691. Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: The Queen’s Spymaster (Part 1)

21:08Dominic Sandbrook:Just to play devil's advocate, she has refused to marry for actually very good reasons. and we talked about them in our previous series about the young Elizabeth. Because once you marry, you hand over your autonomy and your power, don't you, as a queen? And you hand all of that over to your husband, and she just doesn't want to make that mistake.

21:27Tom Holland:Well, there's the example of Mary Tudor, who had married Philip of Spain. And lots of Englishmen, not necessarily Protestants, felt that this had subordinated England to Spain's interests. And Elizabeth doesn't want to repeat that mistake. and as you say she absolutely has very good politic reasons for remaining a virgin and in a way it's amazing that Cecil can't see this yeah and also I think what's surprising considering how astute Cecil is that he doesn't recognize how brilliant a diplomatic weapon it is that Elizabeth's virginity means that she has something to offer all kinds of people and she can play them along and you know play hard to get and kind of dangle the prospect of kind of teaming up with a suitor.

22:13Tom Holland:And it enables her to play France and Spain off against each other.

22:17Dominic Sandbrook:But to play devil's advocate on the other side. Cecil actually has a good point about not marrying, because, of course, this is a very high risk strategy. This is an age when, you know, you can get flu or you can get dysentery or whatever. And that's it. You're gone. And if she dies, everything that he's building will have been for nothing.

22:37Tom Holland:And you said, you know, Elizabeth might fall ill. So in 1562, she caught smallpox and very nearly died of it. And of course, Cecil and all Elizabeth's ministers are agonizingly aware of the fact that there are foreign agents and there are domestic traitors out there who know that all they have to do is slip her some poison or, you know, bring out to take out a dagger or even a pistol. You know, this is an era where assassins are starting to think, well, we could shoot ahead of state. So the jeopardy is enormous. And again, I think this is something that listeners have to bear in mind. We know that Elizabeth survives to a ripe old age.

23:20Tom Holland:You know, she has this incredibly lengthy reign. But that jeopardy is there throughout the reign, and particularly in this period. Elizabeth is very vulnerable and that means that Protestant England is very vulnerable because if Elizabeth dies or is killed then from Cecil's perspective this will spell the triumph of Antichrist because Elizabeth's obvious heir of we as we've said is the second woman to haunt his nightmares and this is Mary Stuart the Queen of Scots.

23:53Dominic Sandbrook:so we did a whole series about queen mary queen of scots last year didn't we and we were talking i mean we talked in that series she's elizabeth's cousin she has tudor blood in her veins so she's not just a steward she has tudor blood she is a catholic and she's actually one of the worst kinds of catholics you can find because she is she's a french catholic basically so her mother was from the the great catholic aristocratic dynasty the guise dynasty yeah but she'd also been brought up effectively as a French woman, as a French princess, and she had briefly been the Queen of France. Yes.

24:29Tom Holland:So I don't think any patriotic Englishman wants a queen like that on the throne. And not least because you mentioned the Guise. So the Guise, I mean, they're not just the most powerful aristocratic dynasty in France, as we will be seeing in the second half, they are militantly catholic and so therefore massive dangers and threats to english protestantism so they are really worth bearing in mind that mary is very closely linked to them the chief of the guise was her uncle this is really bad news for english protestants on top of that they see her as a morally evil person as someone who is supposed to have have killed her own husband, Lord Darnley, who listeners may remember was described as the great cop chick, kind of terrible man.

25:18Tom Holland:We actually concluded that Mary probably didn't kill him, but there was a kind of insane murder plot that involved explosions and people being found in gardens and chairs and all kinds of mad stuff. But definitely in Scotland, as well as in England, people do think that Mary was responsible for killing her husband. And in summer 1567, the Protestant establishment in Scotland had decided that they'd had enough and they'd risen in rebellion. They defeated Mary in battle. They'd imprisoned her on an island on a lonely lock, and they had forced her to abdicate. Now, Mary is kind of irrepressible. She's always bouncing back from seemingly total disaster.

25:59Tom Holland:And on the 2nd of May, 1568, she'd managed to escape from this kind of keep on this lonely island. And she set about trying to win her throne. But the attempt had been a disaster. She'd lost the battle. And so she had decided, what can I do now? The only thing I can really do is to go to England and ask my cousin Elizabeth for help. And so on the 16th of May, she had left scotland forever from this very romantic spot below dundrennan abbey in galway very eerie place i went and visited it um at the new year and she gets into a fishing boat and she rose across the solway firth to cumbria in england westmoreland as it was and she steps foot onto english soil and she immediately writes first to elizabeth to explain you know what she's hoping for.

26:48Tom Holland:And then madly to Cecil, as she said, I have the hope of obtaining the assistance of your good counsel. And that is mad because, of course, Cecil is her deadliest enemy. Cecil hates her. In fact, he wants her dead. Let's be absolutely blunt. That is Cecil's endgame. He wants her removed from the chessboard. While Mary had been Queen of Scots on the throne in Scotland, this catholic this guise this essentially french woman she had been haunting cecil's nightmares now she's come to england she is still a threat but at least she is now kind of under lock and key because cecil does not allow um elizabeth to help her and in fact elizabeth is happy not to help her so instead she's placed under this kind of house arrest and cecil is hoping that elizabeth can be persuaded to license her execution.

