whom he has to instruct.  Those whom you shall find, in the visits that you shall make, who have not the competency, good qualities, and good example that are requisite, and who do not know sufficiently the language of the Indians whom they are to instruct, you shall remove; and you shall advise their superiors, so that they may appoint others who have the necessary qualifications, in which they also must be examined.  You shall advise me of all that you do in this matter.  Given in San Lorenzo, November fourteen, one thousand six hundred and three.

I The King

By order of the king our sovereign: 

Juan de Ybarra”

With the above royal decree was despatched another to the royal Audiencia, in which its observance and fulfilment is ordered and charged; and another to the same archbishop, which only contains the statement that he is strictly charged with its fulfilment. [15] His Majesty says in it that it is advisable to do this for the relief of his royal conscience and that of the archbishop himself.  Those decrees having arrived in the ships that came in the year six hundred and five, Don Fray Miguel de Benavides, archbishop at that time, as soon as he received them, presented all three in the royal meeting held on the second of June, of the said year, and they were obeyed and ordered to be fulfilled.  But as the said archbishop died within two months, he could not carry them out; and consequently they were left unobserved, because the cabildo succeeded to the government of the vacant see.  Afterward, Archbishop Don Diego Vazquez de Mercado, either because he knew nothing about them, or because he was so far prevented by his age and infirmity (as all know), did not put them into practice.  At his death, Don Fray Diego de Arce, bishop of Zibu, governed this archbishopric; but he did not know of the said decrees.  But as they have come to my notice, and since we are obliged, both myself and your Paternities, to observe and obey what his Holiness and his Majesty order in regard to this, as above stated, we cannot excuse ourselves from immediately putting it into execution.

We shall not be able to delay the observance of the said royal decree, by saying that since twenty years have passed since its issue, without having given it a beginning, it will be well to await his Majesty’s will once more; for, besides that things are today in the same condition as then, it appears that his Majesty, having heard that the said royal decree was not being observed in Nueva Espana, either because the bishops had no knowledge of it, or for other reasons, gave it again to the viceroy, Marquis de Guadalcazar, under date of November nineteen, six hundred and eighteen, in which, inserting word for word the first decree above mentioned of November fourteen, six hundred and three, he orders it to be obeyed in the following words: