th respect to the war with France. She was induced to this, not
merely by her habitual deference to her husband, but by natural feelings
of resentment at the policy of Henry the Second. She had put up with
affronts, more than once, from the French ambassador, in her own court;
and her throne had been menaced by repeated conspiracies, which, if not
organized, had been secretly encouraged by France. Still, it was not
easy to bring the English nation to this way of thinking. It had been a
particular proviso of the marriage treaty, that England should not be
made a party to the war against France; and subsequent events had tended
to sharpen the feeling of jealousy rather towards the Spaniards than
towards the French.

The attempted insurrection of Stafford, who crossed over from the shores
of France at this time, did for Philip what possibly neither his own
arguments nor the authority of Mary could have done. It was the last of
the long series of indignities which had been heaped on the country from
the same quarter; and parliament now admitted that it was no longer
consistent with its honor to keep terms with a power which persisted in
fomenting conspiracies to overturn the government and plunge the nation
into civil war. On the seventh of June, a herald was despatched, with
the formality of ancient and somewhat obsolete usages, to proclaim war
against the French king in the presence of his court and in his capital.
This was done in such a bold tone of defiance, that the hot old
constable, Montmorency, whose mode of proceeding, as we have seen, was
apt to be summary, strongly urged his master to hang up the envoy on the
spot.[189]

The state of affairs imperatively demanded Philip's presence in the
Netherlands, and, after a residence of less than four months in London,
he bade a final adieu to his disconsolate queen, whose excessive
fondness may have been as little to his taste as the coldness of her
subjects.

Nothing could be more forlorn than the condition of Mary. Her health
wasting under a disease that cheated her with illusory hopes, which made
her ridiculous in the eyes of the world; her throne, her very life,
continually menaced by conspiracies, to some of which even her own
sister was supposed to be privy; her spirits affected by the
consciousness of the decline of her popularity under the gloomy system
of persecution into which she had been led by her ghostly advisers;
without friends, without children, almost