The Bishop of Aquila had been growing more and more discontented in his palace in the Strand (Durham Place). He had no counsels to give to his master now but those of violence, for he had been outwitted too often to believe in the interested professions of any party in Elizabeth’s court. But the emissaries of the discontented Catholics, the servants of turbulent Lady Margaret Lennox, Shan O’Neil, and his train of wild gallowglasses—all those who hated Elizabeth and Protestantism—found in the old Bishop an eager listener to their whispered treason. Cecil knew all this, for his spies were everywhere. That the Bishop was up to mischief was clear; but yet Cecil did not know whether he was hatching any plot in connection with Mary Stuart’s marriage; and that was the main point of danger for the present. The Queen of Scots, it is true, had more than once expressed to Randolph, the English Ambassador, her disapproval of the attitude of her uncles in France. If she wished to keep friendly with her own ministers and the English Queen, indeed, it was necessary for her to do so; but her powers of dissimulation were known; the religious struggle had drawn the Guises nearer to Philip; and the Queen-mother, herself alarmed at the rising power and warlike attitude of princes of the blood, like Navarre and Condé, was once more turning to her Spanish son-in-law and the Catholics. A Catholic plot combining the Guises, Philip, Mary Stuart, and Catharine de Medici, would be threatening indeed, and it behoved Cecil to be watchful.[166]
As Durham House had only been lent to the Spanish Ambassador by the Queen, Cecil had appointed the English gatekeeper at the gate in the Strand, and from him learnt of those who went in and out, even by the river stairs. But this was not enough. At the end of April he contrived to buy over an Italian secretary of the Bishop, a man named Borghese Venturini, from whom he obtained particulars of the Ambassador’s letters.[167] They abounded with treasonable suggestions, dark hints at conspiracy, and vituperation of the Queen and Cecil, but they disclosed no deep-laid plot of Spain. Cecil nevertheless was not satisfied, and kept on the watch.
The Prince of Condé and the Protestants were now in array against the Guises, and Catharine de Medici was in the power of the latter. Both sides had striven to obtain the help of the German Protestant princes, but, in a great measure due to Cecil’s foresight, their sympathies were on the side of Condé. Cecil laboured incessantly, but against many difficulties, for the Queen was anxious to avoid the cost and risk of pledging herself too deeply. In an important letter to Throgmorton, 16th July 1562, he thus lays bare his plans and his obstacles: “Our thynges here depend so upon those matters ther (_i.e._ in France) that yow shall well ynough judg thereof without advertisement. This _hardness_ here will indanger all, I feare. Sir Thomas Wroth, I trust, shall into Germany with spede: my device is to sollicite them, and to offer a contribution for an army to enter France.… Good Mr. Throgmorton, omitt not now to advertise us from time to time, for this Bishop of Aquila letteth not weekly to forge new devices.… Continue your wryting to putt the Quene’s Majesty in remembrance of her peril if the Guisans prosper. And so, being overweryed with care, I end.”[168]