You will add that I shall be happy to undertake the protection of her person and interests as she requests.”[272] This move of Mary’s made it necessary for Philip to handle the question of the succession with more caution than ever in Rome, for if once the French and Italian Churchmen thought that he meant to seize the Crown of England for himself, half Europe would have been ready to oppose him. So Olivares was ordered to “keep constantly before the eyes of his Holiness the advisability of choosing some firm Catholic, who on the exclusion of the King of Scots should take his place, and it is equally important to keep his Holiness to the point, binding him to agree to my nomination of a fit successor to the Queen of Scots in England.” The reply from Philip gave Mary new hope. She had been deeply discouraged at the repeated failures of attempts to rescue her and overthrow Elizabeth, and the long delay of any effective aid from Philip had well-nigh driven her to despair. But now, surely, a new era of success was opening to her. Rumours reached even her in her prison of the great preparations being made in the Spanish and Portuguese ports for some vast naval enterprise; whilst the open war between Elizabeth’s troops and the Spaniards in Zeeland seemed to Mary to make certain and near the hour when Philip’s arms should avenge the injuries done to him by finally crushing the heretic Queen and substituting Mary for her. Many times in the last six months, she wrote to Mendoza, she had turned a deaf ear to proposals of English Catholics for her deliverance: “But now that I hear of the good intentions of the Catholic King towards us I have written to the principal leaders of the Catholics here a full statement of my views on all points of the execution of the enterprise. To save time I have ordered them to send to you with all speed one of their number, fully instructed to treat with you, in accordance with the promises given to you in general terms, and to lay before you all the requests they wish to make to the King. I assure you, on their faithful promise given to me, that they will carry out their undertakings, even at the risk of their lives. I therefore beg you to give full credit to their messenger as if I had sent him myself. He will tell you the means they have for getting me away from here, which I will attempt to effect on my own account if I am assured of armed aid.”[273]