Elizabeth courted the Duke of Anjou and kept the engagement alive not out of passion but for anti-Spanish diplomacy, aiming to install him as lord of the Netherlands to remove Parma's army, restore trade links, and secure Protestant worship.

34:55bridges with the other great Catholic superpower, namely France. But even having said that, France isn't really the focus of her calculations. The real focus of her calculations is what's going on in the low countries, which by this point is it's an absolute dumpster fire. And why is it such a nightmare? What does the Duke of Oju have to do with it? In what way might Oju be a solution to the problem? Well,

35:20we need to just have again move from France to the low countries and see what the state of play is there. So first of all there is very good reason why ideological reason religious reason why Elizabeth and Protestants in England more generally should be alarmed by events in the Netherlands. We kind of compared it to um yeah >> it's the Protestant Gaza. It's it's something that's calculated to alarm

35:44co-religionists in England. >> To remind people, this is where the local Protestants are in revolt against their Spanish overlords. Yeah. And this war has been raging, fought very brutally. And you you the comparison with Gaza, it's become this kind of international story that strikes rage and fear and shock and outrage into the hearts of English Protestants. And Protestants look at at at the way that's the Spanish troops in the low countries

36:12are repressing this revolt and they say, you know, this is war crimes. It's genocide. It's absolute horror. These are the forces of Antichrist trampling down the godly and fertilizing the soil with their blood. And of course, it offers Protestants in England a glimpse of what their fate would be should Palmer and his 300 his 30,000 Spanish troops managed to cross the seas and land in England. And it's unsettling for

36:40them especially because Protestantism in the Low Countries is something that's grown up organically. It's something that's kind of it's it's it's not been top down as it was in England. So to quote Jonathan Israel, the great scholar of of the low countries in this period, it had worked essentially from the bottom upwards instead of from government circles downwards. And so this had won it in the low countries a

37:00kind of very unusually broad-based sense of legitimacy, much broader than than it had been in England. And it had made a clash with the very Catholic Philip of Spain kind of inevitable. Um because Philip is ruling them. He he is the lord of the Netherlands. It's part of the kind of inheritance that he'd had from his father, the Charles V, the great Habsburg emperor. And so over the course

37:20of the 1560s, Philip had gone in really hard. So in 1565, he'd insisted on the full enforcement of heresy laws. In 1567, he'd sent um a Spanish army to start pacifying the uh the rebellious um Protestant cities in the low countries. Thousands of Protestants had been executed as heretics. Um and in 1568, open warfare had broken out between the Spanish and the rebels against Philip's rules. And the fortunes of war had been

37:48seessawaring this way and that for over a decade when the rebels in 1579 put out feelers to the Duke of Onju. And their question is would he accept the sovereignty of the low countries in place of Philip II? So they're not offering the crown. There isn't a kind of crown of the low countries but they're saying would you become the lord of the low countries in place of Philillip and Oshu says yeah