Elizabeth used her own prospect of marriage to the Catholic French prince François, Duke of Anjou, as a diplomatic tool aimed at building a counterweight to Philip II's Spain, treating Anjou's establishment in the Low Countries as a better bet for England than Spanish rule.

33:36on the Catholic side there are also there's massive opposition. So William Allen the the guy who had founded all the seminaries on the continent and kept sending Catholic priests over to England to try and subvert Elizabeth's regime kind of Elizabeth's greatest enemy among the English immigrants. He thinks it's monstrous as well and he explains it in terms of what he sees as um the monstrousness of Elizabeth's depravity.

34:01So he writes a pamphlet in which he goes all in that Elizabeth is the the little the daughter of the great Amberlin. And he he said that he claimed that her desire for Onju was to the disgrace of princely majesty and the whole nation's reproach by unspeakable and incredible variety of lust. But it has to be emphasized all of this is nonsense. The fact that Elizabeth is

34:24ready to accept Anju's blandishments owes nothing to lust nor even to her undoubted fondness for him because at stake are the needs of her kingdom as Elizabeth understands them. She is using her her her virginity as a diplomatic tool. And if Elizabeth is facing a a showdown with Spain, such a menacing enemy, then Elizabeth thinks, I might as well try and do all that I can to build

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