done long ago, for, of course, I could not hide my communications from him. We have been approached by the same people about the marriage ... and they have given to Lethington lists of the Catholics and others who would raise troops for the Queen of Scots.” Almost hopeless of success, therefore, the Bishop sent one of his most confidential servants to Scotland to tell Mary verbally that the ambassador had a very important communication for her if she would send a trustworthy agent to London to receive it. This messenger, Luis de Paz, left London in the middle of July, 1563, and eventually reached Mary whilst she was travelling in the Western Highlands. She had been ardently expecting Philip’s answer, and had with difficulty held off the other suitors, the Archduke Charles and Eric of Sweden, until it arrived. She gave to Quadra’s messenger a favourable verbal reply, but before he reached Langley, in Buckinghamshire, where the Bishop was staying, the old Spanish Churchman was dying. He had plaintively written to Alba shortly before that it was impossible to conduct affairs in England on Philip’s lines. He had done his best but had been beaten. The English scorned and contemned him. He had been expelled from the Queen’s house; he saw his master’s cause daily waning in England, and he knew that only bold, prompt action would regain the lost ground. The hopelessness of moving Philip to such action broke the old man’s heart. Luis de Paz had just time to whisper Mary’s message to him, and the dying man grieved sorely, he said, that he should thus drop just when he might hope to have succeeded. “I can do no more,” he sighed, just before he passed away, and Spanish influence in England was cast further into the background by his death; for Durham Place during his residence there had been the secret trysting-place of all those who hated Elizabeth’s rule. In the absence of any diplomatic channel through which Mary might work the great combination that she dreamed was to give her the crown of Britain under Philip’s protection, the clever, strong diplomacy of Elizabeth carried all before it. Dudley and Darnley were alternately dangled before Mary’s eyes and then withdrawn, until at length came the Lennox _coup d’état_ and the marriage of the Queen of Scots with her cousin Darnley, which for a time took her out of the market.