The courting had all been done by the Emperor through clever Renard; and the Prince, dutiful {138} son as he was, bent to his father's will without even knowing the terms of the bargain by which he was to be bound for life. The conditions imposed by the patriotism of Mary and her Council were hard for the most powerful monarch on earth to brook for his son. Philip's power was so fenced round by limitations and safeguards that it was plain to see the English nobles meant his sceptre to be a shadowy one, and the sombre, sensitive pride of the Prince was wounded to the quick at the light esteem in which they seemed to hold him; but, as Sandoval says, "he, like a second Isaac, was ready to sacrifice himself to his father's will and the good of the Church." And he did so gracefully and with dignity. No sooner had the courier delivered his message at Aranjuez than Philip set off on his return to Valladolid with his gaudy escort of horsemen in their red and yellow doublets. In hot haste the old Castilian capital put on its holiday garb to celebrate the event; the great square, standing much as it stands to-day, was bravely adorned, and costly hangings covered all one side of it where the Prince sat to see the jousts, tourneys, cane-play, and fireworks, and where he sat, alas! the next time he saw Valladolid, on his return five years afterwards, to watch unmoved the hellish fireworks of the great _auto de fé_. The wedding rejoicings had hardly begun when they were changed to mourning by the news of the death of Don Juan of Portugal, the husband of Philip's sister Juana; and the narrator, Muñoz, breaks off in the midst of his rapture over the splendour of Valladolid's joy to relate the pompous grandeur of its sorrow--how between the screen {139} and the altar of St. Paul's there were 3,000 candles of white and yellow wax, and how all the solemnity of previous exequies paled before these. In the meantime Philip had sent one of his stewards, Don Gutierre Lopede Padilla, to receive the English envoys at Laredo. After waiting there for a month with the Prince's guard to pay them due honour, he found that the news sent had been premature, and that the marriage treaty had not yet even been ratified, and was not, indeed, until Egmont's second visit to England in March. So Padilla found his way back again to Valladolid by the end of March, and they decided to take the matter in more leisurely fashion in future. But in a few weeks came news from the Emperor himself that the contract was ratified, and then the Marquis de las Navas was ordered to take the Prince's first present to his bride. We are told that the Marquis fitted himself out for his mission regardless of cost, and his splendour appears to have been equalled by the princely gifts of which he was the bearer, and the noble hospitality extended to him in England.[11] Philip's offering to Mary consisted of "a great table diamond, mounted as a rose in a superb gold setting,