A suspicion of conspiracy was sufficient in those days, electrical with perils for the Queen and the country, and on the 11th of October 1589 Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, the son of the ill-fated Surrey, and the grandson of the old Flodden duke, was brought a prisoner to the Tower on the charge of high treason, his intended marriage with Mary of Scots constituting the charge against him. In the following month the Queen thus directed Sir Henry Neville to attend to Norfolk’s safekeeping in the Tower. “The Lieutenant is permitted to remove the Duke to any lodging in the Tower near joining to the Long Gallery, so as it be none of the Queen’s own lodgings; and to suffer the Duke to have the commodity to walk in the gallery, having always of course the said Knollys in his company” (Hatfield Calendar of State Papers). Owing to the plague which raged in London in the following year, Norfolk was allowed to leave the Tower for his own home at the Charter House, still a prisoner; but he was soon back again in the fortress, a correspondence which he had carried on with Mary Stuart’s adherents having been discovered. Others implicated in the undoubted conspiracy to set Mary on the throne, were the Earls of Arundel and Southampton, Lord Lumley, Lord Cobham, his brother Thomas Cobham, and Henry Percy; these were all arrested. On his return to the Tower, Norfolk was confined in the Bloody Tower. About this time a batch of letters, written by a Florentine banker named Ridolfi to the Pope and to the Duke of Alva, on the perpetually recurring subject of Mary’s succession to the English throne after Elizabeth’s dethronement, were intercepted by Elizabeth’s government, with the result that a fresh batch of prisoners, with the Bishop of Ross, Sir Thomas Stanley, and Sir Thomas Gerrard amongst them, entered the fortress. These letters disclosed a conspiracy which was known under the name of the Italian Ridolfi, its prime instigator. Ridolfi, who was a resident in London, had crossed over to the Netherlands, where he had seen the Duke of Alva, informing that Spanish general that he had been commissioned by a large number of English Roman Catholic noblemen to send over a Spanish army to drive Elizabeth from the throne, and place Mary Stuart in the sovereignty in her stead. The Duke of Norfolk would then marry Mary, and by these means the English would return to the benign sway of the Holy Father, and become the faithful subjects of the gentle Philip. Alva had suggested that Elizabeth should be got rid of before he himself came to London with his army, Philip entirely agreeing with his general as to the necessity for her removal. [Illustration: _Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, from the Curfew Tower to the Beauchamp Tower_] The mere chance of a packet of letters being intercepted not only saved Elizabeth’s life, but probably England as well from a terrible disaster.