England,[164] and encourage Condé and Coligny in France.[165] The Bishop of Aquila had been growing more and more discontented in his palace in the Strand (Durham Place). He had no counsels to give to his master now but those of violence, for he had been outwitted too often to believe in the interested professions of any party in Elizabeth’s court. But the emissaries of the discontented Catholics, the servants of turbulent Lady Margaret Lennox, Shan O’Neil, and his train of wild gallowglasses—all those who hated Elizabeth and Protestantism—found in the old Bishop an eager listener to their whispered treason. Cecil knew all this, for his spies were everywhere. That the Bishop was up to mischief was clear; but yet Cecil did not know whether he was hatching any plot in connection with Mary Stuart’s marriage; and that was the main point of danger for the present. The Queen of Scots, it is true, had more than once expressed to Randolph, the English Ambassador, her disapproval of the attitude of her uncles in France. If she wished to keep friendly with her own ministers and the English Queen, indeed, it was necessary for her to do so; but her powers of dissimulation were known; the religious struggle had drawn the Guises nearer to Philip; and the Queen-mother, herself alarmed at the rising power and warlike attitude of princes of the blood, like Navarre and Condé, was once more turning to her Spanish son-in-law and the Catholics. A Catholic plot combining the Guises, Philip, Mary Stuart, and Catharine de Medici, would be threatening indeed, and it behoved Cecil to be watchful.[166] As Durham House had only been lent to the Spanish Ambassador by the Queen, Cecil had appointed the English gatekeeper at the gate in the Strand, and from him learnt of those who went in and out, even by the river stairs. But this was not enough. At the end of April he contrived to buy over an Italian secretary of the Bishop, a man named Borghese Venturini, from whom he obtained particulars of the Ambassador’s letters.[167] They abounded with treasonable suggestions, dark hints at conspiracy, and vituperation of the Queen and Cecil, but they disclosed no deep-laid plot of Spain. Cecil nevertheless was not satisfied, and kept on the watch.