Both the King and Feria were impatient at the cumbrous English constitutional way of raising money, and pestered poor Mary daily by word and letter to obtain resources by other means. This she knew, and said, was impossible in England, and might cost her her crown. One day Paget came to Feria with a great plan to raise the vast sum of 800,000 crowns, in addition to the parliamentary vote, and the Spaniards were all eager to put it into practice; but when the time to discuss it seriously came, Paget’s proposal, to Feria’s anger, reduced itself to a loan of £100,000 to be raised by Gresham in Antwerp and £80,000 to be borrowed from the London bankers. All would have been well managed, grumbled Paget, if he had the direction of affairs; and the other Councillors thereupon fell to wrangling with him as to their responsibility. This was early in March, 1558, and Feria had quite lost patience with what he considered the ineptitude of Mary’s advisers, which really meant their disinclination to subordinate English interests entirely to the wishes of Philip and his minister. From the sitting of the Council just referred to, Feria and his colleague Figueroa went off in a rage to the Queen to: “complain of the reply [about the money], and to warn her again of the danger in which the country and she herself are, her Councillors being so inept that, although they say that the country is not rich, they cannot devise means even to raise sufficient money to defend themselves and recover the prestige that has been lost. We dwelt much upon this, as much indeed as we could; for the Queen was not fully aware of the poor service rendered by the English contingent which you had with your army last year. She was not even yet undeceived as to their not having been the first to enter St. Quintin until yesterday, we told her amongst other things. She was much grieved and promised that she would press them again about the money at Greenwich, where she will go to-day. Her one thought is that your Majesty should come to her again. She seems still to believe that she is pregnant, though she does not say so openly. She promises me to send Gresham to Antwerp at once to borrow the £100,000 they say have arranged. I think if that be the case, it would be easy to get them to borrow another £100,000, though I have not pressed it until he is there.”[121]