ey
never could have ventured, as they were requested to do from England,
to allow Mary to come to Scotland and be put on her trial: their own
power would have been endangered by it. Mary too believed herself to
have prepared everything there so well for an enterprise by Don John
that, as she says, an overthrow of the Scotch government would
infallibly have ensued if Philip II had only put his hand to the work.
And how closely were his interests bound up with it! Without a
conquest of the island-kingdom, as his brother represented to him, the
Netherlands could never be subdued. But even now he shunned an open
rupture. Besides this his brother's restlessness and thirst for
action, and his political intrigues which were already reacting on
Spain, were disagreeable to him; he could not make up his mind to take
a decisive step.

He had again and again been vainly entreated to interest himself in
the population of Ireland, in which national and religious antagonism
contended against the supremacy of England. One of the confidential
agents secretly sent thither assured him that he was implored by
nine-tenths of the inhabitants to take them under his protection and
save their souls, that is restore them the mass, which they could no
longer celebrate publicly: they appealed to their primeval
relationship with the Iberian people, to ancient prophecies which
looked forward to this, and to the great political interests at stake.
Philip was not disinclined to attempt the enterprise; but he required
the co-operation of France, without doubt to break the opposition of
this power in the affairs of the Netherlands; a condition which could
not be made acceptable to the French by any interposition of Rome.

And so, if Pope Gregory XIII wished to undertake anything against
Ireland, he had to do it himself. Men witnessed the singular spectacle
of an expedition against Ireland being fitted out on the coasts of the
States of the Church. A papal general from Bologna came to the
assistance of the powerful Irish chief, Fitzmaurice. They commanded
the Irish districts far and wide, and made inroads into the English:
for a long time they were very troublesome, although not really
dangerous.

King Philip was then busied in an undertaking which interested him
still more closely than even that of the Netherlands: he made good his
hereditary claim to Portugal, without being obstructed in it either by
the opposition of a native claimant or by the co