694. Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: A Treacherous Conspiracy (Part 4)

20:41Tom Holland:Elizabeth is very stingy about handing out knighthood. So, for instance, Walsingham, who is her chief secretary, her spy chief, he'd only been knighted in 1577 after years of service. And he is from the kind of background that would entitle him to a knighthood. Drake is absolutely not. He's the grandson of a yeoman farmer. And it is a brilliant occasion. And it seems like the whole of London has turned out for it. Drake is now the great public hero of the English crowds. And the spectators who've gathered in Deptford, they get so excited that loads of them try to pile over the gangplank onto the ship.

21:17Tom Holland:And the gangplank gives way and they all drop into the mud. And there's great fun, great excitement had by all. And on board the Golden Hind, Elizabeth very coyly but ostentatiously loses a garter. And the whole proceeding is a massive propagation to the Spanish.

21:35Dominic Sandbrook:I maintain, by the way, that this would make an excellent carry-on film.

21:40Tom Holland:I think it would make, Cate Blanchett, I think, missed a trick by not losing her garter on the golden hide. I think it would also make a tremendous patriotic, stirring epic. Anyway, so the question is, why has the inveterately cautious Elizabeth taken such a bold and flamboyant step? We've said she is clearly very impressed with Drake. She thinks he's tremendous. She's always inviting him in for chats. But I think she is also playing four-dimensional chess. and she is very good at playing four-dimensional chess and her move works on a kind of couple of levels so first of all it obviously plays well with her subjects drake is the great national hero and elizabeth knows that by having him knighted um it guilds her own brand and this is really important because she has to worry that war is threatening england does remain riven by sectarian divisions and its future as a protestant kingdom hangs by the single thread that is Elizabeth's own life.

22:38Tom Holland:And so, you know, she's always getting intelligence briefings from Walsingham saying that there are assassins out there. So she wants to woo her subjects. You know, she wants to make herself the great beloved of the English people. And so therefore, it is desperately important to her to project a sense of her rule as something glamorous and golden and self-confident to kind of portray herself as Gloriana. And to that end, And having Drake knighted works superbly because to this day, I think, the image of Elizabeth personally dubbing Drake a knight on the deck of the Golden Hind remains one of the great iconic scenes of English history.

23:23Dominic Sandbrook:Overseas listeners won't get this, but when we were growing up in the 70s and 80s, there were these books called Lady Bird books that everybody in England read. They were the guides to history. And this is your classic Lady Bird book illustration, isn't it? Yes. People cheering with great roughs, huzzahs from the crowd. They didn't have the people falling in the mud. A good Queen Bess who looks gorgeous, knighting a very handsome swashbuckling Sir Francis Drake. Makes you proud to be English. And unfortunately, it didn't actually happen.

23:49Tom Holland:Elizabeth didn't dub Drake herself, but she got a Frenchman. Oh, my God. This is literally the worst moment in the history of the podcast. A guy called Monsieur de Marchemont to do it. But obviously, Elizabeth wouldn't have asked Marchamont to Knight Drake had she not been confident that Marchamont would do it. And it was also Marchamont who picks up Elizabeth's fallen garter, which she'd coyly let slip. And it's all very flirty. So it's a proper entente cordiale between England and France. And so here, I think, is another reason for all these tremendous theatrics aboard the Golden Hind. Elizabeth is sending a public message to Spain about the strength of her relationship with France.

24:34Tom Holland:And listeners who heard our second episode, which was all about the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, may find this odd. Why is a Protestant queen flirting with the ambassador of a Catholic country in which only a decade before thousands of Protestants had been massacred in pogroms across the country and most particularly in the capital in France? And it's a very good question. And to answer it, we just need to do a quick retrospective to look at what has been happening in France since that terrible day on St. Bartholomew's Day in August 1572, because France, like Spain, is always a preponderant influence on English foreign policy.

25:18Tom Holland:What happens across the channel in France, the great European superpower alongside Spain, matters enormously. And basically, nothing good has been happening because the massacre had resulted only in further bloodshed, only in further war.

25:34Dominic Sandbrook:All right. So let's have a look at the situation in France. So basically, we have three rival factions and each of them, annoyingly, is led by somebody called Henri Henri. You say it's annoying. I think it's quite fun.

25:46Tom Holland:So they're called Les Trois Henry in France, the Three Henrys. And I think that rather getting stressed about the fact that they're all called Henry, I think we should lean into it.

25:59Dominic Sandbrook:Will you all easily please, Tom? I mean, what's all I'll say?

26:01Tom Holland:There was a film made in France in the 70s called The Three Henrys. You know, we always say this about Tudor politics, but there was a kind of Game of Thrones element to it. I think it would actually make a really good drama. Okay. So there are these three factions. They're each led by a guy called Henri or Henry. The first of these is the Huguenots, who are bloodied and diminished in the wake of the various pogroms and massacres that happened on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572. But they haven't gone away. So they've lost Paris, they've lost the north, but they remain strong in the south. And their leader is Henri, Henri, the King of Navarre.

