Mary herself could see no evil in her husband, and we are told that she was highly gratified at all this dithyrambic praise of him. As they dismounted at Whitehall Gate, and she led him, all smiles, into the great presence chamber, Mary and Philip seemed to onlookers an ideally happy couple, notwithstanding the difference in their ages. Ruy Gomez, writing on the 24th August to Eraso in Spain, says: “The King entertains the Queen excellently, and well knows how to pass over what is not attractive in her for the sensibility of the flesh. He keeps her so pleased that verily when they were together the other day alone she almost made love to him and he answered in the same fashion. As for these gentlemen (_i.e._, the English nobles), his behaviour towards them is such that they themselves confess that they never yet had a King in England who so soon won the hearts of all men.”[65] Philip, indeed, had by his tact and amiability already begun to break down the hatred and distrust that had heralded his approach. At the period of the state entry into London, a diarist writing in the Tower of London no doubt only reflected the general feeling of apprehension when he wrote: “At this time there were so many Spaniards in London; that a man should have met in the street for one Englishman about four Spaniards, to the great discomfort of the English nation. The Halls (_i.e._, of the City companies) taken up for the Spaniards.”[66] In actual fact the number of Spanish servants and followers left to Philip at the time was very few—less than a dozen noblemen with their respective households, probably not more than two or three hundred people at most; and as time wore on, and it was seen that no attempt was made by Philip and his countrymen to interfere with the English, the influence of the King personally being recognised as invariably on the side of conciliation, a more equable frame of mind became general. News had come that the Emperor and his son had detained Cardinal Pole on the way to England, and had vetoed the extreme Papal policy with which he had at first been entrusted; and it was seen also that Mary herself, as well as her husband, assumed a desire to avoid drawing England into hostility with France, which was the great fear of the English people.