But as the effect of Cecil’s diplomacy gradually became apparent, the more reckless of his opponents resorted to desperate devices to frustrate him. Already, by February 1571, Mary Stuart had convinced herself that the treaty for her liberation was fallacious, and she wrote an important letter to the Bishop of Ross, from which great events sprang.[331] She refers to plans for her escape, and announces her decision to go to Spain, throwing herself in future entirely upon Philip as her protector; and she urges that Ridolfi should be sent to Spain and Rome to explain her situation and resolve, and to beg for help. Norfolk was to be asked to pledge himself finally to become a Catholic; doubt as to his religion, she says, having been the principal reason for Philip’s lukewarmness. The Bishop sent a copy of the letter to Norfolk, who was still nominally under arrest. The Duke gave his consent, and Ridolfi started from England at the end of March. It has been frequently denied that Norfolk connived at this proposal for the invasion of England by a foreign power; but, in addition to the depositions of Ross and Barker,[332] the following letter from De Spes introducing Ridolfi to Philip appears to settle the question against the Duke:[333] “The Queen of Scots, and the Duke of Norfolk on behalf of many other lords and gentlemen who are attached to your Majesty’s interests, and the promotion of the Catholic religion, are sending Rodolfo Ridolfi, a Florentine gentleman, to offer their services to your Majesty, and to represent to you that the time is now ripe to take a step of great benefit to Christianity, as in detail Ridolfi will set forth to your Majesty. The letter of credence from the Duke of Norfolk is written in the cipher that I have sent to Zayas, for fear it should be taken. London, 25th March, 1571.” The exact proposal to be made verbally by Ridolfi is not stated, but De Spes refers to it in his next letter as “the real remedy” for Lord Burghley’s activity. It is probable that not only the support of Mary and Norfolk was intended, but also the assassination of Elizabeth and her minister.[334] Cecil had been put upon the alert by the kidnapping in Flanders and bringing to England of the notorious Dr. Storey, who, under torture in the Tower, had divulged the dealings of the northern Lords with Alba through Ridolfi and the Bishop of Ross. This caused Cecil to keep a watch upon the doings of both the agents; and Lord Cobham, in Dover, was instructed to intercept any cipher letters which might be brought by a Flemish secretary of the Bishop of Ross, one Charles Bailly, who was with Ridolfi in Flanders. The man was stopped and his papers captured, with some copies of the Bishop of Ross’s book in favour of Mary’s claims. The Cobhams were never to be trusted; and Thomas Cobham surreptitiously obtained the cipher keys, and had them conveyed to De Spes, substituting for them a dummy packet, which was sent to Cecil. But Bailly himself, who had written the papers at Ridolfi’s dictation, was promptly put on the rack in the Tower, and confessed that the letters were written to two persons, designated by numbers, under cover to the Bishop, and conveyed the Duke of Alba’s approval of the plan for invading England, and his readiness, if authorised by his King, to co-operate with the persons indicated.
Letters sent by the Bishop to Bailly after his arrest, urging him to firmness, threatening the traitor who had betrayed him, and in a hundred ways proving his own complicity, were all intercepted and read. The tortured wretch swore to the Bishop that he would tell nothing, even if they tore him into a hundred pieces; begged that his trunk containing drafts of letters from Mary to Cardinal Lorraine and Hamilton might be rescued from his lodging. But Burghley forestalled them all. The whole of the letters were taken, and every day, in the Tower, fresh rackings, and threats to cut off his ears or his head, were used by Burghley to the frightened lad, to force him to give a key of the cipher. One morning at five o’clock he was carried by the Lieutenant of the Tower to Lord Burghley, and was told that, unless he immediately confessed all, he would be racked till the truth was torn from him. The lad, half distraught, day by day unfolded as much as he knew, notwithstanding the Bishop’s frantic assurances that Burghley would not dare to harm him much, as he was a foreigner and a servant of the Queen of Scots.[335] And so, piece by piece, the whole conspiracy was unravelled so far as regarded the main object, and the complicity of Alba, the Spaniards and the Bishop of Ross proved beyond doubt; but still the persons indicated by the cipher numbers “30” and “40” could only be surmised, for Bailly himself did not know them. Gradually the names of Mary Stuart and Norfolk crept into the depositions of those examined, but without sufficient definiteness yet for open proceedings against them to be commenced.