26:40Tom Holland:and he was the guy whose marriage six days before the massacre had drawn all the various protestant nobles to paris where they could then be massacred and henry himself the king of navarre had been effectively taken prisoner kept under house arrest and obliged to renounce his protestantism but then in 1576 he'd been able to escape the court and had immediately resumed his loyalty to Protestantism. And he's very, very impressive. He's very smart. He's very personable. He's military able. And spoiler alert, in the long run, he is going to triumph and emerge as Henry IV, the most popular king in all of French history, the only king who the French revolutionaries do not kind of chuck out during the revolution.

27:27Tom Holland:I mean, who would play him? Pedro Pascal, perhaps? Oh, my God.

27:33Dominic Sandbrook:So that's faction number one. Pedro Pascal is leading them. He's the king of Navarre. Brilliant. That's the Huguenots. Faction number two, we're going to go to the other end of the spectrum, aren't we? We're going to go to the absolute kind of ultra Catholics, right? Yes.

27:47Tom Holland:So this is the Catholic League, which had been founded by the Duke of Guise, who is the second Henry, who we talked a lot about in our first two episodes. So he's the absolute darling of the Catholic diehards and the mob in Paris, especially. He has this tremendous aura of martial glamour, which has been massively enhanced by the fact that he, like his dad, has been given a scar across his face, the result of a saber wound that he'd suffered in battle in 1575. And he is by now effectively the ruler of France. He commands the largest armies. He is the effective master of Paris. And he's put the monarchy itself in his shade.

28:30Tom Holland:and he is ambitious basically not only to bring France under his control and perhaps his enemies say directly under his rule you know there are all kinds of rumors he wants to make himself king and seize the throne but he also aspires to seize the thrones of England and Scotland and the reason why he can realistically dream of this is because he is the cousin of Mary Queen of Scots and so if If he can depose Elizabeth and marry Mary, he will absolutely be quids in. He'd get both. So who's playing him? Mads Mikkelsen, perhaps? Because you're just thinking Scar, are you? I'm thinking Scar. I'm thinking Gaunt, kind of faintly Machiavellian, but impressive.

29:14Dominic Sandbrook:Okay.

29:14Tom Holland:I mean, he's a smart, you know.

29:16Dominic Sandbrook:Le Chiffre from Casino Royale. Brilliant. Yes.

29:19Tom Holland:Do you think? I mean, I think he'd be quite good.

29:21Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, fine. I mean, you're the casting director. And so that third Henry is the actual king of France. Yes. Who is attempting somehow to unite his kingdom torn apart by these two factions. And he's Henry III. Yeah. Henri III. And he is the younger brother of the bloke who was king in the massacre, who was Charles. And he's a dashing, unusually for a French king. We've done a lot of French kings on this podcast who've turned out to be useless and spineless and, you know, physically weird one way or another. This bloke is actually fine.

29:54Tom Holland:Well, he'd been very dashing as a young prince, and he'd won various victories over the Huguenots. And then he had a kind of mad spell as king of Poland.

30:02Dominic Sandbrook:Never made that choice.

30:04Tom Holland:And then he'd succeeded his brother, and so he'd had to dash back to take over the throne. And he is dashing, but he also has suspiciously flamboyant tastes. So a bit like Edward II in England. He's a great one for a favourite, a menial. And so this generates all kinds of dark rumours of sodomy and cross-dressing and various other things that Catholic kings are not supposed to get up to. And whether these rumours are true or not, he doesn't have any children. And so this is another reason why the Duke of Guise, you know, it seems plausible that he might be suspecting to replace Henry III and his dynasty.

30:47Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, right. Who's playing him, by the way? Andrew Scott. Superb. Yeah. Okay. So this is a great film.

30:55Tom Holland:Yeah, it would be, wouldn't it? They should make it. So if Mads Mikkelsen is going to replace Andrew Scott on the throne of France, he needs to get rid of the Valois dynasty, the ruling dynasty. But the Valois dynasty isn't completely doomed. So the French king may not have a son, but he does have a younger brother. And this is a guy called Francois Francis, and he is the Duke of Anjou. And he is the fourth of four brothers and the only one who hadn't been a king, which he massively resents for understandable reasons. He's physically quite unprepossessing. He got smallpox when he was eight and it left him with a pitted face and bandy legs and a twisted spine.

31:39Tom Holland:But he's a tremendous, he's a very smart, active, calculating guy and very personable. He's a devout Catholic, but not aggressively so. So he'd been perfectly happy to ally himself with Henry of Navarre, Pedro Pascal, the Huguenot leader. And he's kind of the standard bearer for a new trend in politics, not just in France, but across Europe, which is to prioritize political stability over confessional allegiances, over kind of religious identities. And so to his admirers, he is a pragmatist. He is a man whom the Protestants can do business with. But to his detractors, among whom you would include the Duke of Guise and the Catholic League, he's a trimmer.

