"Alas, for pity! Ye be yet in such good estate that ye may, without loss of any man's life, keep the crown and realm quietly. If ye will hear a fool's counsel, keep still the crown to the right succession in your hands, and give it to no foreign princes. Peradventure her Grace thinketh the king will keep her the more company and love her the better, if she give him the crown. Ye will crown him to make him chaste contrary to his nature. They have a saying--'The baker's daughter is better in her gown than Queen Mary without the crown.' They say, 'Old wives must be cherished for their young fair gifts.' 'Old wives,' they say, 'for fair words will give all that they have.' But how be they used afterwards? Doth the queen think the king will remain in England with giving him the realm? The council of Spain purposeth to establish other matters; to appoint in England a viceroy with a great army of Spanish soldiers, and let the queen live at her beads like a good antient lady."--John Bradford to the Earls of Arundel, Shrewsbury, Derby, and Pembroke: Strype's _Memorials_, vol. vi. p. 340, etc.] Struggle as the queen might against such a representation of {p.222} her husband's feelings towards her, it was true that he had left her with a promise to return; and the weeks went, and he did not come, and no longer spoke of coming. The abdication of the emperor would keep him from her, at least, till the end of the winter. And news came soon which was harder still to bear; news, that he, whom she had been taught to regard as made in the image of our Saviour,[493] was unfaithful to his marriage vows,[494] Bradford had spoken generally of the king's vulgar amours; other accounts convinced her too surely that he was consoling himself for his long purgatory in England, by miscellaneous licentiousness. Philip was gross alike in all his appetites; bacon fat was the favourite food with which he gorged himself to illness;[495] his intrigues were on the same level of indelicacy, and his unhappy wife was forced to know that he preferred the society of abandoned women of the lowest class to hers. [Footnote 493: Prayer written by Cardinal Pole for Queen Mary: _supra_.] [Footnote 494: Noailles to the King of France, October 21: _Ambassades_, vol. v.] [Footnote 495: Noailles to Montmorency, December 5: Ibid.]