27:43Tom Holland:But there is a problem because 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 precedent that said it was okay to execute an anointed ruler.

28:26Dominic Sandbrook:This is the problem. This is the dilemma that is confronting Elizabeth and Cecil. What are they going to do with Mary, Queen of Scots? And how are they possibly going to bolster this Protestant regime? We will find out after the break.

28:42Dominic Sandbrook:This episode is brought to you by National Geographic. Tom, we're familiar, aren't we, with what happened in Pompeii when Vesuvius exploded?

28:51Tom Holland:We absolutely are. So AD 79, Vesuvius blows its top. Debris rains down on Pompeii. It ends with a pyroclastic flow, which essentially entombs the city, entombs everyone left living there. And it lay there waiting to be brought to light centuries and centuries later.

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29:29Tom Holland:It is a cinematic masterpiece from the makers of Loki, and it brings the ancient world vividly to life. Watch Pompeii out of time with Tom Hiddleston.

29:41Dominic Sandbrook:Thursday at 8pm on National Geographic.

29:48Hello, everybody.

29:49Dominic Sandbrook:We have absolutely sensational, spectacular, stupendous news about a forthcoming Rest is History live show.

29:57Tom Holland:We do, Dominic. Now, sometimes there are complaints that people in Britain don't know enough about the British Empire, that they don't study it in sufficient depth. so we are stepping in to make up for that and we are we're going to be telling the story of the ultimate victorian imperial adventure and that dominic is the abyssinian expedition of 1868 and it's well i don't say it's brilliant but it's mad isn't it it is mad to give people a bit of context

30:25Dominic Sandbrook:it's an amazing story the emperor of abyssinia to wadros ii he was ignored by queen victoria who didn't answer his letters. So he took some British hostages. And then the British sent an expedition to Abyssinia to attack his capital at Magdala, his kind of mountain citadel. It's an amazing, amazing story, a bonkers story, and precisely the kind of thing that we enjoy on The Rest is History.

30:48Tom Holland:Yes. And I think the entire country could profit from hearing about. So that is what we're going to be doing. It is, I think, a very Flashman kind of a story. Totally. So anyone who enjoys Flashman will enjoy this. And we are going to be doing it at the South Bank Centre in London on the 4th of September. We do have a few tickets for that. We're also doing it on the 5th of September and not to base, but that one is already sold out. So if you want to come, book your tickets for the 4th of September and you can get them at therestishistory.com.

31:26Dominic Sandbrook:welcome back to the rest is history so we are in the autumn of 1569 and we are in westminster on the strand specifically we are in cecil house so this is the family home of the man we were talking about in the first half william cecil the chief minister of elizabeth the first but this is also the headquarters, the nerve center of his entire operation. So the house has just been finished. Cecil helped design it. It's got orchards. It's got nice symmetrical gardens. It's got a kind of tennis court. It's got a bowling alley. He's got his study looking out over the garden where he can look out and he can contemplate his schemes.

32:06Dominic Sandbrook:His study is full of books and coins and antiquities and things. And in this world, he is contemplating the problems of protecting his patron, Elizabeth I, and ensuring the survival of her regime at the apex of Protestant England. Because when he looks out at the world, Tom, he sees it as a... I mean, we see Elizabethan England as this kind of, you know, golden world of people slapping their thighs and exchanging Shakespearean banter. But he sees it as a world of danger and plots and traitors and conspiracies, doesn't he?

32:41Tom Holland:So we've talked about how there are kind of echoes of contemporary spy thrillers in this 16th century story and people who've seen Slow Horses. The name comes from Slough House, which is this kind of terrible metaphor for the state of Britain, crumbling, decayed, decrepit place where failed spies live. I think that Cecil House has a similar metaphorical quality, but it is much more impressive. So you've described how it's exquisite, it's beautiful, it's ordered, and it's this great nerve center in which Cecil's mighty political brain is kind of pulsing like a beacon. But beyond the walls, the very thick walls of Cecil House, you have seething alleyways.

33:25Tom Holland:You have kind of squalid tenement blocks. They're rife with violence, heavy with plague. And then, of course, beyond them, as you said, there are even more dangers. So that sense of Cecil's world as a kind of still center from which he can try to dampen down all the dangers and the perils that are threatening Protestant England. I think it's a kind of very powerful sense. I think he had it. I think that's why it mattered to him that Cecil House was a place of order. It's a counterpoint to the chaos that he feels that he is combating. And, you know, there is no question what the greatest danger facing England is as Cecil sees it.

