Even then, when the dire consequences of his imprudence must have been patent to him, he was in close cipher correspondence with Mary Stuart, who sent him news, which he took care to exaggerate, of Protestant plots being formed to murder King Philip. Writing to the King on the 8th January, 1569, he says, after pressing him to foment dissatisfaction in England by stopping all trade: “In the meanwhile means will be found to bring this country to its senses and subdue it to the Catholic faith. Those who have spoken to me about a rising for the Queen of Scots will not fail to return to the subject,[181] and I will inform the Duke [Alba], as your Majesty orders. Pray do not consider me or my safety, but take the best course for your Majesty’s interests.... These heretic knaves of the Council are going headlong to perdition, incited by Cecil, who is indescribably crazy in his zeal for heresy.” Later in the same letter de Spes tells how his own prediction came true and the conspirators did seek him. “The Earl of Northumberland came to see me disguised at four o’clock this morning, and is ready to serve your Majesty. I sent a post yesterday to the Duke by an Englishman who has secret communication with Flanders.... At midnight last night the Bishop of Ross came to offer the goodwill of his mistress [_i.e._, Mary Stuart] and of many gentlemen of this country, and I have reported this to the Duke [of Alba]. The Queen of Scotland told my servant to convey to me the following words: ‘Tell the ambassador that if his master will help me I shall be Queen of England in three months, and Mass shall be said throughout the land.’”[182] It will be seen that before de Spes had been in England four months he had forced King Philip into a position of hardly veiled hostility towards England, at the very period when his lack of resources and the recrudescence of the war in the Netherlands made it impossible for him to attempt coercion upon Elizabeth. Alba himself was dismayed at the unexpectedly bold action of the English Government in seizing the treasure and embargoing all Spanish-Flemish property in England. The Flemish burghers, already sorely distressed by the civil war, were almost in open revolt at this stoppage of the rich English trade and the embargo of their property in England, and Alba, hard as he might be, was forced to make an attempt to reason with Elizabeth by means of some more pliable instrument than de Spes. The person chosen was the garrulous Flemish lawyer, Dassonleville, who had come to England just before Queen Mary Tudor’s death, but he found himself more contemptuously treated even than de Spes. Who was he, the Council asked, that he should seek audience of a Queen with a letter of credence from a person who, so far as she knew, was not a sovereign? Nothing wounded proud Alba so much as this slight, and poor Dassonleville was denied audience, and was placed under arrest in the house of the Sheriff of London.