Ormond, though desperately short of money, was in constant attendance on Charles II and the Queen Mother in Paris, and accompanied the King to Aix and Cologne when he was expelled from France by the terms of Mazarin's treaty with Cromwell in 1655. In April 1656 Ormond was one of two signatories who agreed the Treaty of Brussels, securing an alliance for the Royalists with the Spanish court. In 1658, he went disguised, and at great risk, on a secret mission into England to gain trustworthy intelligence as to the chances of an uprising. He attended the king at Fuenterrabia in 1659, had an interview with Mazarin, and was actively engaged in the secret transactions immediately preceding the Restoration. Relations between Ormond and the Queen Mother became increasingly strained; when she remarked that "if she had been trusted, the King had now been in England", Ormond retorted that "if she had never been trusted the King had never been out of England".