Yet men wondered at the source whence these strange doctrines had proceeded. The friar was Philip's confessor. It was argued that he would not have dared to speak thus boldly, had it not been by the command of Philip, or, at least, by his consent. That De Castro should have thus acted at the suggestion of his master is contradicted by the whole tenor of Philip's life. Hardly four years elapsed before he countenanced by his presence an _auto da fé_ in Valladolid, where fourteen persons perished at the stake; and the burning of heretics in England could have done no greater violence to his feelings than the burning of heretics in Spain. If the friar did indeed act in obedience to Philip, we may well suspect that the latter was influenced less by motives of humanity than of policy; and that the disgust manifested by the people at the spectacle of these executions may have led him to employ this expedient to relieve himself of any share in the odium which attached to them.[123] What was the real amount of Philip's influence, in this or other matters, it is not possible to determine. It is clear that he was careful not to arouse the jealousy of the English by any parade of it.[124] One obvious channel of it lay in the queen, who seems to have doated on him with a fondness that one would hardly have thought a temper cold and repulsive, like that of Philip, capable of exciting. But he was young and good-looking. His manners had always been found to please the sex, even where he had not been so solicitous to please as he was in England. He was Mary's first and only love; for the emperor was too old to have touched aught but her vanity, and Courtenay was too frivolous to have excited any other than a temporary feeling. This devotion to Philip, according to some accounts, was ill requited by his gallantries. The Venetian ambassador says of him, that "he well deserved the tenderness of his wife, for he was the most loving and the best of husbands." But it seems probable that the Italian, in his estimate of the best of husbands, adopted the liberal standard of his own country.[125] [Sidenote: PHILIP'S INFLUENCE.]