Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Essex's arraignment came with his response to the charges against him, which was to claim that he had been forced to act to prevent his enemies, Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Ralegh, from murdering him, and also to remove Robert Cecil and others from around the Queen. Essex claimed that he had been told that Cecil ‘had said to one of the Council that the Title of the Infanta of Spaine to the Crown of England was as good as any other of the Competitours whosoever’. Cecil himself later wrote that the accusation against him had been that he was planning to ‘sell England to the Infanta of Spain’. According to Camden's account of the arraignment, Cecil himself had intervened to deny the accusation, stepping out from a room close by to the court, dropping to one knee, begging ‘leave to answer so false and foul an Accusation’, and challenging Essex to reveal his source. Essex refused, whereupon the Earl of Southampton was asked to identify the Counsellor, whom he named as Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of the Household and Essex's uncle. Called to court, Knollys testified that he ‘had heard Cecyl two years before say, that one Dolman had in a printed book maintained the Title of the Infanta of Spaine to the Crown of England, and other than this he had not spoken’.