34:10Tom Holland:So in the short memorial of the state of the realm, which you began the episode with a reading from, he drawn up all these kind of dangers. But he said that ultimately they all go back to the one poisonous focus. And that is Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart. And he sums it up. the exalting of the Queen of Scots shall please the Pope, the two monarchies of France and Spain, and all the papists in Christendom, England and Scotland. So there are enemies everywhere. And so listeners may be wondering, well, is he right about this? Is there actually a vast conspiracy that embraces Catholics in England and Scotland, the kind of enemy within you might want to call but also philip ii of spain the king of france and the pope and if there is a conspiracy is its aim to topple queen elizabeth and are the conspirators looking to replace elizabeth with mary queen of scot so is mary stewart really the danger that cecil thinks that she is well let's

35:13Dominic Sandbrook:start with england england itself i mean you said oh you know people think of it as maples and all of this kind of thing elizabethan england but actually when cecil looks if you can picture him kind of looking at his map or his dashboard or something the lights are flashing red there are enemies everywhere on the map and there's good reason for that because england has been a very

35:31Tom Holland:troubled place in 1569 well more specifically that there's been this terrifying warning that no one can um ignore which is the fact that um a servant woman in leicestershire had given birth to a cat and everyone has agreed that well here we go yeah this is very bad and um sure enough on the 6th of september 1569 a massive crisis does break out and it's incredibly dangerous because it embroils england's most powerful nobleman and this is the duke of norfolk who comes in person to elizabeth while she's on one of her kind of grand processions around the country I think she's actually in Wiltshire at the time.

36:11Tom Holland:So the Duke of Norfolk comes to the Queen in Wiltshire and he makes this stunning confession. He says, I've actually secretly been negotiating behind your back to marry Mary, Queen of Scots. I hope you're all right with that. Insane. Elizabeth is absolutely not all right with this because the Duke of Norfolk is her own second cousin. So he has royal blood. so if he marries mary queen of scots i mean that is a very very kind of dangerous combination he's also incredibly rich he's by far the wealthiest landowner in the country after elizabeth herself and the worst thing of all is that even though he's been raised a protestant everyone knows that he's a crypto catholic i mean i suppose if they all know he's crypto catholic he's not really he's hiding in plain sight well everyone knows basically he's he's catholic so he's he's kind of rich he's got royal blood he's catholic he's going he's been kind of negotiating with mary queen of scots to marry her this is really bad news and the only reason that he could possibly turn up and tell elizabeth this and think that she won't kind of blow a gasket is because he's madly arrogant and obtuse and yet a member of the aristocracy i mean who could possibly have guessed that there's a certain andrew mountbatten windsor quality to his political antennae i think and so when elizabeth explodes and she says what you know what are you thinking what what are you why are you contemplating doing this he calms her down by saying that when he was in his tennis court at norwich he thought himself in a manner equal with some kings so it's fine i

37:42Dominic Sandbrook:can marry queen of scots because i you know i am basically a king that's insane that really is

37:46Tom Holland:absolutely bonkers yeah so elizabeth is furious she kind of tells um norfolk to go back to his estate and stay there and um she puts the militia on full alert across the country she closes down the east anglian ports in case ships full of spanish sailors are going to be descending on them and she gives her blessing to cecil to do what he feels needs to be done and this is the kind of order that cecil loves yeah you know go in hard rip out the the treason and the treachery and cecil does go in hard so on the 1st of october he has the duke of norfolk arrested and placed in the tower. And then in the 6th of October, he has a private meeting with the Queen.

38:27Tom Holland:And again, he goes in hard about Mary, Queen of Scots. And he says, the Queen of Scots indeed is and shall always be a dangerous person to your estate. Implication, let's execute her. Elizabeth is not ready to do that. But, you know, she has basically given the green light to Cecil that you can do what you like with the Duke of Norfolk. And so shortly afterwards, Cecil licenses the publication of a pamphlet which is called discourse touching the pretended match between the duke of norfolk and the queen of scots and this is a kind of classic sessile maneuver you leak things you kind of hand vital information to people who then kind of smuggle it out without actually acknowledging where it's come from i mean again it's kind of very familiar to contemporary politics the well-placed leak and this pamphlet very savagely attacks norfolk as a papist says you You know, he's not a Protestant at all.

39:20Tom Holland:He's a servant of the Pope. He's dangerous and evil. Goes in hard against Mary again, condemns her as a competitor of the crown, a thing publicly known. Harps on her Frenchness, emphasizes her family connections to the Guise, the sinister French noble family, the kind of the arch Catholics. Describes them as a race that is both enemy to God and the common quiet of Europe and emphasizes how Mary is related to them. So this is blackening both Norfolk and Mary, and it's clearly serving Cecil's purposes. It's clearly been commissioned by him. And the author of this pamphlet almost certainly is a protege of Cecil's who is a very sober man, a very subtle man like Cecil, again like Cecil, a very committed Protestant.

40:06Tom Holland:And this is a man who will be playing a key role in our story. He's a man called Francis Walsingham.

40:13Dominic Sandbrook:Well, he's another very impressive man, isn't he? So he's an ultra Protestant and he has a sort of, well, didn't Elizabeth call him a rank Puritan? And he has a very sort of Puritan look and sort of vibe to him. He's quite, he looks sort of austere. He wears black. White ruff, but otherwise, yeah. White ruff, yeah. He's got a sort of watchful, contemplative, subtle, dangerously quiet. That's the kind of person he is. Yes. Hooted eyes. But as a double act, I mean, they must be, they must rank alongside. I mean, they're not Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, that's for sure. I mean, they rank alongside the most effective political double acts in England's history.

