Sixtus V. was willing, nay anxious, to allow the conquest to be undertaken by Spain alone, recognising that the French Catholics could not now safely be allowed to exhaust their strength in a foreign war; but he always hoped that James’s constant assurances of Catholic sympathies might be sincere, and that Mary Stuart might be duly succeeded by her son under Catholic auspices. Guise also was constantly plied with arguments by Mendoza on Philip’s orders, directed to divert him from all ideas of England. “Warn him [Guise] against making any agreement with his enemies,” wrote Philip, on the 17th August, 1585, “and open his eyes with regard to the English enterprise. Point out to him the danger he runs if he allows himself to be cajoled into leaving his home and country before he has humbled his rivals and converted or expelled the heretics, and how much deceived he might find himself when he wished to return to France from such an attempt.... Tell the French first to put an end to the heretics in their own country, and afterwards we can deal with them elsewhere.”[264] The sinister activity of Philip’s agents in Rome and the vapouring of the English Catholic refugees in Spanish Flanders, had in the meanwhile aroused the distrust of Elizabeth and her Government. Ever since Philip had captured Portugal and obtained thus the command of the Atlantic, the Puritan element in the English Court, led by Leicester and Walsingham, had promoted attempts, through Don Antonio and otherwise, to strike a crushing blow at the Spanish naval power in Europe. Drake’s depredations in the Pacific had been a terrible loss to Spain, both in a moral and material sense, and the English seamen were eager to return to the charge, in order to anticipate and frustrate the evil which most of them believed was being plotted against their country by the quiet, stealthy little elderly man far away in the mountains of Castile. Elizabeth and Cecil detested to face responsibility; and although the Queen was willing to accept the benefit of accomplished facts, she usually set her face against assuming an attitude of open hostility to Spain when she could avoid it. Leicester had at last, in the autumn of 1585, induced her to accept, with much misgiving, the practical protection of the rebel Dutch States, and this was naturally assumed by Philip as an act of open war. Thenceforward any means for injuring the English were considered legitimate by the King of Spain.