Philip and Renard did their best to smooth ruffled susceptibilities. All acts of clemency were ostentatiously coupled with Philip’s name, and the King surpassed himself in amiability and generosity.[[153]] Mary, in the meantime, was perfectly infatuated with her young husband, and he was kind and gentle to her, as he was to each of his wives in turn. ‘Their Majesties,’ writes a Spanish courtier, ‘are the happiest couple in the world, and are more in love with each other than I can say. He never leaves her, and on the road is always by her side, lifting her into the saddle and helping her to dismount. He dines with her, publicly sometimes, and they go to mass together on feast days.’ Then the same writer continues: ‘These English are the most ungrateful people in the world, and hate Spaniards worse than the devil. They rob us, even in the middle of the city, and not a soul of us dares to venture two miles away for fear of molestation. There is no justice for us at all. We are ordered by the King to avoid disputes and put up with everything whilst we are here, and to endure all their attacks in silence.... We are told that we must bear everything for his Majesty’s sake.’[[154]]
Spanish nobles were openly insulted in the streets of London, and Spanish priests stoned in the churches: but this was not the worst. What galled most was the growing conviction that all this humiliation was in vain. Instead of a submissive people ready to bow the neck to the new King and his countrymen, the Spaniards found a country where the sovereign’s power was strictly circumscribed, and where a foreigner’s only hope of domination was by force of arms. ‘This marriage will, indeed, have been a failure if the Queen have no children,’ wrote one of Philip’s chamberlains. ‘They told us in Castile that if his Highness became King of England we should be masters of France ... but instead of that the French are stronger than ever, and are doing as they like in Flanders. Kings here have as little power as if they were subjects; the people who really govern are the councillors, who are the King’s masters.... They say openly that they will not let our King go until they and the Queen think fit, as this country is quite big enough to satisfy any one King.’
But still Philip struggled on, gaining ascendency over his wife and gradually influencing the councillors by gifts and graciousness.[[155]] The fifty gallows that had borne as many dead sympathisers of Wyatt were cleared from the streets, and the skulls of the higher offenders were banished from London Bridge, so that the triumphant entry of Philip and Mary into the capital should be marred by no evil reminders; but though London was loyal to Mary, it hated Spaniards more than any city in the realm; and the crowd that hailed the Queen effusively when, on the 18th August, she and her husband went in state from Southwark through the city to Whitehall, listened and believed the wild and foolish rumours that a great army of Spaniards was coming to fetch away the crown of England; that a Spanish friar was to be Archbishop of Canterbury, that English treasure was being sent from the Tower to fill the Emperor’s coffers, and much else of the same sort that French agents set afloat; so, withal, there were few who smiled upon the Queen’s consort, let him smile as he might upon them. Fair pageants decked the street corners, and far-fetched compliments were recited to the King and Queen by children dressed as angels, for the corporation of London had been warned that there must be no lack of official signs of welcome; but to prove how sensitive and apprehensive both the court and the people were, the story is told of how the Conduit in Gracechurch Street was decked with painted figures of kings, one of whom, Henry VIII., was represented with a bible labelled ‘Verbum Dei’ in his hand; whereupon Gardiner, in a towering rage, thinking this quite innocent representation was intended as an insult to the Catholic idea of the Bible, sent for the painter and threatened him with all sorts of punishments.
Philip’s patience, however, was gradually breaking down the distrust entertained in him. It was seen that wherever his influence was exerted it was on the side of moderation; though of course it was not understood that this and all his sweetness was only part of the deep plan of the Emperor to obtain for his son full control of English policy. Mary’s position at the time was a most difficult one. She was deeply in love with her husband; and she desired fervently the aggrandisement of Spain, which would mean the triumph of Catholicism over heresy and security for her throne; but she was an English Queen, determined if she could to rule for the good of her people, and to bring about peace with France before she was drawn into the war. When Noailles saw Mary to give his tardy and insincere congratulations on the marriage that he had tried so hard to thwart, she assured him that her friendship with France was unchanged, and Philip immediately afterwards added his assurance that he would maintain intact all the alliances contracted by England, whilst they were for England’s good.[[156]]
After Pole had been made to understand that the full restitution of church property in England must not be pressed, or revolution would result, he was allowed to come to England as legate, and the country formally returned to the pale of the church in November 1554. On the very day that Pole arrived it was officially announced that the Queen was pregnant; and all England, and still more all Spaniards, greeted the great news as a special favour vouchsafed by heaven. To Philip and his father it meant very much; for if a son was born the hold of Spain over England would be complete for generations, at least long enough for the great task of unification of the faith to be effected. Its significance, even in anticipation, was made use of by Philip at once, and during the jubilation to which it gave rise, he caused his spokesman in parliament to propose the sending of an armed English contingent to aid the Emperor in the war against France, and the appointment of himself as Regent of England in case the expected child outlived his mother. The zeal of Bonner and Gardiner, however, spoilt it all. They had already begun their fell work of religious persecution; and the reaction that naturally resulted against Spain compelled the Queen to dissolve parliament in a hurry before Philip’s turn was served.