40:56Tom Holland:I think with both of them, their menace and incredible ability kind of shade into one another. They are absolutely not the kind of people that you want to be up against. And that is why Elizabeth employs them. She recognises how effective they are. and they're playing the role that she as queen can't i mean that's another reason it's not just that she's a woman she recognizes that she has a role to play as a figurehead for her people but she needs competent brilliant people who are doing her work and she and cecil she's appointed cecil cecil has appointed walsingham so it's kind of working and they're both i mean walsingham like

41:33Dominic Sandbrook:cecil is completely devoted to the regime isn't he if is with falls you know he's for the high jump effectively i mean he's got tremendous qualities he's a he's a master of tongues right he speaks french italian he's traveled in europe you know he's a he's a very impressive and sophisticated

41:49Tom Holland:person so he understands how how the catholic powers work i mean he he is he's a consummate kind of cold warrior if you want to put it like that um he he understands the enemy it's because he understands the enemy that he is so committed to fighting the enemy and like cecil he has no room for complacency. So he thinks it's much better to be paranoid than complacent. And in 1568, he had written to Cecil, there is less danger in fearing too much than too little, which is, I think, a motto not just for the 16th century, but for the ages. I mean, it's the universal motto that all governments should bear in mind.

42:25Tom Holland:And so he is very committed to supporting Cecil in trying to kind of snuff the flame of Norfolk's incipient rebellion. And so he suspects that maybe there is a conspiracy that is kind of lurking behind Norfolk's approach to Mary Queen of Scots. And sure enough, shortly afterwards, they fix on a guy who seems to be behind the plot. And this an Englishman, but an Italian. And this Italian is taken to Walsingham's house in London and Seething Alley just by the tower. And it's in this house that this guy is interrogated by Walsingham, who, as you said, speaks Italian. So the interrogation happens in Italian.

43:11Tom Holland:And the person who's being interrogated is a Florentine, a banker who's been based in London since 1561. and his name is Roberto Ridolfi. And he has been caught red-handed bringing money into England from the Pope.

43:28Dominic Sandbrook:So the worst of the worst. And he's been giving it to the servants of the Duke

43:33Tom Holland:of Norfolk. Correct. So this is what Walsingham discovers in the process of his interrogation. And not just to the Duke of Norfolk, also to a Scotsman called the Bishop of Ross, who is in London serving Mary, Queen of Scots, as her agent and ambassador there. So here is the nexus. The Pope is sending money by this guy, Rodolfi, and Rodolfi is then passing the money on to agents of Mary, Queen of Scots, and agents of the Duke of Norfolk. And it is the Duke of Norfolk and Mary, Queen of Scots, who are talking about getting married. I mean, how can this not be a threat to Elizabeth?

44:11Dominic Sandbrook:birth. Just one question about the Rodolfi plot. There's no suspicion that he's been framed.

44:17Tom Holland:Dominic, this is a spy thriller. I mean, obviously, nothing is quite as it seems. And we've said that there will be lots of twists and turns. We will see. But I think that for Cecil and for Walsingham, what the Rodolfi plot suggests is, first of all, that yes, the Duke of Norfolk is definitely embroiled in an overly treasonous conspiracy. But worse, that this plot does have an international dimension. Because if the Pope's involved, then it suggests that all the kind of the Catholic powers on the continent are probably involved on this. And the Pope has no divisions, but he is the Holy Father to both the kings of France and Spain.

45:01Tom Holland:So what might the Pope's agents have been saying to Philip II of Spain and to France. And let's come to France first, because of course, France is the traditional enemy, always happy to stir up mischief in England, even if you take out the whole Catholic Protestant thing. And Cecil's anxieties about France are focused on this family that we've been mentioning throughout the series, the Guise. And in particular, on one guy in particular, who's only 19 years old. He is the Duke of Guise, Henri the Duke of Guise, let's call him Henry. And to Protestants in England, Henry of Guise is the absolute archetype of a sinister Catholic Machiavelli.

45:45Tom Holland:So he is the cousin of Mary Stuart. So of course he wants her on the English throne, but he's even more notorious because of whose son he is. So again, to pursue a kind of contemporary analogy henry duke of guise only 19 is feared by protestants in england in perhaps the way that people in a country that borders russia would be afraid of vladimir putin's son if such a person existed succeeding him right you know there's a sense that father and son here are both you know they're both bad bad guys bad hombres as trump would call them it's like one of saddam's sons or something yes yes or gaddafi so henry of guise's father francis this is the guy who had been mary queen of scotts uncle and so he's the ultimate cecil bogeyman he'd also captured calais and the reign of mary tudor so you know that's very bad from an english point of view he has a very he had a very very sinister scar so that doesn't help but i think worst of all and understandably so from Cecil's point of view.

