6. =The Duke of Norfolk's Plot and Execution. 1571-1572.= For the present Elizabeth's chief enemies were the conspirators who were aiming at placing Mary on her throne. In April =1571= Ridolfi reached the Netherlands, and urged Alva to send a Spanish army to England. Alva was cautious, and thought the attempt dangerous unless Elizabeth had first been killed or captured. Philip was consulted, gave his approval to the murder, but afterwards drew back, though he ordered Alva to proceed with the invasion. In the meanwhile Cecil, who had just been made Lord Burghley, came upon traces of the plot. Norfolk was arrested, and before the end of the year everything was known. Though the proposal of a marriage between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou had lately broken down, she now, in her anxiety to find support in France against Spain, entered into a negotiation to marry Anjou's brother, the Duke of Alençon, a vicious lad twenty-one years younger than herself. Then she was free to act. She drove the Spanish ambassador out of England, and Norfolk was tried and convicted of treason. A fresh Parliament meeting in =1572= urged the queen to consent to the execution of Mary. Elizabeth refused, but she sent Norfolk to the block. 7. =The Admonition to Parliament. 1572.=--The rising in the North and the invitation to bring a Spanish army into England could not but fan the zeal of the Puritans. At the beginning of the reign they had contented themselves with calling for the abolition of certain ceremonies. A more decided party now added a demand for the abolition of episcopacy and the establishment of Presbyterianism and of the complete Calvinistic discipline. The leader of this party was Thomas Cartwright, a theological professor at Cambridge, the university which had produced the greater number of the reformers, as it now produced the greater number of Puritans. In =1570=, Cartwright was expelled from his Professorship. He sympathised with _An Admonition to Parliament_ written in =1572= by two of his disciples, and himself wrote _A Second Admonition to Parliament_, to second their views. Cartwright was far from claiming for the Puritans the position of a sect to be tolerated. He had no thought of establishing religious liberty in his mind. He declared the Presbyterian Church to be the only divinely appointed one, and asked that all Englishmen should be forced to submit to its ordinances. The civil magistrate was to have no control over its ministers. All active religious feeling being enlisted either on the Papal or the Puritanical side, Elizabeth's reformed, but not Puritan, Church seemed likely to be crushed between two forces. It was saved by the existence of a large body of men who cared for other things more than for religious disputes, and who were ready to defend the Queen as ruler of the nation without any special regard for the ecclesiastical system which she maintained.