All these elaborate preparations being completed, Philip, with the Dukes of Alba and Medini Celi, Egmont, Feria, Pescara, Ruy Gomez, and a score of the highest grandees of Spain and nearly a thousand horsemen glittering and flashing in the Castilian sun, rode out of Valladolid on the 14th May, 1554. The Prince’s Spanish and Teuton guards and his three hundred servants were all dressed in the gaudy red-and-yellow livery of Aragon, and each of the nobles was followed by a retinue which vied with that of the Prince in brilliance. The cavalcade had to make a long detour down to the Portuguese frontier to receive the grief-stricken young widow, Philip’s sister, who was to govern Spain in his absence, and again to Tordesillas for the Prince to take a last farewell of his mad grandmother, Jane the Crazy. At each town, too, especially at Benavente and Astorga, there were bullfights and tourneys, banquets and religious ceremonials, so that it was the 22nd June, the day before the Vigil of St. John, when the kneeling aldermen of Santiago de Compostela tendered to Philip the golden keys at the gates of their sainted city. As the Prince and his suite rode through the decorated streets to worship at the shrine of the Spanish patron Saint James, and thank him for his protection so far, a party of gentlemen at the upper window of a house looked on with faces shrouded in their cloaks. These were the English ambassadors—the Earl of Bedford, Lord Fitzwalter, and others—sent by Mary to pledge her troth to her new husband; and on the following morning they were brought by a crowd of Spanish hidalgos into the presence of the future King Consort of England. Philip received them smilingly, cap in hand, for even thus early he had taken to heart the injunctions of his father and of Renard that he would conciliate the English by changing his habitual grave aloofness for the gay amiability which he afterwards assumed in England. Bedford, Fitzwalter, Sidney, and the rest of them, bowed low and half bent the knee before him one by one;[39] and when the presentations were over, Bedford took from a secretary a copy of the capitulations and handed them to the Prince, who confirmed them by word of mouth without opening the paper. Bedford appears to have impressed the Spaniards favourably as “a great gentleman and a good Christian,” and both he and his colleagues did their errand in courtly fashion. When Philip had confirmed the capitulations, we are told, “they showed the greatest delight, from the highest to the lowest, kissing his Highness’s hands with great demonstration; and as they went out they said to each other in their own tongue, ‘Blessed be to God who has given us as good a king as this!’ This was said so quietly amongst themselves that it would not have been noticed, but that a Spanish gentleman who understood their tongue heard and repeated it.”[40] The next day the Englishmen attended pontifical Mass at the Cathedral with Philip, greatly, we are told, to