46:50Tom Holland:In 1562, Francis of Guise had perpetrated an open massacre of French Protestants. And there are a lot of Protestants in France. They're called Huguenots for reasons that are never entirely clear. And in this massacre, 50 Protestants, French Protestants had been left dead, and these included five women and one child. And to Cecil, this massacre serves as evidence of what a Catholic nobleman like the Duke of Norfolk might do in England, given half a chance, and in turn, what the consequences might then be for the stability of the English state. Because in France, that massacre perpetrated by Francis of Guise, the father of Henry of Guise in 1562, had seen the country erupt into full-blown civil war, Catholics against Huguenots, you know, the kind of religious anarchy that Cecil is desperate to stop.

47:45Tom Holland:And in France, over the course of the 1560s, you had massacre after massacre, battle after battle, murder after murder. Now, actually, Henry's father Francis had been, who'd been at the head of the Catholic cause, the guy kind of prosecuting the campaign against the Huguenots, He had been assassinated in 1563. So that's the year after the Civil War had broken out by Huguenot marksmen. So he said, this is the age where people are starting to use firearms to kill enemies. But the Civil War had blazed on despite the fact that Francis of Guise had been shot. And it's this kind of toxic mix of religious and personal hatreds as so often happens in civil wars.

48:25Tom Holland:And Henry, the young Duke of Guise, this guy who is still in his teens, he embodies both these the sectarian and the personal. So he's absolutely determined to eradicate heresy, Protestantism in France, but he also wants to be avenged on the man that he blames for the assassination of his father. And the guy that Henry of Guise blames for the murder of Francis, his father, is a very distinguished soldier from Burgundy called Gaspard de Coligny. And Coligny's had a very, very distinguished career. He'd fought in Italy. He'd become the governor of Paris. The following year, he'd become the Admiral of France, which doesn't actually mean that he's sailing around on ships.

49:04Tom Holland:It means that basically he's number two to the Constable of France, who is the kind of the main military officer in the French Kingdom. And originally, Coligny and Francis of Guise had been great mates. They hung out at the court. They had a great time, complete lads together. But then in 1558, Coligny had become a Protestant. He had a kind of Calvinist conversion. And Calvin, actually the great protestant reformer had written to him and they'd become kind of pen pals and so by the 1560s he is the leader of the huguenots in this civil war against the catholics against the guise and whether colony had actually commissioned the murder of henry's father henry of guise's father is unclear but definitely henry of guise thinks that colony had commissioned it and therefore there is a personal as well as a religious motivation in the fact that the guise refused to make peace with the huguenots you know it's personal for them as well as a matter of ideology and principle and so there's no real prospect i think with colony and guise at the head of the respective sides in this french civil war of the wounds being kind of bound up

50:17Dominic Sandbrook:and healed so when um cecil and walsingham look at their map which they undoubtedly like you can imagine them together in the study looking out over the garden and then looking down at the map and shaking their heads in a sort of performative way so they see france and they say well france is an object lesson in what happens when you have religious tension when you have plotting when you have catholic conspirators all of this but then they look slightly to the northeast so they look at the low countries and they say my god this really is the fate that could await england because in the low countries, it's total chaos and bloodshed, isn't it?

50:53Dominic Sandbrook:So that's Belgium and Holland, effectively.

50:55Tom Holland:Yes, because there you have Philip II, who rules the low countries. He's their lord. Their Protestantism has put down really quite strong roots. And Philip II, as a devout Catholic, is absolutely determined to eradicate it for good. So in France, you have civil war between Catholics and Protestants. And in the low countries, you have a Catholic superpower trying to crush and stamp out the green shoots of godly religion and this had been prompted in 1566 by this great firestorm of iconoclastic fury the building storm it's called in in dutch which was protestant mobs kind of running amok ransacking catholic churches smashing up icons and all of that and philip is not going to put up with this so in 1567 he had sent the The hardest man in Spain, a guy called the Duke of Alva, who is a Castilian bred of the same steel that had bred Cortez and Pizarro.

51:58Tom Holland:Alva is a veteran of wars against the Turks. He fought in Italy and he is a brilliant general. And he arrives in the Low Countries with a very large Spanish army. and he sets up this council of troubles it's called to repress the protestant insurrection and the protestants are very soon calling it the court of blood because it leads to mass executions thousands of people including very distinguished protestant noblemen and huge numbers of protestants flee this persecution for england in due course this persecution will result in one of the momentous episodes in European history, the Dutch Revolt, which we talked about in our episode on the Dutch National Anthem.

52:41Dominic Sandbrook:That was a great episode.

52:42Tom Holland:But we didn't really talk about that on the impact of all this on England, because in England, the repression and the slaughter in the low countries, it provokes outrage, it provokes horror, it provokes calls for solidarity. Refugees are being given sanctuary in in towns and cities across southern England. And I think it definitely consolidates that sense that you were talking about, Dominic, this idea that we still have of Tudor England, of Elizabethan England as a land of maypoles and jollity and peace. I think that although clearly there are massive tensions in England, people in England, Catholics, I think, as well as Protestants, do look across the seas to France, to the low countries, and they do see this great arc of slaughter and bloodshed.

