All London was ringing with preparations for the coming pageant of the Queen’s coronation. Fenchurch, Gracechurch, and Leadenhall, Cornhill, Chepe, and Saint Paul’s were erecting the scaffoldings for their triumphs, repainting and gilding gable ends and pinnacles, and trimming forth their fine stuffs and liveries in honour of the great day when the Queen was to ride in state from the Tower to Westminster.[19] Away across the fields in the little sylvan palace of Saint James’s, Mary sat under her canopy in her audience chamber one day in late September, surrounded by courtiers, all, like the Queen herself, in a blaze of magnificence; for the prim Puritanism of the late reign had been banished as savouring of Reform, and the splendour of King Henry was being copied by his daughter. To one man alone had Mary somewhat sourly prescribed modesty in attire, and that was to Courtenay. The dissoluteness of this young man of twenty-six, who had never before been free since his childhood, had already shocked the austerely virtuous Mary, and had made his chances of winning her hand more impossible than ever. But neither she nor those around her could fail to see that the cunning Frenchman Noailles was still ostentatiously feasting and honouring him, and already the talk of the French party at Court was coupling the names of Courtenay and the Princess Elizabeth in a way that boded ill to Mary’s peace of mind. Courtenay had ordered a gorgeous suit of blue velvet covered with gold for the coming ceremony; but blue was the colour the Queen had chosen for her own outer garb, and she had no intention of allowing so much bravery to the man she knew was being made the tool of her enemies to injure her, and Courtenay was ordered to put his finery aside and wear more modest raiment. At the public audience Renard brought forward to present to the Queen two great Spanish nobles—Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Don Diego de Geneda—who were on their way from Flanders to Spain, the latter a member of Philip’s household. As the two gentlemen in their distinctive Spanish garb and with national gravity were led forward for presentation to the Queen, many scowling brows were bent upon them; for although the matter was supposed to be so secret, the talk of the Spanish marriage was already common at Court; and Noailles, in the deepest chagrin at the way things were tending, noticed that Don Diego de Geneda on this occasion had whispered conference with the Queen, unheard even by his colleague or by the Imperial ambassador.[20]