in manufactures.  Certainly, these were very important concessions.  Still the constitutional objections remained.  Alva could not be made to understand why the alcabala, which was raised without difficulty in the little town of Alva, should encounter such fierce opposition in the Netherlands.  The estates, he informed the King, made a great deal of trouble.  They withheld their consent at command of their satrap.  The motive which influenced the leading men was not the interest of factories or fisheries, but the fear that for the future they might not be able to dictate the law to their sovereign.  The people of that country, he observed, had still the same character which had been described by Julius Caesar.

The Duke, however, did not find much sympathy at Madrid.  Courtiers and councillors had long derided his schemes.  As for the King, his mind was occupied with more interesting matters.  Philip lived but to enforce what he chose to consider the will of God.  While the duke was fighting this battle with the Netherland constitutionalists, his master had engaged at home in a secret but most comprehensive scheme.  This was a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth of England, and to liberate Mary Queen of Scots, who was to be placed on the throne in her stead.  This project, in which was of course involved the reduction of England under the dominion of the ancient Church, could not but prove attractive to Philip.  It included a conspiracy against a friendly sovereign, immense service to the Church, and a murder.  His passion for intrigue, his love of God, and his hatred of man, would all be gratified at once.  Thus, although the Moorish revolt within the heart of his kingdom had hardly been terminated—­although his legions and his navies were at that instant engaged in a contest of no ordinary importance with the Turkish empire—­ although the Netherlands, still maintaining their hostility and their hatred, required the flower of the Spanish army to compel their submission, he did not hesitate to accept the dark adventure which was offered to him by ignoble hands.

One Ridolfi, a Florentine, long resident in England, had been sent to the Netherlands as secret agent of the Duke of Norfolk.  Alva read his character immediately, and denounced him to Philip as a loose, prating creature, utterly unfit to be entrusted with affairs of importance.  Philip, however, thinking more of the plot than of his fellow-actors, welcomed the agent of the conspiracy to Madrid, listened to his disclosures attentively, and, without absolutely committing himself by direct promises, dismissed him with many expressions of encouragement.