some of those
functionaries with whom he had to deal in his financial capacity.
Nothing appears to have stirred his bile so much at Yuste as the
proceedings of some members of the board of trade at Seville. "I have
deferred sending to you," he writes to his daughter, the regent, "in
order to see if, with time, my wrath would not subside. But, far from
it, it increases, and will go on increasing till I learn that those who
have done wrong have atoned for it. Were it not for my infirmities," he
adds, "I would go to Seville myself, and find out the authors of this
villany, and bring them to a summary reckoning."[320] "The emperor
orders me," writes his secretary, Gaztelu, "to command that the
offenders be put in irons, and in order to mortify them the more, that
they be carried, in broad daylight, to Simancas, and there lodged, not
in towers or chambers, but in a dungeon. Indeed, such is his
indignation, and such are the _violent and bloodthirsty expressions_ he
commands me to use, that you will pardon me if my language is not so
temperate as it might be."[321] It had been customary for the board of
trade to receive the gold imported from the Indies, whether on public or
private account, and hold it for the use of the government, paying to
the merchants interested an equivalent in government bonds. The
merchants, naturally enough, not relishing this kind of security so well
as the gold, by a collusion with some of the members of the board of
trade, had been secretly allowed to remove their own property. In this
way the government was defrauded--as the emperor regarded it--of a large
sum on which it had calculated. This, it would seem, was the offence
which had roused the royal indignation to such a pitch. Charles's
phlegmatic temperament had ever been liable to be ruffled by these
sudden gusts of passion; and his conventual life does not seem to have
had any very sedative influence on him in this particular.

For the first ten months