means
deprived the duke of Alva of this resource in the time of his greatest
necessity. Alva, in revenge, seized all the English merchants in the Low
Countries, threw them into prison, and confiscated their effects.
The queen retaliated by a like violence on the Flemish and Spanish
merchants; and gave all the English liberty to make reprisals on the
subjects of Philip.

These differences were afterwards accommodated by treaty, and mutual
reparations were made to the merchants; but nothing could repair the
loss which so well-timed a blow inflicted on the Spanish government in
the Low Countries. Alva, in want of money, and dreading the immediate
mutiny of his troops, to whom great arrears were due, imposed, by
his arbitrary will, the most ruinous taxes on the people. He not only
required the hundredth penny, and the twentieth of all immovable goods;
he also demanded the tenth of all movable goods on every sale; an absurd
tyranny, which would not only have destroyed all arts and commerce, but
even have restrained the common intercourse of life. The people refused
compliance; the duke had recourse to his usual expedient of the gibbet;
and thus matters came still nearer the last, extremities between the
Flemings and the Spaniards.[*]

All the enemies of Elizabeth, in order to revenge themselves for her
insults, had naturally recourse to one policy, the supporting of the
cause and pretensions of the queen of Scots; and Alva, whose measures
were ever violent, soon opened a secret intercourse with that princess.
There was one Rodolphi, a Florentine merchant, who had resided about
fifteen years in London, and who, while he conducted his commerce in
England, had managed all the correspondence of the court of Rome with
the Catholic nobility and gentry.[**]

* Bentivoglio, part. i. lib. v. Camden, p. 416.

** Lesley, p. 123. State Trials, vol. i. p. 87.

He had been thrown into prison at the time when the duke of Norfolk's
intrigues with Mary had been discovered; but either no proof, was found
against him, or the part which he had acted was not very criminal; and
he soon after recovered his liberty. This man, zealous for the Catholic
faith, had formed a scheme, in concert with the Spanish ambassador,
for subverting the government, by a foreign invasion and a domestic
insurrection; and when he communicated his project by letter to Mary, he
found, that as she was now fully convinced of Elizabeth's artifices,
and desp