32:27Tom Holland:And the word that hostile Catholics give to him, he is a politique. He is someone who places politics over loyalty to God. But it's this quality, his quality as a politique, that in 1578 had opened the door to the Duke of Anjou, who at this point is 23, had given him the opportunity to court a woman who is 22 years his elder. And this is none other than our own beloved Queen, Elizabeth I, good Queen Bess. Wow

33:05Dominic Sandbrook:I was going to say He's clearly going to be played By Emmanuel Macron But we should draw a veil over that So Elizabeth I I mean this issue Of who she's going to marry Has hung over her Ever since she became queen Yeah and it's still current It's still rumbling on And she has had A number of suitors Hasn't she Including the current king of France So Anjou's elder brother But this guy Francis of Anjou He had actually come to England In person To try to woo her Yeah I mean, that's a very big step. He's the only one who's done it, to be fair.

33:36Tom Holland:But it didn't work. Although Elizabeth quite liked him. Well, she thinks she really likes him. I think she's genuinely fond of him. She calls him her frog. Whether that's because he looks like a frog or whether it's because the word frog is, the English already starting to use that as a term for the French at this point, is unclear. And the reason that Monsieur de Marchamont, the guy who picked up Elizabeth's garter and knighted Drake, was in London was because he was there kind of acting as Anjou's kind of agent, his kind of marriage broker. Now, the problem for Elizabeth is that the reaction among her Protestant subjects to the notion, the prospect that she might marry a French Catholic prince is one of absolute horror.

34:23Tom Holland:so much so that in 1579 when Anjou had been in London in person and had been out for a romantic barge trip on the Thames with Elizabeth it's likely that a boatman committed an assassination attempt on Anjou the thing was so embarrassing that it was all covered up but it almost certainly was an attempt to have Anjou killed and also in 1579 a lawyer by the name of John Stubbs a Puritan had written a pamphlet which compared Anjou to a serpent and Elizabeth to Eve. Okay. Except, you know, there's an issue with comparing Elizabeth to Eve. And so Stubbs had promptly added, she is also our Adam and sovereign Lord or Lordly Lady of this land.

35:07Tom Holland:So the kind of the wrestling with the fact that Elizabeth is a woman rather than a man. But he'd gone all in against Anjou as a potential husband for Elizabeth, said that Elizabeth was risking a second St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in London. So that's very punchy. And so unsurprisingly, Elizabeth was furious, and Stubbs ends up having his right hand chopped off for inciting sedition. So that's a measure of, you know, you push Elizabeth too far. There's no nonsense about freedom of speech. You know, she's not having that.

35:36Dominic Sandbrook:But some of her closest advisors, her chief cronies, are very, very opposed to the idea of this French marriage, aren't they? So Walsingham, Robert Dudley.

35:47Tom Holland:Yeah, the Earl of Leicester. Yeah. And also on the Catholic side, there's massive opposition. So William Allen, 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 emigres. He thinks it's monstrous as well. And he explains it in terms of what he sees as the monstrousness of Elizabeth's depravity. So he writes a pamphlet in which he goes all in that Elizabeth is the little whore, the daughter of the great whore, Anne Boleyn. And he said that he claimed that her desire for Anjou was to the disgrace of princely majesty and the whole nation's reproach by unspeakable and incredible variety of lust.

36:33Tom Holland:But it has to be emphasised. All of this is nonsense. The fact that Elizabeth is ready to accept Anjou'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 virginity as a diplomatic tool. And if Elizabeth is facing a showdown with Spain, such a menacing enemy, then Elizabeth thinks I might as well try and do all that I can to build bridges 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 Anjou have to do with it?

37:31Tom Holland:In what way might Anjou be a solution to the problem? Well, we need to 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, it's the Protestant Gaza. It's something that's calculated to alarm co-religionists in England.

37:59Dominic Sandbrook:To remind people, this is where the local Protestants are in revolt against their Spanish overlords. And this war has been raging, fought very brutally. And in 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.

38:19Tom Holland:And Protestants look at the way that the Spanish troops in the countries are 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 30 ,000 Spanish troops manage to cross the seas and land in England. And it's unsettling for them, especially because Protestantism in the low countries is something that's grown up organically. It's something that's kind of, it's not been top down as it was in England.

39:01Tom Holland:So to quote Jonathan Israel, the great scholar 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 kind of very unusually broad-based sense of legitimacy, much broader than it had been in England. And it had made a clash with the very Catholic Philip of Spain, kind of inevitable, because Philip is ruling them. He is the Lord of the Netherlands. It's part of the kind of inheritance that he'd had from his father, Charles V, the great Habsburg emperor. And so over the course of the 1560s, Philip had gone in really hard.

39:35Tom Holland:So in 1565, he'd insisted on the full enforcement of heresy laws. In 1567, he'd sent a Spanish army to start pacifying the rebellious Protestant cities in the low countries. Thousands of Protestants had been executed as heretics. 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 seesawing this way and that for over a decade when the rebels in 1579 put out feelers to the Duke of Anjou. 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.

