The conviction that she was to be childless was only gradually forced upon Mary; for she had prayed and yearned so much for motherhood that she could hardly believe that heaven would abandon her thus. In her mind a son born of her and Philip would have made England, as she said, Catholic and strong for ever; and as the bitter truth of her barrenness came home to the Queen she sank deeper into gloomy despondency, increased by the knowledge that her beloved husband, polite and considerate though he was to her, was obliged to leave her, with the tacit understanding that their marriage had failed in its chief object. Mary passionately longed to bring about peace between her husband’s country and France. She knew that the revolutionary movement in and about London was being actively fomented by French intrigue; that the crowd of pamphlets and scurrilous publications attacking her and her faith were being paid for with French money; and that unless peace was soon made or the agitation stopped England would be drawn into the war and her throne would be in peril. But her efforts towards peace met with little real aid from the French, for any step that consolidated her position and gave time for Spaniards and Englishmen to settle down under one system would have meant ruin to France; and Mary’s Council, and more reluctantly Mary herself, was obliged to turn to the other alternative, and attempt to suppress the organised manifestations of rebellion against her rule.
The burning of heretical and treasonable books, and even of the Edward VI. prayer book, was but a prelude to the burning of bodies, and Renard warned the Emperor that before Philip had been gone six months from England the holocaust would begin. It matters little whether the persecutions were religious or political—the apologists of Mary and Elizabeth respectively strive to prove that their victims in each case were political criminals; and doubtless, according to the letter of the law, they were—but it was clear to Philip and his father, that whatever excuse might be advanced for the burning of Englishmen by Mary’s Council, the executions would increase the ill-feeling against Spain, and make English resources less available to them against France. But notwithstanding this Charles would wait no longer for his son, and peremptorily ordered him to return to Flanders.