What Philip wanted of the English councillors was not the hellish bonfires of Smithfield, but ships and men with which to fight the French. Here the fervid churchmen were not so ready. The English navy, the council told Philip, was unfit for sea; but the best of the ships, with the pick of the sailors and soldiers on board, should as soon as possible be sent to guard the Channel. This was not enough for the king, who wrote (September 1555) a vigorous marginal note on the minute, saying that “England’s chief defence depends upon its navy being always in good order to serve for the defence of the kingdom against all invasion. It is right that the ships should not only be fit for sea, but instantly available.” He wishes the fleet to be put in order, and sent, not to Dover but to Portsmouth, as the emperor is going to Spain in November, and wishes twelve or fourteen ships to accompany him beyond Ushant. This was, of course, the thin end of the wedge. What Philip really wanted, as will be seen, was to employ the English fleet against France. On the much-desired arrival of Philip in Brussels he found the great emperor a prey to the last extreme of mental and bodily senile depression. Things had been going from bad to worse with Charles almost uninterruptedly since the defection of Maurice of Saxony in 1552. “Fortune is a strumpet,” he cried at his disaster before Metz, “and reserves her favours for the young.” And so to the young Philip he had determined to shift the burden he himself could bear no longer.