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but before Mary was forced to reconcile herself to being barren, among other future woes, she was simply a smitten new wife. The queen wrote to her father-in-law,Charles V, after the wedding to thank him “for allying me with a prince so full of virtues that the realm’s honor and tranquility will certainly be thereby increased. This marriage renders me happier than I can say, as I daily discover in the King my husband so many virtues and perfections that I constantly pray God to grant me grace to please him, and behave in all things as befits one who is so deeply embounden to him.”
    Philip was somewhat less enamored with his bride. “To speak frankly with you,” his confidant Ruy Gómez wrote home to Spain, “it will take a great God to drink this cup.” Nevertheless, Philip made the best of it. “He treats the queen very kindly,” Gómez reported, “and well knows how to pass over the fact that she is no good from the point of view of fleshy sensuality. He makes her so happy that the other day when they were alone she almost talked love talk to him, and he replied in the same vein.”
    Several months after the wedding Mary believed she was pregnant, the joy of which was matched by her kingdom’s reunion with Rome. With her husband by her side, and a baby in her belly (or so she thought), Mary began to burn heretics. Hundreds of men and women, many of them poor and uneducated, suffered agonizing deaths at the stake, while the queen solidified her place in English history as Bloody Mary.
    During Easter Week, 1555, Queen Mary went into confinement at Hampton Court in anticipation of her delivery, which was expected early in May. The palace was a hive of activity in preparation for the arrival of the precious heir. “I warrant it should be a man child,” Charles V declared confidently. But the due date came and went, followed by fresh calculations by the queen’s doctors that she would deliver in June. Still no baby. As Mary became increasingly more anxious and depressed, people began mumbling that she may not have been pregnant at all. English diplomats searched for explanations for the delayed delivery as their queen was held to increasing ridicule in foreigncourts. Another due date passed in July, by which time the doctors and midwives had ceased making calculations. Still, the Venetian ambassador, for one, continued to hold out hope that a miracle would “come to pass in this, as in all her majesty’s other circumstances, which the more they were despaired of according to human reasoning and discourse, the better and more auspicious did their result then show itself.” †
    By the end of August there were few believers left; Philip departed for the dominions in Flanders that he was about to inherit from his father. Mary wept as she watched him go. She believed at first that her husband would soon return to her, but as his letters tapered off, and rumors of his philandering began to reach her, she despaired.
    As the months went by, Mary became increasingly desperate, even pleading with her father-in-law, the emperor, to make Philip come back. “I beg your Majesty to forgive my boldness,” she wrote, “and to remember the unspeakable sadness I experience because of the absence of the king.” Sadness sometimes gave way to anger, as on the occasion when the queen ordered a portrait of her wayward husband removed from the council chamber, kicking it on the way out. Then there was the resignation that Philip would probably not be coming back. According to one report, the queen “told her ladies, that she had done all possible to induce her husband to return, and as she found he would not, she meant to withdraw utterly from men,and live quietly, as she had done the chief part of her life before she was married.”
    As it turned out, Philip did return to England, but only briefly, and not to reconcile with Mary (though there was intimacy, and yet another false pregnancy). He needed her as an ally in a war he