The idea of entrusting Don John of Austria, the victor of Lepanto, with the restoration of Catholicism in West Europe had been at that time adopted in Rome. His was a fiery nature pervaded by Catholic principles, and seized with the most vivid ambition to be something in the world and to effect something. The Irish wished him to be their king; he was to free Mary Stuart from prison, vindicate her rights alike in Scotland and in England, and at her side ascend the throne of the British kingdoms now united in Catholicism. Mary gladly acceded to this, as she had already long wished for a marriage with the Spanish house. It was probably to give this combination a firmer basis that she proposed, in case her son did not prove to be a Catholic, to transfer her claims on the throne of England to the King of Spain, or to any of his relatives whom he should name in conjunction with the Pope.[241] But whom could she mean by these last words but Don John himself, who then stood in close connexion with the Guises, whom she also recommended most pressingly to the King. But she had at the same time directed her aim towards Scotland. There her enemies Murray and Lennox had perished by assassination; under the following regents, Mar and Morton, Mary had still nevertheless so many partisans, that they never could have ventured, as they were requested to do from England, to allow Mary to come to Scotland and be put on her trial: their own power would have been endangered by it. Mary too believed herself to have prepared everything there so well for an enterprise by Don John that, as she says, an overthrow of the Scotch government would infallibly have ensued if Philip II had only put his hand to the work. And how closely were his interests bound up with it! Without a conquest of the island-kingdom, as his brother represented to him, the Netherlands could never be subdued. But even now he shunned an open rupture. Besides this his brother's restlessness and thirst for action, and his political intrigues which were already reacting on Spain, were disagreeable to him; he could not make up his mind to take a decisive step.