In this critical condition affairs remained for many weeks longer, the Queen obstinately refusing to give up her hope, which her women and physicians had already pronounced delusive. Hampton Court was overcrowded by gossiping courtiers; but none were allowed to see the Queen except a few of her favourite ladies, and the whole of the routine work of the Sovereign was done by Philip. All this was, of course, known by the expectant people in London, who saw daily church processions for the Queen’s safe delivery month after month, until anxiety began to give place to ridicule. Sometimes rumours ran that the Queen was dead, and that the fact was being kept secret by Philip in order that he might work his will in England. Religious feeling grew more bitter than ever, with Bonner’s ruthless persecution on the one hand and fanatic sacrilege on the other. To make matters worse, the summer was the most inclement and the harvest the scantiest that had been seen in England for years, and discontent was everywhere. At length, after another disappointment in July, even poor, forlorn Mary herself was convinced that she had been mistaken, and early in August she dismissed the crowds of hangers-on from their attendance at Court and moved with a smaller following to Oatlands, where she gradually resumed her ordinary routine again.[98] Orders were given for the processions and rogations of the Church to be discontinued, and Philip was now faced with the fact that the splendid plot of his father to capture the control of England by marriage had practically failed, for Mary’s health was evidently bad, and her life promised to be a short one. With it would end the hold of Philip over England unless the Queen’s successor could be lured into the Spanish net. Little knew the Spaniards yet what a wily bird it was that they hoped to snare. But in the meanwhile it behoved Philip to make the most of his opportunities whilst his wife lived. He could delay his departure no longer, for his father was peremptory now, and the urgent need for his presence in England had passed. He was as imperturbable as ever, still an attentive and apparently an affectionate husband to the Queen, though his gallantries to other ladies began to be talked about somewhat openly. If the Queen were of a jealous disposition, wrote the Venetian ambassador, she would indeed be unhappy; to which the reply may be made that she was jealous and she was unhappy. Even now, on the very eve of Philip’s departure, she strove ardently to keep him by her side, or at least to extract a pledge from him that he would return to her within a month, a promise which at last he gave, though to his own Spanish confidants he said that if once he set foot in Spain again, he would never leave it on so poor an occasion.[99]