The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

No foreigner had been king of England since William the Conqueror, and 'the very name of stranger was odious', so the opponents of the Spanish marriage insisted. Marriage to a 'stranger' would outrage the people. England would by this marriage be 'marrying everlasting strife and danger from the French', who were already intriguing witht the Scots and Irish. Since Philip was Mary's kinsman a papal dispensation was necessary: a prospect so objectionable that it must be kept secret, and secrecy brought its own dangers. Philip might promise to adapt to English ways, but no one would believe him, and the Spanish would be as hated in England as they were in Flanders. But Mary was adamant: she would die if she married Courtenay. She now loved Philip, she confessed, before ever she met him. To Gardiner's objection: 'And what will the people say?' she replied that it was not for him to prefer the people's will to hers. When the Speaker led a deputation from Parliament on 16 November to rehearse arguments against the Spanish marriage 'learnt in the school of the Bishop of Winchester [Gardiner]', she roundly rejected their petition. Gardiner's objections may have represented less a narrow patriotism than a politic way of securing the best terms for the marriage treaty; terms so favourable to England that Philip forswore them three times before witnesses, even while he swore them. The fears that 'heretics' would use the marriage as proof that the restoration of the old religion meant foreign domination, that papal tyranny and Spanish tyranny were all one, would not go away.