Not only was Philip personally opposed to the persecution in England, which he saw would injure his object, but he caused his chaplains openly to denounce from the pulpit the policy pursued by the English bishops. Renard ceaselessly deplored in his letters to the Emperor this over zeal of the English churchman, whose one idea of course was to serve, as they thought, their church, and not Spanish political ends. For six months Philip stood in the breach and dammed the tide of persecution: but his father was growing impatient for his presence in Flanders. The deadly torpor was creeping over him, though he was not yet old, as it had crept over others of his house; and he had begged for months that his son should come and relieve him of his burden. Philip had waited week after week in the ever deluded hope that Mary’s promise of issue would be fulfilled; but, at last, even the unhappy Queen herself had become incredulous, and her husband could delay his departure no longer. By August 1555 the rogations and intercessions to the Almighty for the safe birth of a prince were ordered to be discontinued, and the splendid plot of the Emperor and Philip to bring England and its resources permanently to their side against France and heresy, was admitted to be a failure.
The conviction that she was to be childless was only gradually forced upon Mary; for she had prayed and yearned so much for motherhood that she could hardly believe that heaven would abandon her thus. In her mind a son born of her and Philip would have made England, as she said, Catholic and strong for ever; and as the bitter truth of her barrenness came home to the Queen she sank deeper into gloomy despondency, increased by the knowledge that her beloved husband, polite and considerate though he was to her, was obliged to leave her, with the tacit understanding that their marriage had failed in its chief object. Mary passionately longed to bring about peace between her husband’s country and France. She knew that the revolutionary movement in and about London was being actively fomented by French intrigue; that the crowd of pamphlets and scurrilous publications attacking her and her faith were being paid for with French money; and that unless peace was soon made or the agitation stopped England would be drawn into the war and her throne would be in peril. But her efforts towards peace met with little real aid from the French, for any step that consolidated her position and gave time for Spaniards and Englishmen to settle down under one system would have meant ruin to France; and Mary’s Council, and more reluctantly Mary herself, was obliged to turn to the other alternative, and attempt to suppress the organised manifestations of rebellion against her rule.
The burning of heretical and treasonable books, and even of the Edward VI. prayer book, was but a prelude to the burning of bodies, and Renard warned the Emperor that before Philip had been gone six months from England the holocaust would begin. It matters little whether the persecutions were religious or political—the apologists of Mary and Elizabeth respectively strive to prove that their victims in each case were political criminals; and doubtless, according to the letter of the law, they were—but it was clear to Philip and his father, that whatever excuse might be advanced for the burning of Englishmen by Mary’s Council, the executions would increase the ill-feeling against Spain, and make English resources less available to them against France. But notwithstanding this Charles would wait no longer for his son, and peremptorily ordered him to return to Flanders.
Philip accompanied his wife in state through London from Hampton Court to Greenwich[[157]] for the farewell; and there urged her—as he did her Council—to be moderate in punishment. Mary herself was kindly and gentle; but she was a Tudor Queen, and she lived in an age when the life of the individual was considered as nothing to the safety of the State as constituted. Moreover, counsels of moderation coming from Philip of Spain, the patron of the Inquisition, could hardly have sounded very convincing; though they were sincere in the circumstances, for Philip was a statesman before all things, and persecution in England at the time was contrary to his policy. In any case Philip did his best to keep his hand on the brake before saying goodbye to his wife. Mary was in the deepest affliction when she took leave of him on the 29th August 1555, though she struggled to retain her composure before the spectators of the scene. With one close embrace she bade him farewell, and sought solitude in a room of which the window commanded a view of the Thames. So long as the barge that bore him to Gravesend was in sight Mary’s tear-dimmed eyes followed it yearningly; whilst Philip, courteously punctilious, continued waving his hand and lifting his plumed cap to her until a turn in the river shut him from her sight.
Renard was right. No sooner had Philip gone than the fires blazed out. Hooper, Rogers, Saunders and Tayor, were burnt a fortnight afterwards; then Ridley and Latimer some weeks later, to be followed in a few months by Cranmer and the host of others less distinguished. Gardiner, Mary’s prime minister and only able councillor, died in November, just after the opening of parliament; and then, with Pole, practically a foreign ecclesiastic, as her only guide, with a divided Council, and herself in utter despondency, Mary sank deeper and deeper into impotence. Philip had ordered before he left that minutes of all the Council meetings should be sent to him, but he soon found it difficult to control, for his own ends, the action of ministers far away; and when soon afterwards he began to press for English ships to fight the French at sea, he found the Queen’s Council tardy and unwilling. The ships, they said, were not ready; but as soon as possible some would be sent to guard the Channel. This did not suit Philip. The ships must be instantly fitted out and commissioned; not at Dover, as the Council had promised, but at Portsmouth, to guard the Emperor’s passage to Spain. This, of course, was the thin end of the wedge; what he really needed—and it was now the only benefit he could hope for from his marriage—was that an English fleet should be at his disposal to attack France. The coolness of the English Council and the continued refusal to accede to Mary’s request and give him the crown matrimonial of England, soon changed Philip’s attitude, and the suavity that had so remarkably characterised him in England gave way to his usual dry hauteur towards Englishmen whom he met in Brussels.