On the 14th May 1554 Philip rode out of Valladolid with nearly a thousand horsemen in gaudy raiment. First going south west to near the Portuguese frontier to meet his sister Joan, who had just lost her husband, the Prince of Portugal, he turned aside to take a last farewell to his grandmother, Joan the Mad, in her prison-palace at Tordesillas, and then passed on from town to town, through Leon and Galicia; his puny, hydrocephalic heir, Don Carlos, by his side, towards Santiago and Corunna. Loving greeting and good wishes followed him everywhere; for was he not going to fix upon yet another land, and that a rich one, the seal that marked it as within the circle of the Spanish realms? Proud were these hidalgos who rode behind him, proud the Spaniards, high and low, who welcomed him and sped him on his way, proud the very lackeys in the smallest squireling’s train; for they were all Spaniards, and they felt that this was a Spanish victory.
On the vigil of St. John, 23rd June, Philip was received at the gates of Santiago by kneeling citizens with golden keys as usual; and as he and his train, all flashing in the southern sun, pranced through the streets of the apostolic capital, two English lords, Bedford and Fitzwalter, sat at a window with their mantles before their faces, watching the progress of their future King. The next morning the English special envoys were publicly led into Philip’s presence. He met them at the door of the chamber leading into the great hall, and as the Englishmen bent the knee and doffed their bonnets the Prince uncovered and bowed low. Bedford, ‘a grandee and a good Christian,’ we are told by an eyewitness, then handed the marriage contract to him, and kissed hand, as did his colleagues. On leaving the room one Englishman said to another, apparently delighted at Philip’s demeanour, ‘O! God be praised for sending us so good a King as this’; and the Spaniard who heard the remark and understood English was only too glad of an opportunity of repeating it to his gratified compatriots. The envoys had good reason to be pleased with Philip, for though he was usually a bad paymaster to those who served him, he could be very liberal when it suited him; and on the day after the state interview a splendid piece of gold plate, magnificently worked, and standing nearly five feet high, was presented to Bedford, all the rest of the Englishmen being dealt with in similar generous fashion.