The Jesuit mission to England, led by Robert Persons and Edmund Campion, was simultaneously a pastoral enterprise and an act of political subversion — and the regime was right to treat it as treason because the Pope had already excommunicated Elizabeth and licensed her overthrow.

(01:49:00) >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's a true believer but he's not mad which is an important distinction. You're not going to recoil from him in the street. >> Yeah. So all these qualities of course just make him seem more dangerous to to Walssingham. And the fact that the Jesuits are coming to England at this specific moment in particular makes them seem sinister. So in Ireland, remember that invasion force

(01:49:22) that have been sent with the Spanish soldiers. They're still in the field and they've been swollen by Irish Catholic rebels who have flocked to the actually the banner specifically of the pope because an English papal nunio has landed and is preaching holy war against the heretic Jezebel on the English throne. Um, and so to quote Jesse Charles in her wonderful prize-winning book, God's Traitors, which is all about

(01:49:47) the uh the recusants in Elizabeth and England, from the government's viewpoint, it looked very much as though Campion and persons were papal Spanish agents bent on subversion, not conversion. The Jesuits say it's about conversion. Walsingham and Burley say no, this is subversion. But they would be right to say that, wouldn't they? I mean, conversion and subversion are the same thing. If you are a Protestant minister of Queen Elizabeth

(01:50:14) indisputably, >> yeah, >> if you are a Catholic priest, I think you could say, "Well, I'm doing God's will." >> But it's a fine distinction because the Pope has excommunicated the queen. I mean, that's surely the killer detail. >> You are not wrong. And those and and Campion keeps very quiet about this >> because you can you cannot possibly say, "Oh, well, this is this is politically