With these numerous signs of yielding on the part of the Protestants, it is not surprising that the Spanish partisans should pluck up courage. De Spes, raging with wounded pride at the indignities continually heaped upon him,[193] all of which, Philip told him, he must bear patiently, never ceased to plot with the Bishop of Ross and Mary Stuart. On the 2nd September he wrote to Philip details of another dangerous conspiracy that had been broached to him by Mary through the Bishop of Ross. The Catholics, he said, feeling themselves now absolved from their allegiance to Elizabeth by the Pope’s Bull, were willing to rise. The sons of the Earl of Derby and the gentry of Lancashire were ready to release Mary—one of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s sons having also been brought into the plan, which would make it easy, as Mary was in Shrewsbury’s keeping. This combination looked askance at Norfolk as a doubtful Catholic and a backslider, though it was joined by his kinsmen Arundel and Lumley, as well as by the thoroughgoing Catholics, Southampton, Worcester, and Montagu (Sir Anthony Browne). The plan now advanced was for a Spanish fleet to go to the Stanley country, the Isle of Man, or the Lancashire coast, and carry Mary Stuart thence to safety. The scheme, however, was thrown away by the kidnapping and forcible abduction to England of Dr. Story, the English Catholic Agent in Antwerp, who upon the rack had torn from him all he knew, which was not much, of the communications on the subject that had passed between Mary Stuart’s friends and the Duke of Alba. The ostentatious but insincere negotiations going on between Elizabeth and the Queen of Scots, and the redoubled vigilance of Cecil’s Government, completed the impracticability of this scheme, and then once more Norfolk took the lead.