There are few letters extant that reveal so clearly as this does the character of Philip. As he points out in his long preamble, the objections to the match are numerous and grave. Elizabeth was of doubtful orthodoxy, excommunicate and officially declared a bastard, the daughter of a woman whom Catholic Spaniards looked upon as the personification of evil, and yet to marry her the proudest monarch on earth and the champion of the Church omnipotent was ready to salve his conscience, sacrifice personal desires and lavish upon a people he loathed the money wrung painfully from the Castilian subjects that he loved. The talk of his sacrifice to God no doubt was sincerely uttered and believed by himself, because he ever identified his political aims with the cause of the Almighty; but the real reason for his willingness to marry Elizabeth in spite of everything was primarily to prevent England from slipping away from his grasp to the irreparable injury of his cause. If England became a Protestant power under Elizabeth, he foresaw that it would reinforce the elements in his own dominions with which his great struggle was even now visible on the horizon; if it became Catholic under Mary Stuart, matters would be still worse for him, because his great rival France would then hold the whip hand over him for ever from across the Channel. It was a dire predicament for a proud, devout monarch to find himself in, and of the two great evils that threatened, Philip proposed to choose the lesser in marrying Elizabeth “for the greater glory of God.”