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broke out in opposition to the queen’s proposed marriage to Philip, and Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, was one of the ringleaders. The rebels were decisively crushed, but Simon Renard made it clear to the queen that the emperor would never allow his son to come to England while Jane Grey still lived as the focus of future uprisings. “Let the Queen’s mercy be tempered with a little severity,” Charles V said. And so on February 12, 1554, the Nine Days Queen, not yet seventeen years old, lost her head. *
    Popular opposition to the queen’s marriage was not quelled by Jane’s death. Spain was a hated enemy, and it was unthinkable to many that Mary would import a Spanish prince to rule over them. The Speaker of the House of Commons even dared remonstrate with the queen personally on the matter, but to no avail. Mary had sworn she would wed Philip, and she would never retreat from that vow.
    As the queen’s excitement grew to bursting, the prince of Spain finally came to England in the middle of July 1554. Several days before the wedding at Winchester Cathedral, Mary met him for the first time. She was delighted by what she saw, running up to Philip and kissing him when he entered the room. Clearly he had lived up to the dignified portrait by Titian that had so far been the queen’s only contact with the man who was to rule England by her side.
    Philip treated Mary with perfect decorum when he met her, but his gentlemen were quite disappointed by her appearance. Years of care and worry had taken their toll. “The queen is not at all beautiful,” one of Philip’s companions wrote. “Small, and rather flabby than fat, she is of white complexion and fair, and has no eyebrows.” As biographer Carolly Erickson noted, Mary “looked exactly what she was: Philip’s maiden aunt.”
    The Venetian ambassador was a little bit kinder in his assessment of the queen’s appearance:
    She is of low rather than of middling stature, but, although short, she has not personal defect in her limbs, nor is any part of her body deformed. She is of spare and delicate frame, quite unlike her father, who was tall and stout; nor does she resemble her mother, who, if not tall, wasnevertheless bulky. Her face is well formed, as shown by her features and lineaments, and as seen by her portraits. When younger she was considered, not merely tolerably handsome, but of beauty exceeding mediocrity. At present, with the exception of some wrinkles, caused more by anxieties than by age, which makes her appear some years older, her aspect, for the rest, is very grave. Her eyes are so piercing that they inspire not only respect, but fear in those on whom she fixes them, although she is very shortsighted, being unable to read or do anything else unless she has her sight quite close to what she wishes to peruse or to see distinctly. Her voice is rough and loud, almost like a man’s, so that when she speaks she is always heard a long way off. In short, she is a seemly woman, and never to be loathed for ugliness, even at her present age, without considering her degree of queen.
    Winchester Cathedral, stripped of much of its ornate magnificence by Henry VIII, was temporarily restored to some of its former glory for the queen’s wedding. Rich tapestries and cloth of gold were hung. On either side of the altar were two canopied chairs for the bride and groom (which can still be seen today). Mary’s gown was of black velvet studded with precious stones, over which she wore a mantle of gold cloth matching that worn by Philip. The queen, one observer wrote, “blazed with jewels to such an extent that the eye was blinded as it looked upon her.”
    After the wedding a sumptuous feast was held at the bishop of Winchester’s palace. The newlyweds then retired to lodgings specially prepared for them. “What happened that night only they know,” one of the Spanish guests wrote. “If they give us a son our joy will be complete.”
    That would never happen,