This was enough for Cecil. New locks were put on the house gates, and the keys held by the “heretic English gatekeeper.” The Bishop could obtain no interview with the Queen, but was obliged to see Cecil instead. Send me to jail, he indignantly pleaded, if I have offended; but if nothing is proved against me, as nothing can be, at least let me have free ingress and egress from my own house. Cecil’s reply was a long indictment of the Bishop’s whole proceedings. The Ambassador, he said, was by the Queen’s kindness living in one of her houses, which had been turned into a hotbed of conspiracies against her and a refuge for malefactors. The law of the land had been openly defied, and the Queen desired the Ambassador to quit her house. In vain the Bishop protested. One indignity after another was placed upon him. The folks going to mass in the embassy were haled off to prison as they came out; all the most private conversations between the Ambassador and the English rebels were repeated to him by Cecil; he was confronted with the text of his most secret despatches; he was turned out of Durham House with ignominy, and all he could do was to weep tears of rage, and pray Philip to avenge him.[177] But Philip’s hands were more than full in the Netherlands now, as Cecil knew, for before the writing-table in the Secretary’s room in Cecil House[178] there stood a portrait of Count Egmont,[179] and Gresham’s agents in Antwerp, Bruges, and Brussels left no event unreported. The blow to the Spanish Ambassador was cleverly planned by Cecil. That the former had been futilely plotting, was known, and it served as a good pretext for his disgrace; but the real reason for it was the need to prove to Dudley and his friends, and to the discontented Catholics, that they were leaning on a broken reed when they depended upon Spain to help them against the Secretary. The bankrupt, heartbroken old Bishop was a good object-lesson. If his master could not pay his debts or defend him from deliberate indignity, much less could he help discontented Englishmen who only had their own ends to serve.