Elizabeth I’s Secret War for England

Tom Holland: Although Elizabeth has no fondness for Mary and although she entirely recognizes the danger that Mary as a Catholic represents to the future of Protestant England, the salient thing from Elizabeth's point of view, even more important than Mary's Catholicism, is the fact that she is an anointed monarch. And you cannot from Elizabeth's point of view simply chop off the head of an anointed monarch because Elizabeth herself is an anointed monarch and she does not want to be the queen who established the president that said it was okay to execute an anointed ruler.

Tom Holland: What that play describes is the most infamous bloodbath in all 16th century European history. It is the massacre the pogram against French Protestants or hugeno as they were called which began on the 24th of August 1572 St. Bartholomew's day and Marlo was writing his play two decades later. But the events of that day the bloodshed in the streets of Paris were still stamped onto the imaginations of English Protestants. They haunted their dreams because this was the proof. Proof beyond any possible doubt that Catholics were set on extrapating the true religion, the true Protestant faith, that they were plotting and conspiring to destroy Protestantism and that if they were ever given the opportunity, there was no atrocity, no barbarism, no crime, no cruelty that they would not commit in the name of their hellish fanatical devotion to the bishop of Rome and his underlings.

Tom Holland: Throughout all these processes, the core argument is the one that we were talking about earlier. Is his mission a pastoral one or is it blatant treason? And this is, you know, they just keep going over and over and over it and there's never really any doubt as to what the verdict is going to be. So on the 20th of November, Campion is convicted not of heresy, not of any crime of conscience, but as an offender against a statute against treason that had been passed in the reign of Edward III 220 years before. So he is convicted as a traitor.

Tom Holland: over the course of Elizabeth's reign, 471 priests will end up being captured. And 116 of these will be executed. And the reason that the numbers are so high is because neither side is willing to abandon its respective strategy because both sides I think feel that the benefits they secure from what they're doing outweighs the costs. So for Wingham's men, they are stopping the procilitization of potential Catholics. It's destroying a foreignfunded campaign of subversion. For the Catholic priests, their deaths enshrines them as martyrs and gives them what Protestants had been given under Mary Tuda.