apa, on account of his services
to the late Emperor and of those he continues to render to the King, shall
always be provided with lodgings suitable to his rank, in Toledo or
wherever else in the Spanish realm the court may happen to reside. The
attendance of Las Casas at court would seem, from this document, to have
been frequent.

In 1563, the annual life pension of 200,000 maravedis granted him by
Charles V. in 1555, was increased by Philip II. to the sum of 350,000
maravedis.

In the early months of 1564 Las Casas was in Madrid, lodged in the Convent
of Our Lady of Atocha just outside the city walls. It was on the
seventeenth of March of that year that he there formally delivered a
sealed document, which he declared to be his signed will, in the presence
of a notary, Gaspar Testa, and seven other witnesses.(74)

At the age of ninety he wrote his treatise in defence of the Peruvians,
the last of his known compositions, and which was written, as is stated in
its text, in 1564.(75) The style and arguments of this work are identical
with those that characterised all his writings. The last negotiation in
behalf of American interests that Las Casas undertook and saw to a
successful finish, was to obtain the restoration of the Audiencia of the
Confines, to Gracias a Dios, whence it had been recently transferred to
Panama, thus leaving the whole of the former province with no superior
tribunal for the administration of justice. This business called him from
Valladolid to Madrid in the spring of 1566.

The life of the great Bishop was nearing its end. He had long outlived
all his early contemporaries, he had enjoyed the confidence and respect of
three of the most remarkable sovereigns, Ferdinand of Aragon, Charles V.
and Philip II., all of whom had received his fearless admonitions, not
only with docility, but had responded with cordial admiration. Cardinal
Ximenez, Pope Adrian VI., the powerful Flemish favourites, the discoverers
and conquerors from Columbus to Cortes and Pizarro, were all long since
dead, and he had seen numbers of his most powerful enemies in disgrace and
in their graves. The Spain on which he closed his aged eyes was a
different country from that on which he had first, opened them; the
colonial development in America, the Reformation in Germany, the rise of
England--all these and a hundred events of minor but far-reaching
importance, had changed the face of the world.

The illness which prove