53:28Tom Holland:You know, the bodies floating in the Loire, the flames licking barns in Normandy, the corpses littering the streets of Antwerp or whatever. And they do think of Elizabeth as a kind of fairy queen, as she will come to be called by Spencer. They do think of her as a kind of magical protectorist. There's actually a brilliant, it's brilliantly phrased by Garrett Mattingly, who wrote one of my favourite ever books on the defeat of the Spanish Armada. And, you know, that English people in this period see Elizabeth as warding from her island the threatening march of history. And I think there is a kind of sense of that.

54:05Tom Holland:And that is why Cecil is so desperate to stop the threatening march of history, if you want to put it like that.

54:11Dominic Sandbrook:I think that's true of the Tudors generally, Tom, actually. That's my controversial opinion about the Tudors. People think of the Tudors as melodramatic and colourful and there's a sense of instability and soap opera drama. But I actually think the Tudors' great achievement. is to keep England fairly stable and united, relatively united. When you look at what's going on on the continent, I mean, it's total bloodshed and chaos.

54:33Tom Holland:Yeah, absolutely. And Elizabeth has a huge role to play in this. You know, she is the kind of the woman who charms and woos her own people and who plays hard to get with kind of Catholic suitors on the continent. So, you know, she's magnificent at that. But then you do have Cecil and Walsingham, who are hard in the way that you need to be hard to keep your kingdom secure and stable. And so one of the ways in which they display this hardness is that in 1568, four Spanish treasure ships loaded down with the silver from the New World, the mines in Peru, they're chased by pirates and they have to take refuge in English ports.

55:11Tom Holland:And so Cecil says, well, I think we'll keep it. The justification for this is that the money was going to be used to fund the Duke of Alva. But it's also the reason that Elizabeth likes it is that she's always short of money. She's incredibly stingy. And so brilliant, we've got this kind of incredible windfall. There is, of course, a problem with doing this in that it really annoys the King of Spain. And in 1569, so the year following the arrival of these treasure ships in English ports, Cecil writes to Elizabeth and says, you know, very bluntly, that you and your government are, and I quote, most offensive, both to the King of Spain and the French king for sundry considerations and especially for suckering of the persecuted in other words for taking the side of the persecuted Protestants in France and in the low countries so

55:58Dominic Sandbrook:to use another analogy from a series we've we've done on the rest is history when we talked about the origins of the first world war I mean there's a perception in Austria-Hungary a big power that Serbia a sort of gadfly is fermenting treason and unrest and is giving aid to terrorists and all of that kind of thing and that lies you know it's the heart of the the process that leads to the outbreak of the first world war well there are there must be people in the courts of france and spain who are saying similar things about england that england is becoming a rogue state that is

56:27Tom Holland:supporting terrorists completely there are and so it's an incredible tightrope for elizabeth and cecil to walk to take the measures that enable england to hold her head up and to kind of bulk up her defenses and not to allow sand to be kicked in her face, while at the same time, trying not to go too far and not provoke kind of, you know, say the sending of an enormous fleet up the channel, you know, an armada, because that would be very bad. And so I think by the late 1560s, you know, 1569, when Cecil wrote that report, it's not surprising that he thinks that things are looking pretty bleak, because you have all this bloodshed across the channel, a kind of grim forewarning of what might come to England should he fail in his mission.

57:12Tom Holland:There's this whole courtship thing between the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Queen of Scots. That's very ominous. Two Catholics, both with royal Tudor blood in their veins, wanting to get hitched up. I mean, you can't allow that. And then you've got this guy, Rodolfi, who you mentioned. You know, we talked about him. Is he all that he seems? He seems to have been acting as this conduit between the Pope and the Duke of Norfolk and Mary, Queen of Scots. So what's going on with him? So all of these are very worrying. And then in very rapid succession, two further developments. So in December 1569, two Catholic noblemen in the north of England, which we said is the place where probably Catholicism is at its most militant.

57:53Tom Holland:And these are very, very significant players in the politics of northern England. So Thomas Percy, heir of the percys the great family of northumberland um he's the earl of northumberland and charles neville the earl of westmoreland so on the other side um of of the coast from northumberland the pair of them rise in revolt and their object they make this clear is to liberate mary stewart and to restore catholicism and as an index of this they capture durham and they celebrate mass in Durham Cathedral, the first time since Elizabeth's accession. And Elizabeth is merciless in her repression of this revolt.

58:33Tom Holland:So 700 of the rebels are hanged and their bodies are left to rot in gibbets. The church bells that had been used to ring the rebellion to raise the rebels are melted down. And those rebels who do manage to escape abroad, which include Westmoreland, they will live out their lives on the continent as marked and hunted men so if we compare elizabeth's repression of what she sees as heresy with that of mary's mary was responsible for the 300 heretics you know elizabeth has sanctioned the execution of 400 more people than that so

59:07Dominic Sandbrook:is the difference though is that they have risen in revolt so if you rise in revolt you know what

59:11Tom Holland:you're getting into yeah you could say that you could say that but uh you know she is at least as robust in her approach to stamping out sedition as Mary was.

