RIDOLFI’s brief, assisted by smooth-talking diplomat Giovan Luigi ‘Chiappino’ Vitelli, was to coordinate discontent among English courtiers with a planned invasion from Philip’s Spanish Netherlands, led by the Duke of Alba. Simultaneously, Elizabeth was to be arrested and imprisoned, or worse; but her cousin Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, jailed for his part in the Northern Rebellion, would be Queen Mary’s consort.* England would become a Catholic country again, under Spain’s inquisitorial eye.
For a secret agent, however, Ridolfi was altogether too much of a chatterbox. His boasts to the horrified Duke of Tuscany were instantly relayed to Elizabeth, though they only confirmed what her own spies had already wormed out of the Spanish ambassador. The plot was uncovered, and Howard was executed; Ridolfi was conveniently out of the country. Yet neither King Philip nor Pius’s successors were discouraged, and the Continental conspirators were soon devising another, still bolder plan to bring England into European conformity: the ‘Grand and Felicitous’ Spanish Armada.*
Mary was already married to James Hepburn, her third husband, currently imprisoned for conspiring with Mary to murder her second husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. See Mary Queen of Scots. Mary’s first husband, King Francis II of France, had died of natural causes. Norfolk himself had been married and widowed three times. For the sake of the bigger picture, the Pope had declared himself ready to overlook all this, and even the fact that Norfolk was technically a Protestant.
See The Spanish Armada.