40:16Tom Holland: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 Philip? And Anjou says, yeah, absolutely, I would. I'd love to. That would be great. You know, all his brothers have been kings of France. He hasn't. So why shouldn't he go? And there'd been protracted negotiations. And finally, he had signed on the dotted line. And in January 1581, Anjou had been officially proclaimed the prince and the lord of the Netherlands. and in June 1581 a crucial moment in the history of kind of revolution more generally in Europe and the West so including America the states generals in the low countries had issued an act of abjuration formally renouncing the rule of the king of Spain and his heirs so it's a kind of huge ideological turning point a kind of pivot point first time this has happened right kind of

41:07Dominic Sandbrook:basically yeah that an assembly speaking for the people says we are casting off our yeah so so you

41:13Tom Holland:know you can see how this would reverberate and in february 1582 ojoo has been in england but he thinks that i'm charming though elizabeth is she's playing hard to get it's becoming pretty clear she's not going to marry me after all uh rather than hang around in england i am going to cross the sea and go to the Low Countries and rule there as their lord. And so he leaves England and Elizabeth, as it turns out, for the last time. She rides with him through Kent, and then he takes ship from Dover, and he heads to the Low Countries. Now, the engagement between Elizabeth and Anjou is not broken off.

41:50Tom Holland:And again, just to emphasize, this isn't because she fancies him. It's for reasons of anti-Spanish diplomacy. she wants Anjou in the Netherlands because although he's a French Catholic, he's a better bet to be Lord of the Netherlands for England than Philip of Spain is. And actually having him establish his rule successfully in the Low Countries would secure a host of English objectives. So it would result in the removal of Parma and his terrifying Spanish army i mean that would be brilliant it would also restore trade links between the low countries in england and it's been one of the themes of the rest is history over years that england's trade links with the low countries in the middle ages and in the 16th century are crucial the wool that goes to bruges and ghent and above all antwerp yeah really really matters and of course there's the the whole kind of gaza thing the fact that protestants in england and protestants in the Low Countries, there's a natural sympathy between them and therefore securing freedom of worship for the Protestants, which the Duke of Anjou has guaranteed, would be an absolute win for them.

42:57Tom Holland:And so this is why, you know, Elizabeth had been courting Anjou. It's why she co-opted Marchement to Knight Drake. She's signalling to both sides in the Low Countries her support for Anjou as king in Philip's place. And also, of course, she is, you know, as we said, she's bunging the Dutch rebels a whole load of cash as well that has come from Drake's void around the world. So if only this can work out, it'll be brilliant for Elizabeth. In all kinds of strategic ways, it will be a victory. Unfortunately for her, it does not work out. And what will prove to be her last engagement is actually doomed.

43:33Tom Holland:Because even as Anjou arrives in the Low Countries, there is there an undertow of discontent and two crucial states in the low countries have refused to accept him from the start and these are zealand and the largest of the rebel states holland they say we are not having anjou and holland and zealand are essentially the heartlands of the protestant resistance and they just do not want a catholic prince right even if he comes with Elizabeth's seal of approval. And meanwhile, Anjou, he doesn't really just want to be a lord, he wants to be the king of the Netherlands. And so he's becoming increasingly annoyed by all the restrictions that have been placed on him by the Dutch rebels.

44:19Tom Holland:And in January 1583, he launches an attempted coup in Antwerp, which is the great economic ideological powerhouse of the low countries. It's by far the richest city in Europe, quite possibly the world. It's as large as Paris. It's much larger than London. It's the great marketplace of this emerging global economy. And so if Anjou can seize control of Antwerp, then he will have a lot of cash behind him. And perhaps he really can set about making himself king rather than just lord of the low countries. Unfortunately for him, it goes horribly wrong. His militia are wiped out in what becomes known as the French Fury.

45:00Tom Holland:And as a result of that defeat, his prospects in the Low Countries are doomed. And by June, he has left for France and he never returns. And he goes back to mummy, Catherine de Meditry, very formidable figure. And she is completely withering. And she says to him, would to God you had died young. You would not then have been the cause of death of so many brave gentlemen. Wow, that's harsh. So any mothers out there wanting parenting tips for sons who let them down. Listen and learn. And Elizabeth also reacts very harshly. She breaks off the engagement. So that attempt to secure the defeat of the Spanish in the Low Countries is blocked.

45:40Tom Holland:Anjou is, you know, he's not going to establish his rule there. And all the while, she's been manoeuvring to get Anjou in place in the Netherlands. Her Catholic enemies likewise have been on manoeuvres. And even as Elizabeth, in the eyes of her Privy Council and government, are fixed on the low countries, a new conspiracy is brewing in France. And it's a new conspiracy, but it is a conspiracy with goals that will be very familiar to people who've been listening to our early episode. These goals are a Catholic invasion of England, the toppling of Elizabeth, the replacement of Elizabeth as Queen by Mary Stuart.

46:21Tom Holland:And as Burley's head of intelligence in London puts it, writing to Lord Burley as the first kind of whiff of this conspiracy starts reaching the noses of Burley's intelligence agents. The enemy sleeps not.