59:22Dominic Sandbrook:We are very keen on robust statesmanship at the rest of history. And I just want to make that very clear to all our listeners.

59:27Tom Holland:We've had this rising of the North, which has been stamped out. But then a few weeks after the suppression of that revolt comes something that is much, much harder to stamp out because it doesn't take the form of an armed uprising. It takes the form of a papal bull. and dominic a menacing papal bull is nothing that you want to get when you're an embattled

59:50Dominic Sandbrook:protestant regime i dread getting a papal bull i mean literally the poem postman comes i worry

59:54Tom Holland:about papal bull so this papal bull is uh is published obviously by the by the pope that's what makes it papal and this is pious the fifth uh and it's called regnans in excelsis which is the first line of of the bull which means raining on high and by the terms of this bull the pretended queen of england as it describes elizabeth is excommunicated at last we said the pope has been itching to do this philip has been kind of um holding the pope on a tight leash and um i think the kind of the pope takes his chance philip's philip is distracted and he kind of publishes it and this is really really devastating for elizabeth and for her government because it doesn't only license English Catholics to renounce their loyalty to Elizabeth.

1:00:42Tom Holland:It positively demands it. So to quote the bull, this is the Pope speaking, we charge and command all and singular the nobles, subjects, peoples, and others aforesaid that they do not dare obey her orders, mandates, and laws. Those who shall act to the contrary, we include in the like sentence of excommunication.

1:01:01Dominic Sandbrook:So this is really raising the stakes. if you want to you know stay in the bosom of the church you have to um you must treat elizabeth as a heretic and as a traitor and ignore her and whatnot but effectively this goes beyond that because what the pope is saying isn't he is that actually she is a legitimate target now of plotting and indeed of assassination if if you're a good catholic and you want to i mean this is effectively like fatwa he's issued a fatwa against elizabeth the first so it's it's

1:01:30Tom Holland:it's really bad news and on top of that Cecil is pretty clear from intelligence reports that the Pope had kind of been slipping money to the rising in the north so he's behind that you've got the Duke of Guise you've got Henry the Duke of Guise you've got the Duke of Alva they both have massive armies on the other side of the channel from England steeped in Protestant blood so that's very bad news. And at the centre of the web, all along, the whole time, the person to whom all these plots are leading back, you have the blood-gorged spider that is Mary Stuart. And so in 1571, Cecil feels that he's got the proof he needs to go to the Queen and say, look, we need urgent action.

1:02:16Tom Holland:And for two years, so ever since the arrest of Roberto Rodolfi, that Florentine banker who'd been supplying Norfolk and Mary Stuart with the funds from the Pope. Cecil's agents have been working really hard behind the scenes to bring the full facts of the plot to light. And what their efforts have resulted in is very, very shocking. So Cecil's agents have managed to prove that the Duke of Norfolk had been plotting to free and then marry mary that he and mary had been working hand in glove not just with uh paper ambassadors but with the french and the spanish ambassadors in london that there was to be a rebellion in london that a spanish army was to cross from the low countries so that was why elizabeth had closed the ports on the eastern coast to stop them from landing there and that mary queen of scots was to be proclaimed queen of england and all of this you know it's been done undercover cecil wants it out in the public so he does the classic wheeze of um you know a leak and he does it in the form of a fabricated letter which gets published and unsurprisingly goes viral so it's kind of like the equivalent of a newspaper expose everybody's reading it and going oh this is

1:03:32Dominic Sandbrook:terrible and we know for sure the letter was fabricated right yes we do so people might be

1:03:36Tom Holland:Well, if the letter's fabricated, are the details necessarily true? And Dominic, you implied that perhaps Cecil was playing a complicated game. I mean, maybe the letter is the expression of what Cecil believes to be true, but can't 100 % prove. Or possibly, Rodolfi, during the process of interrogation by Walsingham, might have been turned and actually become a double agent, have ended up working for Cecil. and for elizabeth's cause and we will never know because we don't have the papers to solve this but i think these are absolutely the right kinds of questions to be asking um there is definitely a sense of a plot there but who you know where exactly the the lines are to be drawn in the uh the kind of the the balance of all the conspirators is more complex and just to quote stephen orford again in his biography of cecil he offers a suggestion that rodolfi was a plant that the whole conspiracy was a setup from the start, a plot manufactured by Cecil to expose Mary Stewart for the danger he knew her to be.

1:04:44Dominic Sandbrook:Just to focus in on that for a second, Stephen Alford is not claiming that the whole thing is an utter fiction. What is effectively saying, isn't he, is that Cecil and Walsingham know that the Pope and various other bad people are plotting against England. and they have basically fabricated the evidence, but he's not denying, I mean, the plot definitely, insofar as if plot is the right word, the scheme exists.

