The relations of England both with France and Spain were at this time extremely strained, and Antonio de Gueras, the Spanish Commissioner in London, thought the expedition of Essex might be turned to good purpose. The English refugees in Spain and the Low Countries kept pressing Philip to invade Ireland, and Rowland Turner, calling himself Lord Audley, an English priest from Louvain, was sent to Ulster with letters from De Gueras to Sir Brian MacPhelim. Essex, the Spaniard wrote, was about to land with 3,000 men and to exterminate the O'Neills. In order to frustrate his plan, Sir Brian was advised to put himself under the direction of Turner, a prudent, worthy, and faithful Catholic gentleman, with 500 splendidly armed men awaiting his orders in England. Turner, who had lately been in Spain, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, was well known to the English Government; and his foolish boasts about hanging all Protestants were not likely to enhance his reputation for ability or discretion. Sir Brian, though very willing to keep off Essex, had no idea of directly opposing Queen Elizabeth, nor of engaging in oecumenical plots for the extirpation of heresy. Like Archbishop Fitzgibbon, he feared that the English Catholics would make a tool of him, and throw him away when a turn had been served. He received Turner very coldly, who bitterly complained that he was not believed, though an exile for God's sake and for that of the Irish. Captain Piers hinted to Sir Brian that Turner's noble blood was fabulous, and the exile, while insisting upon his own stainless pedigree, retorted that Piers himself was the son of a scoundrel, and unworthy of being believed on his oath. His language, indeed, though he wrote in Latin, was almost worthy of Marryat's boatswain. The Irish were wretched, beggarly paupers, the slaves of the English, who took their cattle and fished their waters without payment, and held all their country either by force or fraud. By listening to Turner the natives might change all this, and make the English their slaves for ever. But they would not listen; and Turner shook the dust from his feet, though Essex thought he could trace the effects of his machinations. He was afterwards employed by Alva, and received money from Philip, but he does not appear to have risked a second rebuff in Ireland.[259]