On the 18th the Portuguese ambassador did homage to the Pope for the kingdom of Portugal, on behalf of King Philip. This same ambassador represented on other occasions the late King of Portugal, and likewise those states of King Philip with which he was at variance.[110] On my way back from Saint Peter’s I met a certain man who gave me an interesting account of two occurrences. The first was that the Portuguese had done their homage in Passion week, the service being held in the church of Saint John at the Porta Latina; and the second, that in this very same church, several years ago, certain Portuguese had established a very strange confraternity. These were men who joined themselves in matrimony, using the mass and the same religious ceremonies as we use at our weddings, taking the sacrament together, and reading our marriage service. Then they went and lived together after the fashion of married folk. These fanatics declared that the marriage ceremony alone rendered lawful the union of man and woman, and that their own form of union would become equally lawful should it be sanctioned by the ceremonies and mysteries of the Church. Nine or ten Portuguese belonging to this execrable sect were burnt.[111] I witnessed the homage done by Spain for the kingdom of Portugal. A salvo of artillery was fired from Saint Angelo and from the palace, and the ambassador was escorted by trumpets and drums and the Pope’s archers. I did not go inside to be present at the speech-making and the other ceremonies. The Muscovite ambassador, who sat at a decorated window to behold the procession, remarked that he had been brought there to witness a great gathering; but in his country, when men spoke of troops of horses, they had in mind twenty-five or thirty thousand, wherefore he made light of the show before him. This I heard from a gentleman who was sent to converse with him through an interpreter. On Palm Sunday, in a church where I went for vespers, I saw a child seated in a chair beside the altar clad in a long gown of new blue taffetas, bareheaded, crowned with olive branches, and holding in his hand a lighted candle of white wax. This boy was about fifteen years old, and had just been discharged by the Pope’s order from prison, having been sent there for killing another boy. At Saint John Lateran they showed me some transparent marble. On the next day the Pope visited the seven churches.[112] He wore boots of flesh-colour, with a cross of lighter-coloured leather upon each boot. He always takes with him a Spanish horse, a hackney, a mule, and a litter, all equipped in the same fashion, but to-day the horse was lacking. His esquire, with two or three pairs of gilded spurs in his hand, awaited him at the foot of Saint Peter’s Stairs; but he put the spurs aside and asked for his litter, in which were hanging two red hats of the same sort.