Bitter disappointment is the note struck all through. The English lords who had been so heavily bribed were ready enough to take all they could get; but they were as patriotic as they were greedy, and did not sell their country's interests for their pensions. Renard for once had made a mistake. He was ready to assent to any conditions the English liked to propose on paper, trusting to the personal influence of Philip on his queen after the marriage {174} was effected. But he forgot that the Queen herself was a mere puppet in the hands of her nobles, as the narrator I have quoted soon discovered, and, whatever ascendency the young bridegroom might obtain over his half-Spanish bride; her councillors, from the stern Gardiner downwards, were Englishmen before everything, to whom the over-weening power of the Emperor had been held up as a terror since their childhood. And so the whole splendid plot failed, and the magnificent nuptials had hardly been forgotten before Philip, recognising that his sacrifices had been in vain, and that he could never rule in England, made the best of an unfortunate speculation, and with all gravity, courtesy, and dignity left Mary to die of a broken heart, alone, disappointed, and forsaken. [1] _The English Historical Review_, April, 1892. [2] This curious and rare tract was reprinted by the Camden Society, 1849, and is the groundwork of Foxe's and Hollingshed's accounts of the events related therein. [3] Edward Underhyll was one of the gentlemen pensioners, and his quaint narrative of the accession of Mary and the subsequent events, now amongst the Harleian manuscripts, was largely used by Strype and others. [4] Ambassades de Noailles. Leyden, 1763. [5] To these may be added the slight but interesting narrative existing in manuscript at Lotivain, and printed by Tytler in his "Edward VI and Mary," and the letters of the Venetian ambassador in Flanders to the Doge and Senate, for which see Calendar of State Papers (Venetian) of the date in question. [6] He was equally at sea at the beginning of Mary's reign, when he vigorously aided Northumberland's conspiracy to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and repeatedly told his master that Mary's cause was an absolutely hopeless one. On the ignominious collapse of Dudley, Noailles excused his own want of prescience by saying that nothing but a direct miracle from heaven could have brought about such a change.