But Dudley was not by any means the only artful or self-seeking man in Elizabeth’s Court, and was not allowed to have all his own way. The real difficulties of the marriage with the Archduke, hampered as he would be by unacceptable Spanish conditions, were soon obvious to the Protestant party, who tried a bold stroke, which, if their weapon had been a strong instead of a lamentably weak one, might have altered the whole course of English history. To a French Catholic princess, as Queen of Scotland and heiress to the crown of England, the natural counterpoise was a close alliance between England and Spain; but the Protestants saw that, from a religious point of view, one position was as bad as the other, and conceived the idea of encouraging the claims of a son of the house of Hamilton, who, after Mary, was next heir to the crown of Scotland. The Earl of Arran, son of the Duke of Chatelherault was in France; and Cecil’s henchmen, Randolph and Killigrew, were sent backwards and forwards to him and to Throgmorton, in Paris, to urge him to action. If he could raise a revolution in Scotland against papists and foreigners, and seize the crown, he might, thought Cecil, marry Elizabeth, unite the two countries, and defy their enemies. Trouble in Scotland was easily aroused; but the King of France, just before his own death, which raised Mary Stuart to the throne of France as well, learnt of the plan and ordered Arran’s capture alive or dead. Killigrew managed to smuggle him out of France disguised as a merchant, and took him to Geneva and Zurich, where he sat at the feet of Peter Martyr and other reformers, and then as secretly was hurried over to England in July, 1559. The Spanish party and the Emperor’s ambassador soon got wind of it, and were in dismay. The Earl was hidden first in Cecil’s house, and was afterwards conveyed secretly to the Queen’s chambers at Greenwich. The news soon spread, and the marriage was looked upon, all through August and part of September, as a settled thing;[23] and, although Bedford and Cecil went out of their way to buoy up the hopes of a marriage with the Archduke, it was clear to the Spanish party that Arran was the favoured man, the more especially that Mary Stuart’s husband had now become King of France. But this did not suit Dudley. Early in September Lady Mary Sidney, Dudley’s sister, came to the Spanish ambassador with a wonderful story that a plot had been discovered to poison the Queen and Dudley at a dinner given by the Earl of Arundel. This, she said, had so alarmed the Queen, who had now a war with France on her hands, that she had determined to marry at once, and awaited the ambassador at Hampton Court with the offer of the Archduke, whom she would accept. Lady Sidney professed to be acting with the Queen’s consent, and emphatically insisted that, if the matter were now pushed and the Archduke brought over at once, it could be concluded without delay. The cunning Bishop himself was for once taken in.