46:39Dominic Sandbrook:Ominous. So come back after the break to find out what happens with this new conspiracy.

46:49Dominic Sandbrook:This episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic. Recently, I've had to work through all kinds of issues. One of them was having to write a series about the First World War in 1915. It would have been so easy to be overwhelmed by that, like an Italian soldier trudging up a limestone hill towards Austrian guns. Whereas the Italians often felt alone in that campaign, I knew that I always had you. It was very special. You did dominate. Yeah. And if I'd had to do it on my own, I'd have probably been daunted. I never felt alone. But sometimes people do feel alone. And the good news is that when you need help thinking through a problem, there's Claude.

47:26Tom Holland:Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. So whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai slash restishistory. That's claude.ai slash restishistory.

48:02Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back, everybody, to The Rest is History. It is June 1583. Picture the scene. we are in Paris, a meeting of some of the worst people in the world. Led by the Duke of Guise, so he's been played, if you recall, by Mads Mikkelsen. He is the leader of the Catholic League in France. He is the cousin of Mary, Queen of Scots. He is a man who has been committed for years to the overthrow of Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth I, and indeed Protestantism in England. So an absolutely terrible man. And Tom, as we look on this through the eyes of the heroes of this story, Lord Bergeley and Sir Francis Walsingham, it's like the opening of the Naked Gun, isn't it?

48:49Dominic Sandbrook:When you've got the Ayatollah and you've got Mikhail Gorbachev and you've got Colonel Gaddafi and all these other villains that Frank Drebin of Police Squad has to confront. This is basically the scene, because who are the people who are there apart from the Duke of Guise?

49:05Tom Holland:So Guise is there. He's got his military and spiritual advisors. And if you're a devout Protestant, you know, the military and spiritual advisors of the Duke of Guise are terrible people. William Allen, the head of the English Catholics in exile. No, he's a bad man. Yeah. The Pope's nuncio in Paris. Oh, come on. It gets worse. And the Archbishop of Glasgow, a guy called James Beaton, who is effectively functioning as Mary Stuart's ambassador in Paris. So the Mary Queen of Scots. What a chamber of horrors. Yeah. I mean, if you're Walsingham, this is all your nightmares in one room. So Gies has been hankering to invade England for ages.

49:43Tom Holland:We talked about this earlier. He's the cousin of Mary, Queen of Scots. So if he can marry Mary, Queen of Scots, it'd be brilliant. He'll become King of England and maybe King of Scotland as well. But what makes him push the venture now is that he has secured the backing of two crucial allies. The first of these is the Pope. So hence the presence of the nuncio there. but also crucially of Mendoza, who is the choleric and very aggressively anti-Protestant Spanish ambassador in London, who we met earlier in this episode. So with the backing of the Pope and the Spanish ambassador in England, things are looking very promising.

50:20Tom Holland:And a very detailed plan is drawn up at this meeting. And it's decided that 12 ,000 troops will set sail from France for Northwest England. So that's Lancashire, which is the most Catholic region of England. And funds will have been sent ahead of the invasion to encourage the Catholics in Lancashire to prepare themselves for revolt. And these funds are to be provided by Gies himself, but also by Philip II and by the Pope. So the kind of unholy trinity from the point of view of Burley and Walsingham. Meanwhile, a second smaller force will cross the channel and land in Sussex. So that is in southern England.

51:01Tom Holland:And here they will team up with the earls of Northumberland and Arundel, who are both Catholic and both have castles located conveniently nearby the projected landing place for this invasion force. And the sign of how seriously Guise is taking all this, this isn't just a pipe dream, he really is intending that it should go ahead, is that the following month after this meeting, where the plans have been drawn up, he heads to Normandy, where he sets himself preparing for this channel crossing. Now, none of this will work without good intelligence. And so at this stage of the preparations for the invasion, the plans are mostly being conducted in the shadows.

51:43Tom Holland:And Guise is sponsoring a number of agents. And some of these he is sending undercover across the channel, and others are already resident in England and being controlled from the French embassy in London. And the key agent among these agents who were already in England is a young Catholic gentleman called Francis Throckmorton. He's very well born, he's well connected. His uncle had served Elizabeth as her ambassador to both Scotland and France. But unfortunately, Francis's own family has fallen on hard times. So Francis's father is a lawyer and a royal official. But he died in 1580 with a kind of accusation of corrupt dealings hanging over his head and a massive fine that's been kind of levied against him.

52:35Tom Holland:So this is a very bad patrimony for Francis to inherit. And on top of that, Francis has been secretly raised by his mother as a Catholic. So he's skint and a Catholic. In other words, It's exactly the kind of person who is liable to become an agent for Guise because it serves his ideological, but also his financial interests. Right. And it's Throckmorton who links up Mary Stewart, who is under house arrest in Yorkshire at the time, so Mary Queen of Scots, the conspirators in London and the conspirators in Paris. So he is the kind of the go-between between them all.

