The Rolfi conspiracy may have been a setup manufactured by Cecil, using the Florentine banker Roberto Rolfi as a plant, in order to expose Mary Queen of Scots as the danger he knew her to be.

53:35absolutely the right kinds of questions to be asking um there is definitely a sense of a plot there but who you know where exactly the the lines are to be drawn in the uh the kind of the the the balance of all the conspirators is more complex. And just to quote Steven Orford again in his biography of Cecil, he offers the suggestion that Rulfi was a plant that the whole conspiracy was a

53:57setup from the start, a plot manufactured by Ceil to expose Mary Stewart for the danger he knew her to be. Just to focus in on that for a second, Steven Ulford is not claiming that the whole thing is an utter fiction. What he's effectively saying, isn't he, is that Cecile and Wilsingham know that the Pope and various other bad people are plotting against England and they have bas they basically fabricated

54:24the evidence, but he's not denying I mean the plot definitely as in so far as if plot is the right word, the the the scheme exists. Yeah. that it does and that they need to expose it and that they do this essentially by turning Rulfi and getting him to make kind of statements that can then be used and there is kind of evidence for this. So amazingly Rulfi has a private audience