The King, enraged at their disobedience, now resolved to make his son feel the full weight of his royal displeasure. He could not take away without the consent of Parliament, the Prince’s allowance of £100,000 a year (though he endeavoured to do so), and he could not prevent him from succeeding to the throne; but he did everything that he could to humiliate his son, and to wound the Princess. They were deprived of their guard of honour and all official marks of distinction. A formal notification was made by the King’s order to the foreign ambassadors and envoys that if they visited the Prince they would not be received at St. James’s. All peers and peeresses, privy councillors and their wives, and official persons received similar notices. Orders were sent to all persons who had employment both under the King and the Prince to quit the service of one or the other, and the ladies whose husbands were in the King’s service were likewise to quit the Princess’s.[82] This applied to Mrs. Howard, whose husband had a little appointment under the King, but she refused to leave her mistress, and so separated from her husband. But all were not so decided as Mrs. Howard, and this order gave great alarm to the time-servers, who had now to make up their minds whether to be well with the father or the son. “Our courtiers,” writes a scribe, “are reduced to so hard a dilemma that we may apply to them what the Spanish historian says of those in his day, when the quarrel happened between Philip II. of Spain and his son, Don Carlos. ‘Our courtiers,’ says he, ‘looked so amazed, so thunderstruck, and knew so little how to behave themselves, that they betrayed the mercenary principles upon which they acted by the confusion they were in. Those who were for the Prince durst not speak their minds because the father was King. Those who were for the King were equally backward because the son would be King; these because the King might resent; those because the Prince might remember.’”[83]