CHAPTER VIII.

QUEEN MARY, KING PHILIP, AND THE
PRINCESS ELIZABETH.

EDWARD VI.'s last visit to Hampton Court took place in September, 1552; and two years after this, on the 23rd of August, Queen Mary and Philip II., five days after they had made their public entry into London, and exactly a month after his arrival in England, retired to Hampton Court to spend their honeymoon. The King's reception had not been very cordial, and he was, doubtless, not sorry to remove from the capital, where the hostility universally exhibited to his attendants and followers, and the brawls which continually occurred, indicated what a deep ill-feeling existed between the two nations.

Though Mary, even at this early period of their married life, was, if not repugnant, at any rate an object of indifference to him, he appears to have behaved, for a short time at least, with some outward show of deference. A contemporary writer, who wrote to Spain from the spot, and whose report has been recently published, declares that he never left her side, always assisted her to mount and dismount, dined with her continually in public, and never failed to attend the services of the Church with her on feast days. Yet the account he gives of her shows what an unattractive bride she must have been. He describes her as "ugly, small, lean, with a pink and white complexion, no eyebrows, very pious and very badly dressed."

The visit must have been a gloomy one for both of them, for they remained in great retirement, allowing very few members of the Court to accompany them, and indulging in none of that magnificence, profusion, and pageantry which constantly followed the Tudor Court. This was set down by the people to Philip's haughty Spanish exclusiveness, complaining that "the hall-door within the court was constantly shut, so that no man might enter unless his

(From the picture by Antonio More at Woburn Abbey.)

errand were first known; which seemed strange to Englishmen that had not been used thereto." No less disgust was excited by the niggardly table kept by the happy pair. Instead of celebrating their marriage, as was the good old English custom, with feastings and festivities, to which all were welcome, they dined in private on maigre dishes—fish, buttered eggs, and oatmeal-another instance, so said the English, of morose churlishness.

The King's Spanish attendants, however, who accompanied him to England, naturally looked at the question from a different point of view. They regarded the English as hopeless barbarians and incorrigible heretics, with whom it was impossible to associate as equals, and yet whom they dared not treat as inferiors. Even the ladies disgusted them. According to the Spaniard quoted above, their dresses were of common and coarse material, and ill-made; they wore black stockings, and showed their legs, even as far as the knee; they were ugly and very ungraceful, especially when dancing, which with them consisted only of constrained gestures, and shuffling gait. "There is not a single Spanish gentleman," he concludes, "who would give a farthing for any of them, and they care equally little for the Spaniards. The English, in fact, hate us as they do the devil, and in that spirit they treat us. They cheat us in the town, and anyone venturing in the country is robbed."

This John Bull feeling was a constant cause of complaint by foreign visitors to England in Tudor days. "The English," says a Frenchman who travelled here a year or two after, "are great lovers of themselves and everything belonging to them, and think there are no other men like themselves, and no other world but England. Whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that 'he looks like an Englishman, and that it is a great pity he should not be an Englishman."" As to banquets, our Spanish critic remarks, that "the English have no other idea of a feast than eating and drinking; they understand no other way of enjoying themselves." And then he goes on to comment severely on the eighteen kitchens in the royal palace, and on the hundred sheep, twelve oxen, eighteen calves, and the tuns of beer-"so abundant that the winter flow of the river at Valladolid is not greater in quantity"-that were daily consumed on the

royal table. This love of our ancestors for good cheer, in the reign of Queen Mary, is confirmed by another Frenchman who was in England soon after. "The English," says he, "are great drunkards, and if an Englishman would treat you, he will say in his language, 'Will you drink a quart of Gascoyne, of Spanish, of Malmsey wine?' Their conversation is continually interspersed with phrases such as these: 'Drind iou,' 'Iplaigiou,' 'Bigod sol drind iou agoud oin' (meaning thereby: I drink to you, I pledge you, By God, I shall drink you a good wine)." Like the Spaniard, he censures them for the large quantities of beer they drink, and declares that in England "there is no kind of order; the people are reprobates, and thorough enemies of good manners and letters, for they do not know whether they belong to God or the devil, and their manners are very unpolite."

On the 3rd of April in the following year, 1555, Philip and Mary came again to Hampton Court, in which palace the Queen intended to have her confinement, which she fondly imagined was soon going to take place. According to the custom of that time, therefore, she retired entirely from public view, and for some weeks we hear little news from Court, except that, on the 8th of April, Courtenay was admitted to kiss hands before his departure for the Netherlands, and that the Duke of Alva spent a few days with Philip.

In the meanwhile processions were organised and masses were said in London to draw down the Divine blessing upon the expected offspring, and "a solemn prayer was made for King Philip and Queen Mary's child, that it might be a male child, well-favoured and witty."

On the 23rd of April, being St. George's Day, after a grand high mass in the Chapel Royal, King Philip, as Sovereign of the Order of the Garter, went with the Knights, and the Lords of the Council in their robes, in procession round the cloisters and courts of the palace, attended by heralds, and accompanied by the Lord Chancellor, and by Bishop Gardiner in his mitre, and followed by a crowd of noblemen and ecclesiastics, with acolytes bearing crosses and carrying tapers, thurifers swinging censers, and clerks and priests all in copes of cloth of gold and tissue. As they marched round the cloister of the old Inner Court (which stood on the site