For some time the authorities could get no further than this. Of course they knew that the two persons unnamed were Mary and Norfolk, but they needed legal proof, and gradually Cecil’s net was widened and swept into gaol one after the other of the confidants and tools of the plotters. In August a false follower of Norfolk brought to the Council a bag of £600 with a cipher letter that had been entrusted to him by Norfolk’s secretary to forward to Lord Herries, the leader of Mary’s Catholic friends in Scotland. Curiously enough this sum of money had been received from the French ambassador, so it is clear that Mary and Norfolk were playing false and doing what Alba dreaded most, namely, bringing the French into the business. But this fact made matters no better from the point of view of the English Council, and suddenly the Duke of Norfolk, the first noble in England, found himself in prison with all his confidential servants. The torture did its fell work promptly, and the secrets of the underlings were drawn from them, implicating the Duke beyond redemption. The Bishop of Ross, seeing his most secret papers deciphered, became almost loquacious in his fright, and went out of his way to vituperate his unhappy mistress. Norfolk collapsed as abjectly as before. He had hoped at first, he said, to wed Mary by Elizabeth’s permission. He was sorry and repentant for having acted so falsely after he had promised not to do so, and would never do it again. He had not really been a Catholic, he said, and now submitted himself entirely to her Majesty’s mercy. He had never, he solemnly avowed, intended to bring foreign troops into England, or to touch the sacred person of his revered sovereign. It was all the fault of the Bishop of Ross, of Mary, of anybody but himself, ... and so, with such sorry lies as this, the most beloved and highest noble in England whined for mercy and his bare life. Elizabeth was loath to sacrifice him, for he was her cousin and the head of a powerful group of Englishmen, but at length the Protestant influences around her were too strong for her to resist, and Norfolk’s head fell on Tower Hill on the 2nd June, 1572.