The Privy Council--in reality, the National Government--had for more than a year been protesting against the outrages perpetrated on the foreign residents and had solicited the Lord Mayor of the city to apprehend the disturbers and to seek out and imprison the agitators.[3] Their Lordships went so far as to instruct the Mayor to have the person guilty of having written the "libel" apprehended and tortured (though torture was no part of the English legal system) if he did not disclose his meaning and purpose and the identity of his accomplices. This was in the early part of April, 1593. But the Mayor, whose sympathies were evidently with the natives, made no arrests. On April 22, the Privy Council[4] again considered the matter and appointed a special commission "to examine by secret means who maie be authors for the saide [seditious] libelles." Less than two weeks after this, a highly alliterative and bombastic placard was displayed in London in which "the beastly Brutes, the Belgians, or rather Drunken Drones, and faint-hearted Flemings," as well as the "fraudulent Frenchmen" were ordered "to depart out of the Realm of England." Six days later, on May 11, the Council--fearing international complications even more than domestic broils--ordered another commission to use "extraordinary pains" (the equivocal wording may have been intentional) to apprehend the malefactors and to "put them to the Torture in Bridewell and by the extremitie thereof, to be used at such times and as often as you shall think fit, draw [!] them to discover their knowledge concerning the said libells."[5] * * * * * The very next day, May 12, 1593, officers of the law entered the study of Thomas Kyd with a warrant for his arrest and made a careful search of the premises for documents of a seditious nature. Inasmuch as it could not have been the literary qualities of the posters--verse tests had not yet been discovered--which made the authorities suspect Kyd, we are almost compelled to assume that he had been betrayed to the Commission by an informer. That Kyd probably thought so will appear from what follows. Whether his arrest was due solely to his connection, real or supposed, with the minatory placards, or whether it was also due to his share in the authorship and contemplated production of the incendiary play of _Sir Thomas Moore_, or both, it is impossible to say. But the combination is certainly suggestive.