53:11Dominic Sandbrook:Right. Hence the Throckmorton plot, as it's later known. So the conspiracy in London, the headquarters of this conspiracy, effectively the Spanish embassy, I guess, the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, we already talked about him. He's this sort of, I mean, he's like a figure from a kind of Protestant casting agency. Yeah, nightmare. Yeah, exactly. He hates Elizabeth, he hates Francis Drake, he hates England. He's just a terrible person. And then the other person is the French ambassador, and he is called Michel de Castelnau, And he is much more calculating and smoother and more subtle, isn't he, than the Spanish guy?

53:47Tom Holland:Yes. And he's been there a long time. So he'd been sent in 1572 and charged specifically with smoothing Anglo-French relations after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. So he's been chosen for his emolliency, among other qualities. And he's done a very good job. And so by 1583, he's got over a decade's worth of experience in handling relations with Elizabeth and her government. And Elizabeth is not an easy woman to handle. I mean, you know, she plays the game very well. But the whole while, I'm sad to say, Castelnau has been in close contact with Mary, Queen of Scots, who is writing to him using a cipher.

54:24Tom Holland:And amazingly, a cache of her letters were found as recently as 2024 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. And they show conclusively that Mary, Queen of Scots is not a passive bystander in this. You know, she's not just a cipher being used by Guise for his own interest. She was actually an active conspirator in this plot.

54:48Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. So this has been debated by historians for decades, for centuries. Yeah. Was Mary effectively framed? You know, was she being used by more Machiavellian people? Was she naive? Or did she join in the plots? Was she an active agent in the conspiracy? and and basically the this recent evidence suggests there's no question whatsoever yes it does she knew exactly what she was doing she'd rolled up her sleeves she got stuck in

55:17Tom Holland:yeah and so a result of this the residency of the french ambassador salisbury court which is a house of grand very grand house of fleet street this makes it a kind of key focus of the conspiracy that is being hatched by guise you know he he essentially it's the nerve center for operations within England itself. However, Walsingham, the great spy chief of Elizabeth, all along has had moles in the French embassy in Salisbury Court. And one of them goes by the codename of Henry Faggot. Great codename. And the identity of this mole is very controversial. So in 1991, the great historian of these topics, John Bossie, He published a book arguing that this mole, Henry Faggart, had actually been a very, very famous name in Renaissance philosophy.

56:12Tom Holland:And this was a Neapolitan friar who had turned a kind of philosopher of nature. He'd become a hermetic magician. And the name of this guy is Giordano Bruno.

56:23Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, yeah. Very big name.

56:25Tom Holland:Yeah. So Bruno ends up becoming a pantheist. theist. He is a skeptic about the Trinity. He doubts the divinity of Christ. So, you know, the full smorgasbord of heresies. And he very groovily argued for an infinite universe and the possibility of life in outer space. So a big fan of the idea of aliens. And he would end up being burned in 1600 in Rome by the Inquisition. And there is a famous statue of Bruno there. And he's kind of celebrated as a martyr for freedom of speech. I mean, I don't think he was really that. His beliefs were kind of too renaissance, really, by our lights, too strange. But he's a very powerful, charismatic, fascinating figure.

57:10Tom Holland:So it's amazing the possibility that he was Walsingham's Mole in Salisbury Court. And if Henry Faggart was Bruno, then as Hugh Trevor Roper in his review of Bossy's book said he'd chosen his pseudonym with prescient grim humor because of course faggots would be used to burn him. Of course. But why would he, why would he have done it for money for? I suppose it would have been for money. You know, he is there. He's in the right place at the right time. He is serving as the French ambassador's secretary in 1583. But it has to be said that Bossy's argument has not been universally accepted. In fact, I think probably most historians don't accept it.

57:52Tom Holland:And the reason for that is that the evidence is entirely circumstantial. You know, it's just you could say it's all just coincidence. But whoever faggot is, he is the one who first fingers Strockmorton as a spy to Walsingham. And so Walsingham then recruits another mole in the embassy. And we have no idea who this was, but someone who is much closer to Castelnau than whoever faggot was. And he provides Walsingham with copies of the actual correspondence between Mary and Castelnau. And by June 1583, so this is exactly the time when Gies is convening his meeting in Paris to plot the invasion, Mary is already anxious that Walsingham is on to Throckmorton.

58:34Tom Holland:And she writes using her cipher to the French embassy, to the ambassador there, to say as much. And, you know, she's not wrong because Walsingham is indeed monitoring Throckmorton's meetings with Castelnogh and also with Mendoza. so even as the plot is going ahead Walsingham is watching every last step

58:55Dominic Sandbrook:and then he pounces doesn't he he waits and waits and waits then he pounces on the 7th of November and actually Throckmorton is they catch him red-handed yeah encoding a letter to Mary coding a letter and they burst in and arrest him

59:09Tom Holland:yeah and so he's taken to the tower where he is put to the rack he's very brave he refuses to speak I mean he suffers excruciating torture But Walsingham, he says, notwithstanding the great show that he hath made of a Roman resolution, i.e. in other words, he's prepared to suffer death rather than speak his mind. Walsingham says he will. He suffered too much pain. You know, he, one of the more chilling things about Walsingham, he understands the psychology of pain. And he's right, because three days later, you know, by which time Throckmorton's been given time to recover, the prisoner is led back to the rack and the site of it.

