The fact of their correspondence was, of course, well known to Elizabeth’s Government, and this made the ambassador’s treatment the harder. Once, in May, 1582, he was driven, by orders from the anxious King, to demand audience of the Queen, who replied that she would receive him as a private person if he liked, but would see him no more as ambassador until he brought an apology from Philip for aiding the Irish rebels. To this he replied haughtily in a letter, threatening to leave England at once and let muskets speak for him. When Elizabeth read the letter she was perturbed, and softened somewhat. “God forbid,” she said, “that she should ever break with the King of Spain, to whom she bore nothing but goodwill, ... She hoped that Don Bernardino would not leave; he could communicate with her in writing until the King’s explanation of the Irish affair came.” Writing to Philip in November, 1582, Mendoza says: “I have tried every means, overt and covert, to get into relations with the Queen’s ministers, but they fly from me as if I were a rebel subject of hers, and things have reached such a point that no one will speak to me or even to my servants.” Even his heavily paid Court spies, Lord Henry Howard and Sir James Crofts, avoided communication with him, except when they needed money. The efforts of Guise and Beton to keep the Scottish Catholic intrigue in their own hands also tended to isolate Mendoza. Both he and Philip, when the news of the raid of Ruthven and the flight of Lennox reached them, recognised that the enterprise through Scotland was hopeless for a time, and endeavoured to confine Guise’s energies in future to France. He was told how dangerous it would be for him to leave France with his enemies the Huguenots in possession, and was flattered and encouraged by Philip with the suggestion that the Crown of France might be his by Spanish aid, if Henry and his brother Alençon died childless, as seemed probable: “for it would be a public infamy if the most Christian Crown should fall, as may be feared, into the hands of a man who was not a Catholic [_i.e._, Henry of Navarre], besides the danger of this, it will be a standing disgrace to a true Catholic like Guise himself.” Guise was proud and delighted that so much deference was being paid him, but he could hardly be expected to look at Scottish affairs entirely from Philip’s point of view; and, whilst not losing sight of his vast ambitions in France, he still endeavoured through Beton, Tassis, and Parsons, to keep his hand on the realm of his cousin.