Queen Mary’s will, 30 March 1558 Mary kept up a regular correspondence with Philip while he was in Brussels, providing him with information and seeking his views. The king replied with advice, comments and sometimes instructions; it was not just a one-way flow. In other respects he was less dutiful. Freed from his wife’s smothering attentions, he apparently embarked on a couple of liaisons with attractive ladies of the Flemish court.There was gossip about his infidelities in London, though it may not have reached Mary’s ears. But she missed him terribly and it took her almost a year to adapt to his absence. During that period, she sent Charles V a series of imploring and increasingly bitter letters, pleading for her husband’s return.The rational part of her realised the difficulties, yet ‘I cannot’, she told the emperor, ‘but deeply feel the solitude in which the king’s absence leaves me. As your majesty well knows, he is the chief joy and comfort I have in this world’.1 No doubt Charles felt the same.