59:49Tom Holland:He just gives way. He falls to his knees. He makes his confession. And all the details of the plot come out, the involvement of Guise, of Castelnau in the French embassy, of Mendoza in the Spanish embassy, and crucially of Mary, Queen of Scots. and it's the last confession the confession that mary has been corresponding in treasonous tones with him that uh causes throckmorton the most agony so he cries out now i have betrayed her who was dearest to me in this world and since i have failed with my faith towards her i care not if i were hanged and that's just as well because he is hanged well more than hanged i mean it's worse than hanging right yeah so he's tried in may 1584 and he does retract his confession and he says you know i only made it because i i'd suffered such pain but it doesn't help he is convicted for treason of course and so therefore he suffers a traitor's fate he's hung drawn and courted at tyburn on the 10th of july and he dies refusing to ask for the queen's forgiveness which traditionally people would do because then their their relatives and heirs would be treated better he refuses to do that from walsingham's point of view it's you know it's been brilliant it's been a completely triumphant feat of spycraft and it has massive massive consequences so let's look at

1:01:11Dominic Sandbrook:the consequences and let's go through the various people who were involved in the plot as it were the ayatollah michael gorbachev and so on and and what the consequences are for them so let's start with the duke of guise so this is the mads mickelson character so he at first after throckmorton's um unmasking that doesn't throw him he continues with his planning doesn't he yeah so mary queen

1:01:33Tom Holland:of scots manages to get a letter through to him and she is very keen that the plot should carry on and she you know she had been queen of france and so um she kind of has investments left from her dowry and she says well you could use money from that to help continue fund the plot um and And, you know, that's what Guise wants to hear. So he says, fine, okay, we'll carry on. But then the plot does get knocked on the head and it's nothing that Walsingham or the English do. It's the fact that on the 10th of June, 1584, the Duke of Anjou, so Elizabeth's frog, you know, this guy who'd been courting him, the guy who had messed up being the Lord of the Netherlands, he dies from malaria at the age of 29.

1:02:13Tom Holland:And this is fateful because it means with the Duke of Anjou, Henry III, Sir Andrew Scott, the King of France, he has no heir. So with his death, the House of Valois will go extinct. And the next in line is Henry of Navarre, Pedro Pascal, who is the Huguenot, the Protestant. And this is plainly intolerable. So just as it's intolerable for Protestants in England that Elizabeth should be succeeded by the Catholic Mary, so is it intolerable for Guise and the Catholics in France that Henry III should be succeeded by the Protestant Henry of Navarre. So his entire focus now is on assuring that this will never happen.

1:02:56Tom Holland:And so the kingdom collapses back into civil war. It's known in France as the War of the Three Henrys, which I think is one of the great names for a war at any time. And basically, France will be so consumed by its own agonies that no one there is going to have much time for affairs in England. So that basically is the French now knocked out of calculations. There remains, of course, the Spanish, and in particular Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, who's up to his eyeballs in all this plotting. And so on the 19th of January, 1584, he was summoned to meet the Privy Council. And Walsingham, in his fluent Italian, lists six charges of conspiracy against him and informs him that he is going to be expelled.

1:03:43Tom Holland:Mendoza very angrily and menacingly denies the charges. And he says, Don Bernardino Mendoza was born not to disturb kingdoms, but to conquer them. Wow. However, that said, he is being expelled. He has no choice but to pack his bags. And this is a decisive moment in Anglo-Spanish relations because no one is sent to replace him. Effectively, England and Spain now have no diplomatic relations, and so it is becoming much harder for the two sides to communicate. So that's Mendoza gone.

1:04:18Dominic Sandbrook:Right. So what about the best known person in this conspiracy, the person on whom the conspiracy really hinges? What about Mary, Queen of Scots?

1:04:27Tom Holland:Well, she denies all the charges against her, and she insists quite correctly that she had written none of the letters carried by Throckmorton because they'd been written by her secretaries. And she says, I knew absolutely nothing about them. There is also a problem for Walsingham and Burley, should they want to prosecute Mary. Because remember that Throckmorton at his trial had said that he had confessed under duress because of the pain of the rack. And under English law, that invalidates his evidence. and of course always lurking in the background is the biggest problem of all which is that mary is a sovereign queen and that therefore elizabeth refuses to countenance the possibility of her being executed and also mary can quite reasonably say well i can't be accused of treason because as a sovereign queen how can i possibly be a subject of elizabeth and you know that is a very valid legal point.

1:05:28Tom Holland:And this all along has been the great imponderable problem for Burley and Walsingham. Mary left alive is clearly a massive, massive threat to Elizabeth. The fact that she is Catholic and Elizabeth's most obvious heir is a constant incentive to Catholic dissidents to try and assassinate Elizabeth or otherwise remove her from the throne. But Elizabeth will not countenance her removal and the legal apparatus for doing it doesn't exist. But the impact of the Throckmorton plot on Burley and Walsingham is absolutely massive because they are now absolutely set on eliminating Mary Queen of Scots no matter what it costs.

