The unhappy Queen of Scots herself, persuaded that no help could just now reach her from her French kinsmen, seems to have depended almost entirely upon the aid to be given by the King of Spain and Alba to the Scottish Catholics. No messenger came from her to London without beseeching secret letters in cipher to the Spanish Ambassador; and whilst the trial dragged on, she left no stone unturned to arouse indignation against Murray and the English. They wished to kill her child, she said, and force the reformed faith upon her and Scotland. In an intercepted letter to one of the Hamiltons, which fell into Cecil’s hands,[285] she says that Dumbarton, with Murray’s consent, was to be seized by the English. Elizabeth had, she averred, promised to sustain Murray, to recognise his legitimacy, and raise him to the throne as her vassal; both of these being accusations which were likely to move the Hamiltons to fury. But, above all, she accused Cecil of a deeper plot still. He had arranged, she said, to marry one of his daughters to the Earl of Hertford, father of Catharine Grey’s young heir, and thus, by mutual support, Hertford’s son and Murray might occupy respectively the English and Scottish thrones under Cecil’s tutelage. “So they will both be bent on my son’s death.” There was no truth in it; but it was an excellent invention to arouse the ire of the Scottish Catholics. Before even this was written (December), Cecil knew how bitter was Mary’s feeling against him. When Beton came to London from Mary in October, with secret messages for De Spes, suggesting her escape, “which will not be difficult, or even to raise a revolt against this Queen,” Cecil guessed his real errand, and, says De Spes, “Cecil is so much against the Queen of Scotland, and so jealous in the matter, that as soon as he saw Beton he asked him whether he had been with his complaints to the Spanish Ambassador, and whether he came to see me often; to which Beton replied that he had no dealings whatever with me.”[286]
But Cecil’s spies were everywhere, and he knew that De Spes was working ceaselessly in Mary’s interests to bring disaster upon England, in union with his chief, the Duke of Alba, in Flanders. The great difficulty in the way of the Spaniards was the extreme penury of the treasury. Spain was in the very depths of poverty, its commerce well-nigh killed by unwise fiscal arrangements and the depredations of the privateers, against whom De Spes inveighed to Cecil constantly, but in vain, though the Secretary was strongly against piracy on principle. Flanders desolated with war, Holland and Zeeland in revolt, were no longer the milch-cows for the Spaniards that they had been, and Alba, with an unpaid and rebellious soldiery, was in despair of subduing Orange, much less of crushing England, unless large sums of money were forthcoming. Philip made a great effort in the autumn of 1568, and borrowed a large sum of money from the Genoese bankers to supply Alba with the sinews of war. The money was to be conveyed by sea to Flanders at the risk of the bankers. Three of the vessels duly arrived in Antwerp, after having been chased by Huguenot privateers; but several others put into Southampton, Plymouth, and Falmouth, to escape from their pursuers. The representative in England of the bankers was the Genoese Benedict Spinola, who requested De Spes to ask the Queen to allow the money to be discharged and brought overland to Dover, where it could be transhipped under convoy for the Duke of Alba. De Spes saw the Queen on the 29th November, and she consented to this course being adopted.