"God save us and give us health, and bring us safely home again. The country is a good one, but the people are surely the worst in the world. I verily believe if it were not for the constant prayers and processions for us in Spain we should all have been murdered long ago. There are slashings and quarrels every day between Englishmen and Spaniards, and only just now there was a fight in the palace itself, where several were killed on both sides. Three Englishmen and a Spaniard were hanged for brawling last week. Every day there is some trouble ... God help us, for these barbarous, heretical people make no account of soul and conscience; disobey God, disregard the saints, and think nothing of the Pope, who they say is only a man like themselves, and can have no direct dominion over them. The only Pope they recognise is their sovereign." The futility of the marriage, from a national point of view, rankled in the breasts of the disappointed courtiers as much as did their personal {173} discomfort. They felt that the trouble they had undergone, and the humble pie they had eaten, had added nothing to the power of their country or their sovereign, and their prevailing idea was how soonest and best to wash their hands of an ungrateful and profitless business in which all their sacrifices had been in vain. "We Spaniards," says the narrator, "move about amongst all these Englishmen like so many fools, for they are such barbarians that they cannot understand us, nor we them. They will not crown the King nor recognise him as their sovereign, and say that he only came to help govern the kingdom and beget children, and can go back to Spain as soon as the Queen has a son. Pray God it may be soon, for he (Philip) will be glad enough, I am sure, and our joy will be boundless to be away from a land peopled by such barbarous folk. The King has forgiven the Queen 2,250,000 ducats she owed him, and has distributed 30,000 ducats a year in pensions to these lords of the Council, to keep them in a good humour. All this money is taken out of Spain. A pretty penny this voyage and marriage have cost us, and yet these people are of no use to us after all."