Whilst Lord Burghley, with inexhaustible patience, was tracking the plot to its source, the most elaborate pretence of agreement with the French on the subject of the Anjou match was kept up both in Paris and London; though more sincere on the part of the former than the latter, for Catharine and Charles IX. were in mortal fear of the Guises, the League, and the heir-presumptive to the crown. Cavalcanti and officers of the King’s household ran backwards and forwards to England with loving messages; and the Huguenots worked their best to bring the matter to a successful issue, or, in default of it, for a close alliance. Henry Cobham was sent to Madrid ostensibly to treat on the matter of the seizures, but really to learn, if possible, how far Philip was pledged to the plans against England; but the Spaniards were forewarned and ready for him, and he learned nothing.
Lord Burghley had, however, a better plan than this. Fitzwilliam, a relative of the English Duchess of Feria, had been sent to Spain by him for the purpose of negotiating for the release of the men and hostages who had been captured from Hawkins at San Juan de Ulloa. He professed in Spain to be strongly Catholic and in favour of Mary Stuart, and came back to England in 1571, with presents, pledges, and promises to the captive Queen and her friends. Hawkins lay with a strong auxiliary fleet at the mouth of the Channel, and it was agreed with Lord Burghley that Fitzwilliam and Hawkins should hoodwink the Spaniards, obtain a good haul for themselves, and at the same time trace the ramifications of the great international plot against England. De Spes jumped at the bait, with but a mere qualm of misgiving, when Fitzwilliam went and offered, on behalf of Hawkins, to desert with all his fleet to Spain, and take part, if necessary, in an attack upon England. When he wrote to the King he said, “My only fear is lest Burghley himself may have set the matter afoot to discover your Majesty’s feelings, though I have seen nothing to make me think this.”
But it was exactly the case, nevertheless, and the ruse succeeded beyond expectation. By the end of August all Hawkins’ men had been released in Spain and sent back to England, with ten dollars each in their pockets, and Hawkins himself was the better off by £40,000 of Spanish money. But more than this: Burghley had obtained through Fitzwilliam full knowledge of the aims of the Ridolfi conspiracy. It was clear now to demonstration that the Pope,[336] Philip, and the Catholic party in France were pledged to a vast crusade against England, for crushing Protestantism, destroying Elizabeth,[337] and raising Mary Stuart to the thrones of Great Britain. Burghley and the Queen had practically known it for months, as we have seen, and already the diplomatic measures they had taken to counteract it were producing their effects. But now that the evidence was sufficient, the blow against the conspirators could be struck openly. All unsuspecting still, De Spes was comforting himself with the reflection that the capture of Bailly was an unimportant incident; he urged Alba and the King to immediate action, fumed at the instructions he received to hold back Philip’s letters to Mary and Norfolk until he had orders to deliver them, and sneered at the timid delay. “As all of Lord Burghley’s jests have turned out well for him hitherto, he is ready to undertake anything, and has no fear of danger. They and the French together make great fun of our meekness.” “It is a pity to lose time, for Lord Burghley is continuing to oppress the Catholics. If the opportunity is lost this year, I fear the false religion will prevail in this island in a way which will make it a harsh neighbour for the Netherlands.”
The opportunity, though he did not know it, had been lost already, for all the threads were now in Burghley’s hands, and he was master of the situation. In August was intercepted the bag of money (£600) with a cipher letter[338] being sent secretly to Herries and Kirkaldy of Grange, Mary’s friends in Scotland, by the Duke of Norfolk’s secretary, and in a day or two the net swept into the Tower the Duke and all the underlings who had served as intermediaries. Burghley lost no time now. Almost every day, threats or the rack wrung some fresh admission from the instruments—secretaries, messengers, and the like. Norfolk at first, with extreme effrontery, denied everything;[339] but he was a weak man, and soon broke down. Even then De Spes did not see that all was lost. “The Catholics,” he said, “are many, though their leaders be few, and Lord Burghley, with his terrible fury, has greatly harassed and dismayed them, for they are afraid even of speaking to each other. The whole affair depends upon getting weapons into their hands, and giving them some one to direct them.”[340] It was too late. Mary Stuart’s prison was made closer; her correspondence was intercepted and read; there was no more concealment necessary or possible. One Catholic noble after the other was isolated and imprisoned; Dr. Storey’s dreadful fate was held up as a warning to traitors, and London and the country was flooded with broadsheets calculated to arouse English and Protestant sentiment to fever heat at the dastardly conspiracy which was laid bare.
