It is probable that England was acting towards Philip in much better faith than he deserved, or than Parma believed; but it is hardly to be wondered at that Leicester should think himself injured by being kept perpetually in the dark.
Elizabeth was very impatient at not receiving direct letters from Parma, and her anxiety on the subject explains much of her caprice during the quarrel about the governor-generalahip.

Many persons in the Netherlands thought those violent scenes a farce, and a farce that had been arranged with Leicester beforehand.

In this they were mistaken; for an examination of the secret correspondence of the period reveals the motives--which to contemporaries were hidden--of many strange transactions.

The Queen was, no doubt, extremely anxious, and with cause, at the tempest slowly gathering over her head; but the more the dangers thickened, the more was her own official language to those in high places befitting the sovereign of England.
She expressed her surprise to Farnese that he had not written to her on the subject of the Grafigni and Bodman affair.

The first, she said, was justified in all which he had narrated, save in his assertion that she had sent him.