1:05:14Tom Holland:Yeah, that it does and that they need to expose it and that they do this essentially by turning Rodolfi and getting him to make kind of statements that can then be used. And there is kind of evidence for this. So amazingly, Rodolfi has a private audience with the Queen at Greenwich palace which is quite odd also when the plot is revealed rodolfi is safely back in italy where actually you know he i mean if he's a double agent he then becomes a triple agent because he ends up becoming a papal senator in florence and lives to a very ripe old age i mean he dies in his 80s so i think there's a definite you know there is a kind of real leccare quality to it um smoke and mirrors you're never entirely sure whose side rodolfi is on but i think i think that while he is in England and being menaced by Cecil he's on Cecil's side and then probably when he gets back to Italy he changes sides again um so he gets off it but I mean someone who doesn't get off scot-free is the Duke of Norfolk because um he ends up having his head chopped off he may be Elizabeth's second cousin and he may be England's preeminent nobleman but you know he's been caught bang to rights but what about Mary Queen of Scots Cecil is going really hard in saying to the Queen look you cannot be secure on your throne while she is alive you have to get rid of her and elizabeth says no for the reasons that we've said you cannot execute one of god's anointed and there are all kinds of attempts fostered by cecil fostered by walsingham to get um parliament to try and petition her so you have the the bishops in the house of lords the late scottish queen have heaped up together all the sins of the licentious sons of david adultery murder conspiracy treasons and blasphemies against god and therefore should be put to death but elizabeth says no and cecil as a result of this even as he's triumphant that he's foiled the duke of norfolk's plot is kind of plunged into fury and despair at elizabeth's obduracy as he sees it you know he just he can't believe that he's not allowed to to sweep Mary Queen of Scots from the board.

1:07:22Tom Holland:But Elizabeth and Cecil, you know, they've had this massive bust up, but Cecil is still confident that he has Elizabeth's backing. You know, she may be capricious and infuriating, but she still trusts him. And I think that's the key to the teamwork that they embody. So in December 1571, Elizabeth expels the Spanish ambassador for his involvement in the Rodolfi plot. And it makes perfectly clear that she believes in the existence of this plot. So she tells the Spanish ambassador, you would secretly seek to inflame our realm with firebrands. So again, it's so like the Cold War in Britain or the United States where, you know, spy networks get exposed in the rush of the Soviet embassy and the Soviet ambassador gets expelled.

1:08:09Tom Holland:It's exactly like that. and so Elizabeth knows that she owes Cecil for this I mean he may be hassling her to execute Mary Queen of Scots and she's not going to give into that but she does know that he has done her in a kind of an amazing turn you know that without him she she would be in all kinds of peril so in February 1571 she bestows a signal honor on him so William Cecil this humble Welshman from Lincolnshire he gets raised to the ranks of the nobility and he's given the title of the Baron of Burley. And today, you know, people are endlessly be given titles and knighthoods and things by the government.

1:08:46Tom Holland:But Elizabeth is much more chery. So it is a huge deal for Cecil to be given this honour. And henceforth, he will be known as Lord Burley. And that's what we'll be calling him, Lord Burley. And Lord Burley is on hand to continue his godly war against the threats from Antichrist, whether it be Catholics in England, Mary Queen of Scots, the King of France, the King of Spain, the Pope, they are all still out there and they are all still looking to menace the Protestants of England and the reign of good Queen Bess.

1:09:20Dominic Sandbrook:Well, it's actually, I mean, not only are they still looking to do it, but actually the threats are becoming more and more serious, aren't they? And the skies are getting darker and darker. Because just 12 weeks after the execution of the Duke of Norfolk, who I think everybody agrees had it coming that was on the 24th of august 1572 12 weeks later something happens in the streets of paris that sends shockwaves through protestant europe and this is a pogrom a massacre beyond even cecil's worst nightmares the massacre of saint bartholomew's day and on hand to see it is the other person we've been talking about today francis walsingham who had been sent by elizabeth the first to serve as her ambassador in france and what waltzingham sees that day in paris will never leave him it's stamped on his imagination for the rest of his life as it is stamped on the imaginations of everybody in england and it confirms him and cecil in all their darkest suspicions of the papist catholic menace and their dread of the catholic enemy within and tom we will We'll be telling that story, won't we, next time as part of this epic sweep through the reign of Elizabeth I.

1:10:33Dominic Sandbrook:So we'll be telling the story of St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. We will be looking at the career of one of England's greatest heroes, Francis Drake, who I think some people very sadly question him these days. And we will also be looking at the road to the Spanish Armada, the attempt by Philip of Spain finally to crack down on what he sees as England's rogue terrorist protestant state so there's loads of exciting drama to come members of the rest is history club they can hear all those episodes right now so they're the members of our own rogue state if you want to join them if you want to cross the um cross the divide and come over to God's own side then head to the rest is history.com and sign up it is actually what God would have wanted and indeed what elizabeth first would have wanted um and of course if you want to read lots about this there is no better place than the rest is history's newsletter so you can sign up to the newsletter as well for free and you'll be getting all kinds of interesting tidbits about the reign of elizabeth the first i say tidbits but actually articles interviews book extracts you name it we've got loads of fun things coming up so on that bombshell thank you very much tom we will see you next time for the massacre of saint bartholomew's day goodbye bye-bye Thank you.