The effect was seen when a new Parliament met in May. The people of England believed with an absolute conviction in the truth of the whole indictment against the Scots Queen. Nor was there any question that she had appealed both to France and Spain to liberate her; so far at least she was implicated in the Ridolfi plot, even if the assassination proposals had not come within her ken. She was believed to be a criminal, who had forfeited all right to sympathy and consideration; she was palpably a standing menace to the internal peace of the realm, a standing incitement to its enemies abroad. The Commons therefore demanded her attainder; as for the technical right, no sovereign at the time or in the past would have hesitated to ignore or evade the point. The question was outside the range of technicalities. The plea that England had no right to detain her, or to judge her, that she had a right to seek her own release by any available means, was perfectly sound; the counter-plea that the safety of the State forbade her release, and her attempts to procure war against it justified her destruction, was equally unanswerable. But Elizabeth could not resolve to act upon either plea, ignoring the other. So Mary remained a prisoner, and the centre of intrigue. Even an alternative Bill, supposed to have Elizabeth's approval, which merely excluded Mary from the succession, never reached the statute book. [Sidenote: Lepanto; April Revolt of the Netherlands] A notable triumph had recently been achieved for Philip's arms, in the crushing defeat of the Turks at Lepanto by the combined Venetian and Spanish fleets commanded by the Spanish King's half-brother, Don John of Austria. To this perhaps may be attributed the less defiant tone of communications with Spain. The narrow seas were swarming not only with English privateering craft, but with Dutchmen commanded by the privateer De la Marck on behalf of William of Orange, who were habitually succoured in English harbours. But though these were now ordered to depart, and the English mariners aboard them were commanded to leave them, there is no doubt that their privy equipment was deliberately connived at, in the flattest possible contradiction to the public declarations. At the close of March, De la Marck's fleet sailed from Dover to fall upon a Spanish convoy; a few days later, it appeared in the Meuse before Brille. The town promptly surrendered. The whole of the Netherlands was seething under Alva's savage rule; trade, already in a fair way to be ruined by the cessation of commerce with England since the seizure of the treasure ships, was being throttled also by the system of taxation which Alva had recently instituted. The capture of Brille fired the train. City after city raised the standard of revolt. The rebellion which Alva fancied he had utterly stamped out was suddenly in full blaze once more; and on the south, Mons, like Brille, was seized by a rapid dash of Lewis of Nassau, operating from