experiences to
Archbishop Deza on his return to Seville, and begged him to arrange that
both Conchillos and the Bishop of Burgos should be present at the audience
the King had promised him, so that he might put the case fully, for he
desired to charge them directly in the royal presence with responsibility
for the massacres and cruelties to the Indians and for the damage done to
the royal interests by their maladministration of the colonies. His
project for this dramatic encounter was forestalled, and all the hopes
born of the royal assurances given him at Plasencia were dashed by the
news that reached Seville of the death of King Ferdinand, which occurred
at Madrigalegos on January 23, 1516.

This sudden stoppage of his carefully planned campaign was discouraging
enough to Las Casas but he was not disheartened, and resolved to set out
at once for Flanders where the young King Charles then was and to present
his plans to the monarch before he arrived in Spain.

King Ferdinand's last will designated Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros as
regent of the kingdom until his successor's arrival in Spain.

In a century prolific in great men, Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros was among
the greatest. Descended from an honourable family, he entered the Church,
where a career of great promise opened before him. At an early age,
however, he quit the secular priesthood for the cloister and became a monk
of the Franciscan Order, in which the austerity of his observance of that
severe rule of life and the vigour of his intellect advanced him to the
position of a Provincial.

Much against his own inclination, he had accepted the post of confessor to
Queen Isabella and from thence forward he became, in spite of himself, a
dominant figure in the political and ecclesiastical affairs of the realm.
The Queen raised him to the primatial see of Toledo, which carried with it
his elevation to the Roman purple. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo was
the richest and most important person in Spain, after the sovereign; but
promotion to this lofty dignity, with its obligations to the pomp and
magnificence imposed by the usage of the times, in no way modified the
austerity of Cardinal Ximenez's life. He still wore the rough habit of
St. Francis under his purple and he patched its rents with his own hands.
Amidst palatial surroundings he slept on the floor or on a wooden
bench--never in a bed--and he held strictly to the diet of a simple monk.
No man was