She did not mince matters with Mendoza, either. “By God!” she shouted, “if the edict of toleration is not re-granted to the States I will help them against you whilst I have a man left in England.” Mendoza drily remarked that she was helping them pretty effectually already, “and that, grateful as I was for her kindness to me, I could not help telling her that your Majesty had very long arms, and that if need arose their strength would be felt in any country upon which they were placed. She swallowed this,” says Mendoza, “with rather a wry face, and said she did not consider these people to be rebels, as they were satisfied with what your Majesty had granted to them before, and she would not allow either the French to set foot in the States nor the Spaniards to oppress them.” Thus surely but slowly Elizabeth worked her way; but with the inevitable consequence of convincing Mendoza, as all other Spanish ambassadors in turn had been convinced, that force against Elizabeth was their only remedy, since in diplomacy she was more than a match for the cast-iron methods of their master. To Mendoza’s intercession for the unhappy Guaras, with whom the new ambassador had little sympathy as a plebeian and bungler in State affairs, Elizabeth replied angrily that if he had been a subject of any other King but Philip she would have hanged him long ago, as he had been plotting against her with the Queen of Scots and English rebels. She would get rid of him, she said, by and by, when she had squeezed some more information from him. Once, in June, 1578, Guaras was brought out of prison and told by the Council that he would have to leave the country in ten days; but, instead of accepting the decision humbly, he raised an altercation, again claiming diplomatic privilege, with the result that he was promptly sent to solitary confinement in the Tower again, though both Mendoza and Don Juan had received money from Spain to be spent in bribes for his help and defence.[225]