Her trials began to tell on her understanding.  She was ill with hysterical longings; ill with the passions which Gardiner, as her chancellor, had provoked, but Paget as leader of the opposing party, had disappointed.  But she was now to become the wife of King Philip of Spain.  Negotiations for this momentous marriage had been protracted, and even after the contract had been signed, Philip seemed slow to arrive.  The coolness manifested by his tardiness did much to aggravate the queen’s despondency.  On July 20, 1554, he landed at Southampton.  The atmospheric auspices were not cheering, for Philip, who had come from the sunny plains of Castile, from his window at Southampton looked out on a steady downfall of July rain.  Through the cruel torrent he made his way to church to mass, and afterwards Gardiner came to him from the queen.  On the next Sunday he journeyed to Winchester, again in pouring rain.  To the cathedral he went first, wet as he was.  Whatever Philip of Spain was entering on, whether it was a marriage or a massacre, a state intrigue or a midnight murder, his first step was ever to seek a blessing from the holy wafer.  Mary was at the bishop’s palace, a few hundred yards’ distance.  Mary could not wait, and the same night the interview took place.  Let the curtain fall over the meeting, let it close also over the wedding solemnities which followed with due splendour two days after.  There are scenes in life which we regard with pity too deep for words.

The unhappy queen, unloved, unlovable, yet with her parched heart thirsting for affection, was flinging herself upon a breast to which an iceberg was warm; upon a man to whom love was an unmeaning word, except as the most brutal of all passions.  Mary set about to complete the Catholic reaction.  She had restored the Catholic orthodoxy in her own person, and now was resolved to bring over her own subjects.  But clouds gathered over the court.  The Spaniards were too much in evidence.  With the reaction came back the supremacy of the pope, and the ecclesiastical courts were reinstated in authority to check unlicensed extravagance of opinion.

Gardiner, Bonner, Tunstal, and three other prelates formed a court on January 28, 1555, in St. Mary Overy’s Church, Southwark, and Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, and Canon Rogers of St. Paul’s, were brought up before them.  Both were condemned as Protestants, and both were burnt at the stake, the bishop at Gloucester, the canon at Smithfield.  They suffered heroically.  The Catholics had affected to sneer at the faith of their rivals.  There was a general conviction among them that Protestants would all flinch at the last; that they had no “doctrine that would abide the fire.”  Many more victims were offered.  The enemies of the church were to submit or die.  So said Gardiner, and so said the papal legate and the queen, in the delirious belief that they were the chosen instruments of Providence.