Throughout the home and eastern countries, where Protestantism was strong, the action of the priests gave rise to constant brawls, the actors of which were unfortunately not proceeded against by the civil authorities but by ecclesiastics on the charge of heresy. Philip, by means of his friends on the Council, did his best to discourage these tactics, for which he saw he would unjustly have to suffer the unpopularity. Whilst Philip and his wife were living at Hampton Court, in September, there was a wild rumour in London that twelve thousand Spanish troops were on their way to land in England and seize the Crown,[69] and almost simultaneously people indignantly whispered that the Archbishopric of Canterbury was to be given to a Spanish friar. The most extravagant false news, too, was current that many leading noblemen and Councillors had been proclaimed traitors, amongst them Pembroke, Shrewsbury, Westmorland; that Dr. Petre had been dismissed from the Council; that the Marquis of Winchester had been forced to give Basing House to the Queen; that the King and Queen, in violation of the ordinary English traditions, had become inaccessible to the lieges;[70] and much else of the same sort, evidently designed to keep up the irritation against the Spanish Consort, who, for his part, was using every means to ingratiate himself with his poor faded wife[71] and her suspicious subjects. It is obvious that, so far as religion alone was concerned, the great majority of English people would have been ready without demur to accept Catholicism again if it had come without the foreign mark upon it, and the moderative policy of the Emperor was dictated solely by the political aim of conciliating the minority, who it was thought would be most strongly opposed to Spanish influence. For this the Churchmen cared nothing, whilst the Protestants and French party, instead of being conciliated by the King’s attitude, naturally seized upon the ecclesiastical prosecutions, which he deprecated, still further to discredit him. Pole in the meanwhile was growing restive. He was a man of high and unselfish aims, a true Catholic as well as a true Englishman, and he resented his exclusion from his own country at the bidding of a foreign potentate after his long exile for the cause of his faith. His letters of exhortation to Mary and to Philip are throughout inspired by the Churchman’s zeal, and not infrequently by scorn of the opportunist policy which was, in his view, hampering the prompt and complete return of his country to the Church.[72]