On the 14th December a message reached De Spes summoning him to the Council at Whitehall. When he arrived there he found them awaiting him, with Lord Burghley as spokesman. There was no mincing matters. The Ambassador was told that he had plotted with traitors against the Queen’s life and the peace of the country, and he would be expelled, as Dr. Man had been from Spain with far less reason.[341] De Spes tried to brazen it out, but ineffectually. Burghley was on firm ground: no delay, he said, could be allowed, excepting the time absolutely necessary for the preparations for the voyage, which time was to be passed out of London.[342] Speechless, almost, with indignation, in pretended fear that Burghley would have him killed, De Spes was hustled out of the country he had sought to ruin, and a week afterwards (16th January 1572) the Duke of Norfolk was tried by his peers and found guilty of the capital crime of high treason.
De Spes left England with bitter resentment at the triumph of Burghley’s diplomacy. “They will now,” he says, “make themselves masters of the Channel, and with one blow, with their practices in Flanders, will plunge that country into a dreadful war. It is of no use now to speak of our lost opportunities. They have gone; but … steps may still be taken to make these people weep in their own country.” When he arrived in Flanders he made a long report of his embassy, containing the following interesting appreciation of Burghley as he appeared to his greatest enemy: “The principal person in the Council is William Cecil, now Lord Burghley, a Knight of the Garter. He is a man of mean sort, but very astute, false, lying, and full of artifice. He is a great heretic, and such a clownish Englishman as to believe that all the Christian princes joined together are not able to injure the sovereign of his country, and he therefore treats their ministers with great arrogance. This man manages the bulk of the business, and by means of his vigilance and craftiness, together with his utter unscrupulousness of word and deed, thinks to outwit the ministers of other princes, which to some extent he has hitherto succeeded in doing.”
Before De Spes was expelled, the efforts of Burghley, Walsingham, and De Foix had been successful in arranging the terms of a close political alliance between France and England. Elizabeth swore to Cavalcanti that she would never trust Spaniards again, and he might see how little she cared for the King of Spain by the way she had treated his Ambassador. She could, indeed, afford now to slight the most powerful monarch in the world; for one of the counter-strokes to the Spanish-Papal plot had been the concentration in the Channel of a great fleet of Flemish and Huguenot privateers under the Count de la Mark, and during the winter a plan had been perfected for the seizure by the “beggars” of Brille, the key to Zeeland. The imposition in Flanders of the tax which ruined Spain had been the last straw,[343] and the whole country was ripe for revolt. For some time an arrangement had been in progress with Louis of Nassau, by which the Huguenots should invade Flanders over the French frontier, in the interest of the Flemish Protestants. However friendly Elizabeth might be with France, this was a proceeding which was sure to be looked upon by English statesmen with profound distrust; and Walsingham, writing to Cecil on the last day of 1571,[344] says that he has been asked whether, in the event of the French entering Flanders, the Queen of England will take Zeeland, as the Flemings fear that the French may not be contented with Flanders. Some time before this, in September, Walsingham had urged Cecil to promote this invasion of Flanders by the French, as a means of keeping the Huguenots in power, as well as embarrassing Spain. “If not,” he says, “the Guises will bear sway, who will be so forward in preferring the conquest of Ireland, and the advancement of their niece to the crown of England, as the other side (i.e. the Huguenots) is contrariwise bent to prefer the conquest of Flanders.” When the immediate danger from the Guises was over, however, the idea of a French invasion of Flanders could not be calmly endured without some corresponding move in English interests, and joint action in the Netherlands was suggested. It is assumed by Motley and most other historians that the capture of Brille by the “beggars” under La Mark early in April was quite unpremeditated, but De Spes warned Alba that the affair was being planned in England at least six months before;[345] and the sending away from Dover of La Mark’s fleet did not, as Motley surmises, arise alone from Elizabeth’s fear of offending Spain—for that she had already done—but from the complaints of the Easterling merchants that their trade with England had become impossible whilst these freebooters of the seas lay off the coast. In any case, the surprise and seizure of Brille by the “beggars” once more gave Alba plenty to think about on his own side of the Straits; and England might, for the present, breathe freely again.