On the 23rd December 1559, Cecil could write to Sadler, saying that the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Grey were on their way north to take command of the army. “Our shippes be on the sea, God spede them! William Winter is appointed, as he commeth nigh, to learn of you the state of the French navy within the Firth. And it is thought good that ye should cause some small vessell to goo to hym with your intelligence before he come very nigh that towne, lest by tarryeng for your answer his voyage be hindered. The French are much amased at this our sodden going to sea, so as the Marq d’Elbœuf being come to Callise is retorned to Parriss in great hast. We lack intelligence from you and be ignorant of what ye do in Scotland. We be afrayd of the loss of Edinburgh Castle. God gyve ye both good night, for I am almost a slepe. At Westminster, hora 12ᵃ nocte 23 Dec. 1559.”[120]
The fleet of thirty-two sail, with 8000 infantry and 2000 cavalry, sailed up the Forth exactly a month after this letter was written, to the dismay of the French and the Queen Regent, who shortly afterwards learnt that Elbœuf and his army had been storm-beaten back to France. The French and Catholic Scots were now cooped up in Leith, with no possibility of receiving aid from France; whilst the English on the Border, and the Lords of the Congregation, were organising a strong land force to invade Scotland.
There was nothing more to be dreaded by Philip—as Cecil well knew—than a war between England and France for the cause of the Scottish Protestants. The Spanish alliance with France had aroused the distrust of the powerful reform party in the latter country; and on the accession of Francis II. and the Guises to power, the Queen-mother, Catharine de Medici, whose chance had at last come after years of insult and neglect, at once threw her influence into the scale of their opponents, the Montmorencis and the reformers. Throgmorton had been sent to France to form a union between the Protestant and anti-Guisan elements in France and Elizabeth, and in this he had been entirely successful, to the unfeigned dismay of Philip and his agents.[121] This combination of Protestants in England, Scotland, and France, and probably also in Germany, was a most threatening one for Philip’s objects, especially in view of the condition of his own Netherlands; and yet his hands were tied. He dared not raise a hand to make French Mary Stuart Queen of Great Britain, although the triumph of reform in Scotland and this combination of Protestants struck at the very root of his objects and his policy. To the cautious planning of Cecil almost exclusively was owing the fact that in one year Philip had been disarmed, and rendered impotent to injure a Protestant England. The Spanish Bishop’s only remedy for it all was to plot with the extreme English Catholics to kill Elizabeth, Dudley, and Cecil, and place Catharine Grey or Darnley on the throne under Spanish tutelage; and he conspired ceaselessly with that object. But his master knew better than he. The French, he was aware, would fight to prevent such a result, as well as the English, and neither he nor his coffers were in a mood for fighting them then; so he had to stoop to peaceful diplomacy, and tried to beat Cecil at his own game. The Secretary had continued to answer firmly all the Bishop’s remonstrances and veiled threats, for he knew Philip could not move; and when it was decided to send a special Flemish envoy to England to dissuade the Queen from aiding the Scottish Protestants, the Bishop almost scornfully told Feria that, if talking had been of any good, he would have done it already. “They would do more harm than good if they were only coming to talk, for the English Catholics expect much more than that.” “Cecil,” he says, “is the heart of the business, and is determined to carry it through, until they are ruined, as they will be.”[122] In the meanwhile (April 1560) the siege of Leith went on, notwithstanding the attempts of the French to settle terms of peace in London. Elizabeth would have nothing to do with any peace that left a French man-at-arms in Scotland.
