Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 2.djvu/364

 malice have not sufficed to eclipse the fame of my fidelity and services; hence in despair they have sought to obscure Your Majesty's vision, and lead you astray from the Holy and Catholic intentions which I have always recognised in Your Excellency, to acknowledge and reward my services. One of their means is to accuse me before Your Majesty of treason, saying that I refused obedience to Your Royal commands; that I held this country not in Your Powerful name, but under my own tyrannical and despotic rule, for which they give some depraved and diabolical reasons which are entirely false and spring from their depraved invention.

Did they but look sincerely into my acts, and were they just judges, they would be forced to recognise the reverse of what they declare, for, up to now, it has not been, nor will it ever be, seen whilst I live that any letter or command of Your Majesty has been refused scrupulous obedience. Now the iniquity and malice of those who have made these accusations will be more clearly and entirely proved and made manifest, because, had what they say been true, I would certainly not have gone six hundred leagues from this city, through an uninhabited country, and by dangerous roads, leaving the government to Your Majesty's officials whom I had every reason to believe were most zealous in the Royal service though indeed their actions did not correspond to the confidence I placed in them. Their other argument is that I held the greater part of the natives here as my slaves, treating them as such and profiting by their services and work, by which means I have amassed a large sum of gold and silver treasure, and that I have used the revenues of Your Catholic Majesty, without necessity, to the sum of sixty odd thousand pesos of gold; also that I have not sent the full amount of the Royal revenues to Your Excellency, retaining them under various