Such was Monk's position when the Portuguese ambassador asked for an audience. The recent treaty of the Pyrenees had left Portugal at the mercy of Spain, and she had sent a special envoy to England to seek assistance. For some time past the envoy had been in negotiation with the Council of State for a renewal of Cromwell's alliance, but the action of the Presbyterian leaders seems to have demonstrated to him that its authority was moribund. The power of Monk and the now inevitable recall of the King suggested to him a brilliant piece of diplomacy, and he resolved to flash a dazzling proposal in the eyes of the general. Father Russell, the secretary to the embassy, seems first to have sounded Morice. But at all events, amidst the enormous mass of business with which he exhausted his secretaries, Monk found time for an interview. The ambassador began by saying that without wishing to pry into the general's intentions with regard to the King, he thought it only right to tell him that Charles Stuart ought at once to get out of Spanish territory. He was then at Brussels, and the envoy assured Monk that the moment the Spaniards got wind of the national reaction in favour of a restoration they would kidnap his person, and hold him as a hostage for the retrocession of Jamaica and Dunkirk. Monk, who already had reason to suspect the Spaniards of intriguing with the Irreconcilables through the Jesuits, was much impressed, and the ambassador was encouraged to explain his solicitude for Charles's safety. In the event of a restoration, he said, his master was prepared, in return for military assistance against Spain, to offer the King the hand of the Infanta, and with her a dowry of an unheard-of sum of money, together with the towns of Tangiers and Bombay. The advantages of the arrangement it was needless to point out. It would give to England the command of the Mediterranean and East Indian trade, and enable her to complete the humiliation of her great rival which the heroes of the Armada had begun. To a man of Monk's hot patriotism, who remembered Raleigh, who had been moulded into manhood while Drake and Grenville and Hawkins were living memories, the proposal was too dazzling to resist. His passion for the expansion of England had never been quenched. His faith in it as a panacea for all political trouble was as strong as ever. Before him stretched the prospect of a glorious war, in which the fierce ardour of the Fanatic soldiers would find worthy employ, and serve to lift their country out of the slough into which they had plunged it to a greatness beyond the dreams of their fathers. The fires of his youth were rekindled. He may even have dreamed of ending his career in wiping out the disgrace in which it had begun, and at the head of the most powerful navy and the finest army in the world of outshining the greatest of the great Queen's captains.