The struggle between Elizabeth and the Queen of Scots was long and fierce. Before it closed on the scaffold at Fotheringhay, February, 1587, it had brought many prisoners to the Tower. Among the earliest were two more members of the Pole family, Arthur and Edmund, great grandchildren of the Duke of Clarence. They were imprisoned in the Beauchamp Tower in 1562 on the charge of conspiring to set Mary Stuart on the English throne. Inscriptions on the wall may still be seen, bearing their names. There can be no question that Elizabeth’s position was one of great danger. England was half ruined when she came to the throne—no army, no fleet, a huge debt, and the whole country containing a population less than that of London to-day. And Spain was rich and populous, with the finest army and navy in the world. Philip expected England to buy his support against her neighbour, France, by becoming a dependency of Spain. But he misjudged not only the courage of the Queen, but the indomitable determination of her nation. They had had enough of Spain. Unjustly, no doubt, they attributed all the miseries and disasters of Mary’s reign to the Spanish alliance, and it was the special feature which so wonderfully marked the reign of Elizabeth that her people rallied round her in the hour of danger as people had never done to a sovereign before. We have to bear this in mind when thinking of the high-handed doings of Burleigh and the astute diplomacies of Walsingham. A suspicion of conspiracy was a most serious matter then. In 1569 Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, son of the ill-fated Surrey, was brought in on the charge of high treason, his overt act being the proposal to wed the Queen of Scots. Others implicated in the conspiracy to place Mary on the throne were the Earls of Arundel and Southampton, Lord Lumley, Lord Cobham, and his brother Thomas. A batch of letters, written by an Italian banker named Ridolfi, resident in London, on the same business, got into the hands of the government, with the result that a fresh haul of prisoners was brought in. They furnished evidence that the Duke of Alva was laying plans for the murder of Elizabeth, prior to Norfolk’s marriage with Mary. These prisoners were distributed in the various towers, and a young man named Charles Bailly, who was seized at Dover with a number of treasonable letters in his possession, was placed in the Tower, and under torture gave evidence against many prisoners. There are several inscriptions by him in the Beauchamp Tower. The Duke of Norfolk was beheaded on Tower Hill June 2, 1579, the first execution there for fourteen years. The old scaffold had become rotten, and a new one was set up for the occasion. John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, when put on his trial for the same crime, pleaded that, being an ambassador, he was not amenable to criminal trial. And on this plea he was put back, kept prisoner for two years longer, and then dismissed the kingdom, to which he never returned.