Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [120]
England, if thou delight in ancient men
Whose glorious acts thy fame abroad did blaze
Both Mary and Philip their offspring ought thou then
With all thy heart to love and to embrace
Which both descended of one ancient line
It hath pleased God by marriage to combine.7
Philip was presented not as the Spaniard of popular fears but as an Englishman. Mary’s own Spanish lineage was also ignored, and she was depicted as being wholly English. Their marriage was cast as one of concord and reconciliation: being both descended from John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, their marriage had united the divided Lancastrian house. The pageant highlighted the fact that Katherine of Aragon, Charles V, and Philip could be traced back to Edward III through John of Gaunt; while Roman Catholicism, which for twenty years had been reviled as foreign and traitorous, was represented as the true patriotic faith of England.
At St. Paul’s a sumptuously dressed scholar presented the king and queen with a book, while at Fleet Street, Mary and Philip witnessed the final pageant. Set around a castle decorated with the “arms of all Christian realms,” four characters—a king and a queen (Philip and Mary), Justice bearing a sword, and Equality holding a pair of balances—were each crowned by a figure that descended on a rope from the top of the pageant. An inscription below read:
When a man is gentle, just and true,
With virtuous gifts fulfilled plenteously
If Wisdom then him with her crown endure
He govern shall the whole world prosperously.
And sith we know thee Philip to be such,
While thou shalt reign we think us happy much.8
TWO WEEKS LATER, Philip wrote to his sister, the princess regent of Spain, telling her, “We have visited London, where I was received with universal signs of love and joy.”9 But despite the welcoming pageantry, anti-Spanish feeling was never far away.
On August 20, two days after the celebrations, the city authorities were ordered to take the pageants down for fear of vandalism.10 At the time of the royal couple’s entry into London, the Tower chronicler described how “there was so many Spaniards in London that a man should have met in the streets for one Englishman above four Spaniards, to the great discomfort of the English nation.”11 And Renard told the emperor, “They, the English, loudly proclaim that they are going to be enslaved, for the Queen is a Spanish woman at heart and thinks nothing of Englishmen, but only of Spaniards and bishops.”12 It was going to be difficult, he told Charles, to reconcile Spaniards with Englishmen. The language was an obstacle, the English hated foreigners, “and the slightest altercation might be enough to bring about a very dangerous situation.”13
CHAPTER 51
THE HAPPIEST COUPLE IN THE WORLD
He [the king] treats the Queen very kindly, and well knows how to pass over the fact that she is no good from the point of view of fleshy sensuality. He makes her so happy that the other day when they were alone she almost talked love-talk to him, and he replied in the same vein.1
—RUY GÓMEZ DE SILVA, PRINCE OF ÉBOLI, TO CHARLES’S SECRETARY, FRANCISCO DE ERASO, AUGUST 12, 1554
IN A PRIVATE LETTER TO A FRIEND, RUY GÓMEZ DE SILVA, A MEMBER of Philip’s entourage, revealed a somewhat different view: “To speak frankly with you, it would take God himself to drink this cup … and the best one can say is that the King realises fully that the marriage was made for no fleshly consideration, but in order to cure the disorders of this country and to preserve the Low Countries.”2
Philip had intended to stay in England for only a short time, though Mary was probably unaware of this. On the eve of his arrival in England, the French had defeated imperial forces at Marienburg, the gateway to the Netherlands. Brussels had looked vulnerable to French attack, and Philip had brought 4,000 troops to go on to the Netherlands. Charles had instructed Philip to take only a few of his servants ashore with him in England and, immediately after the marriage and having spent just six