Philip’s Spanish chaplains had been extremely unpopular. Such insults indeed had been offered to them, that they dared not appear in the streets in priestly garb. But they were really mild and conciliating, and when the fierce zeal of the English bishops led them to burn the Protestants, Philip’s principal confessor openly denounced them from the pulpit, doubtless at his master’s instance--certainly with his approval. The cruel persecution of the Protestants, indeed, was dead against the realisation of Spanish aims. Philip and Renard clearly saw that it would bring about reaction and hatred, and used their influence to stay it. Charles himself was appealed to by Renard. “If,” he said, “this precipitancy be not moderated, affairs will assume a dangerous appearance.” For nearly six months Philip’s efforts stayed the storm of persecution, and his active intercession saved many condemned to the stake. But Charles was impatient for his presence in Flanders. The deadly torpor had already seized upon the great emperor. The man who had been indefatigable in his youth and prime had now sunk into indifference to the world. For weeks together no word could be got from him, and of action he was almost incapable. He had begged Philip to come to him before his honeymoon was over, and had continued to do so ever since. The king had waited and waited on, in the ever-deluded hope that Mary’s promise of issue would be fulfilled, but at last even she 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 discontinued, and the splendid plot was seen to be a failure. Consider what this meant for Philip and for the Spanish power. An Anglo-Spanish dynasty ruling England, Spain, and Flanders, supreme over Italy and the Mediterranean, with the riches of the Indies in its hands, would have dominated the world. The German Protestant princes, without effective seaboard, must remain a negligeable quantity outside of their own country. France, shut in on every side by land and sea, could have progressed no more, and Spain would have become paramount more completely than if Charles’s first dream of the universal spread of the power of the Roman-Austrian empire had been realised.