Felipe a la Princesa Regente de España (Extracto)

Hampton Court,

By the messenger sent over land by the agent of the Queen, my dear and well-beloved wife, I received your letter in cipher, dated August 3rd, as well as another in your own hand and one from the Emperor, dated June 29th, a duplicate of which I had already seen at sea. I felt satisfaction on hearing that you and the Infante, my son, were well; and I pray Our Lord that you may so continue.

The last letters from his Majesty tell me that he is well, praise be to Him, and so am I, and the Queen also. I can well imagine that you were anxious until you heard that I had reached England and how I had been received here, but you will now have learned all the details of our marriage by the letters I wrote to you, so there is no need to dwell on the subject. Since then we have visited London, where I was received with universal signs of love and joy, and after spending six or seven days there we came hither to pass the rest of the summer. You will have been freed of the grief you felt on reading what his Majesty said in his letter of June 29th about the condition of affairs in the Low Countries, for Our Lord has remedied it in such a manner that the enemy has been unable to win any further success, and there is now no need for my presence in Flanders.

All that remains to be said is that the King of France bombarded Renty for a few days and proclaimed his intention of storming it, but his Majesty came up with his army and, after some skirmishes that resulted in losses on both sides, the King retreated with his army to Montreuil by night and in a manner calculated to diminish his prestige. His Majesty's army was in quarters near Renty, and his Imperial person at St. Omer, waiting to see what the enemy intended to do before determining his own course. I have heard no news for ten days now, and am anxiously waiting to hear what has happened since. . . . . (The battle between Peter Strozzi's and the Marquis of Marignano's forces)

Decipher. Spanish.