To checkmate Dudley the Protestants were actively urging the suit of Eric of Sweden, when, in January 1561, the former made a bold bid for Spanish support.  He was, he said, quite innocent of his wife’s death, and he promised Quadra that if the King of Spain would urge his (Dudley’s) suit upon the queen, England should send envoys to the Council of Trent, receive a papal legate, and become practically Catholic.  He might promise, but such a thing was impossible, and Cecil, when he learnt of the intrigue, promptly embroiled matters and spoilt the plan.

Elizabeth, too, saw whither she was drifting, and by pretended levity turned it into a joke.  At one time she invited the old Spanish bishop to marry her to Dudley, and next day said she would never marry at all.  But she never ceased to flirt with Dudley, who, when his intrigue with Spain fell through, cynically appealed to the French Protestants for support.  They were in no position to help him, and by January 1562, he was cringing to Spain, and pretending to be Catholic.  But English Catholics hated him, and he was now no fit instrument for Philip.

In her own court it was firmly believed that Elizabeth was secretly married to Dudley—­it was high time, said the gossips; but in truth the international importance of her marriage was now (1562-63) partially obscured by that of the widowed Mary Queen of Scots.  Before the latter were dangled Eric of Sweden, the Archduke Charles, the Earl of Arran, and Darnley; but the match which Mary most wished for, and the most threatening to Elizabeth, was that with the vicious young lunatic, Don Carlos, the heir of Philip of Spain.  The match with Darnley, too, as he was in the English succession, was distasteful to Elizabeth; but in order to divert the Spanish match—­which, really, though she knew it not, was out of the question—­she pretended to favour Darnley’s suit at first.

In order still more to avert the Catholic alliance, Elizabeth sent active help to the French Huguenots, and drew closer to the Protestants of Germany and Holland, where distrust of their Spanish sovereign was already brewing.  In these circumstances, Elizabeth for the first time could defy Spain, and Quadra, accused of conspiring against the queen, was expelled the country.  When the Darnley match for Mary Stuart looked too serious, Elizabeth diverted it for a time by proposing that Dudley—­now Earl of Leicester—­should marry Mary.  It was, of course, but a trick, through which the Scottish queen saw, with the object of preventing the Darnley marriage and discrediting Mary in the eyes of foreign princes; but it served its turn for a time.

In July 1564, when the league of France and Spain again menaced her, Elizabeth set her cap at the boy Don Carlos, and even swore to the Spanish ambassador that she was really a Catholic.