1:06:11Tom Holland:No matter what the legal costs, no matter what the diplomatic costs, no matter what the costs in terms of their relationship with their royal mistress, Elizabeth Tudor. The immediate priority for them is massively to tighten the security around Mary to ensure that she can't get letters out. And so to this end, she's placed under much stricter confinement. She's given a much stricter and sterner governor. Her correspondence networks are systematically throttled. And the result of this is that she no longer has access to the outside world. But that's not enough, because Burley and Walsingham, they really need to find a way to bring Mary to trial, to sentence, to execution.

1:06:53Tom Holland:And it is with these goals in mind that in the wake of Throckmorton's execution, Burley and Walsingham draw up a really remarkable document. And this is what comes to be called the bond of association. And it begins with a very simple but ingenious provision. And this provision is that anyone who is responsible for the death of Elizabeth will be ineligible to succeed her. And this will become law. Mary isn't mentioned by name, but she doesn't need to be mentioned by name. It's obviously targeted at her. And by the time this bond of association is signed off by the Privy Council at a meeting in Hampton Court on the 19th of October, 1584, a further crucial provision has been added.

1:07:37Tom Holland:And this states that anyone who is responsible for the death of Elizabeth will be put to death whether they were aware of the assassination plot or not. So just to spell out what that means, if a Catholic assassin kills Elizabeth with the aim of putting Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne, Mary will be subject to death, even if she didn't know anything about the assassination plot.

1:08:04Dominic Sandbrook:And is it just aimed at Mary, do you think, or is it aimed at other people as well?

1:08:07Tom Holland:No, it's just aimed at Mary. And the Privy Council, when they sign this off as law, they know that. And they also know that effectively, they are formally committing themselves to a kind of lynch law. And they then send it out into the streets of London and the kingdom beyond. And thousands and thousands of loyal Englishmen and women add their signatures to this bond of association. And if they're illiterate, then they sign it with their cross. and amazingly on the 5th of january 1585 mary queen of scots herself puts her name to this bond see i think that's smart politics from her yeah it is isn't it because she can feel the noose is tightening around her her neck and so she wants to do all that she can to loosen it yeah but the question is you know will she succeed um and what of what remains her her her preeminent ambition namely to replace Elizabeth on the throne of England.

1:09:04Tom Holland:Can she really be trusted to give up on that? And what do all of these developments, the expulsion of Mendoza, the issue of this kind of lynch law, what does this mean for England's relations with Spain? So the diplomatic relations have been broken. The flames of Protestant revolt are blazing in the low countries. There is no end to that conflict in sight. On top of that, topsy dog, Sir Francis Drake. He is very much on the scene and he has been pressing Elizabeth and the Privy Council to let him have another crack at the Spanish. So I think it is no exaggeration to say that the drumbeat of war is sounding.

1:09:48Dominic Sandbrook:Wow. Drake's drum is sounding and the Tudor Cold War is hotting up. Very, very exciting. And next week it will be red hot it'll be white hot in fact scorching hot incredibly hot all sorts of drama to come because we are of course approaching one of the most dramatic moments in English history so imagine that you wanted to hear those episodes straight away next week's episodes is there any way you could do that well the good news is there is you could be a member of the rest is history club you could be a member of our own Throckmorton plot and if you're not already a conspirator the way to join the um the sinister enterprise is to head to the rest is history.com that's the way that's the only way but people don't know this tom but this is the only way that you can get all the amazing benefits genuinely incredible benefits we've never mentioned that before have we never um and it's important to point that out for the first time dominic i have

1:10:40Tom Holland:even more exciting news because we are running a summer sale and so for a limited time if you want to sign up to the rest of history club listen about the dinosaurs and a host of other supplementary benefits then you will get an extra 20 off an annual membership using the code summer 26 and this is only valid until the 31st of august so hurry hurry hurry while stocks last anyway listen

1:11:06Dominic Sandbrook:do all those things listen to the series join the club it'd be brilliant and we'll see you next time for the road to the spanish armada goodbye bye

1:11:25Dominic Sandbrook:Hey, guys, this is Anthony Scaramucci for The Rest is Politics U.S. Caddy Kay and I want to tell you about our North American tour in October.

1:11:34Tom Holland:Donald Trump is rewriting the history of the United States. From trade wars to immigration crackdowns to global conflicts, we are here to make sense of all of it.

1:11:44Dominic Sandbrook:You know, we're in an era defined by depolarization and American institutions are breaking under Donald Trump.

1:11:52Tom Holland:Cady and I will be live on stage breaking down what's really happening, sharing insider perspectives and answering your questions. This October, we're heading to Toronto, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., a host of other American cities to get into all of the political action. We would love to see you there. Come and join us.

1:12:11Dominic Sandbrook:So head to the restispoliticsus.com to get your tickets and come see us live.