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

Summary

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Podcast Summary

The Rest Is History – Episode 691

Title: Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: The Queen’s Spymaster (Part 1)
Hosts: Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook
Release Date: July 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this gripping installment, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook launch into the political and religious turmoil of Elizabethan England, focusing on the threats faced by Elizabeth I from internal and external Catholic conspiracies. They spotlight the pivotal roles of Elizabeth’s trusted chief minister, William Cecil (later Lord Burghley), and his protégé, Francis Walsingham—the crown’s “spymasters”—as the duo navigates assassination plots, international intrigues, and rebellion to keep Protestant England secure.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: A Realm Under Siege

• Opening Mood: The podcast starts by quoting William Cecil’s gloomy 1569 “briefing paper” (02:12) that depicts Elizabeth I as a patient beset on all sides—a metaphor for England’s perilous position among hostile Catholic powers.
• Elizabeth’s Precarious Rule: Although Elizabeth has ruled for over a decade, the Protestant regime remains fragile, surrounded by Catholic Spain, France, and the Papacy eager to return England to Rome (04:24).
• Central Threat: Elizabeth’s life becomes identified as the single thread holding Protestant England together—her lack of an heir intensifying the sense of jeopardy (05:22).

“The country's future as Protestant hangs really by a single thread... and this thread is Elizabeth's life.” — Tom Holland (05:22)

2. Religious Tensions: The “Cold War” Atmosphere

• England as a Religious Faultline: Protestantism is considered shallowly rooted, especially outside London and the Southeast, with the north remaining militantly Catholic (07:26).
• Espionage & Paranoia: The period is likened to the Cold War, with espionage, double agents, and codebreaking (08:20).

“There is a kind of Cold War context to this conflict... spy chiefs... dirty tricks departments... plots to topple Elizabeth are really present dangers.” — Tom Holland (08:20)

• Major European Flashpoints: France (Catholic-Huguenot civil war) and the Spanish-ruled Low Countries (Protestant repression) serve as warnings for English Protestants of what their fate could be (50:18, 50:56).

3. William Cecil: The Spymaster’s Biography & Motives

• Career Trajectory: Cecil rises from humble origins, serving three Tudor monarchs (Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I), adapting his survival skills to each regime (11:03–15:32).
• Loyalty and Mission: Cecil sees protecting Elizabeth—and Protestantism—as a religious vocation, viewing the conflict as a cosmic battle of good versus evil (18:03, 19:34).

“Although it may not be an open war, it is a cold war in which falsehood is attempting to overthrow truth and hell is raging against the forces of heaven.” — Tom Holland (18:03)

• Relationship with Elizabeth: She grants him unmatched trust, recognizing his competence. Even when they disagree, Cecil’s loyalty is never doubted (16:08, 18:03).

4. Elizabeth’s Vulnerabilities: Succession, Marriage, and the Queen of Scots

• Elizabeth’s Decision Not to Marry: While this gives her diplomatic leverage, it gravely alarms Cecil, who worries about England’s future if she dies without an heir (21:08–22:37).
• Mary, Queen of Scots: Presented as Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin and arch-rival; her presence in England after her fall in Scotland raises the stakes (23:54–28:26).

“Mary is very closely linked to [the Guise family]... the chief of the Guise was her uncle. This is really bad news for English Protestants.” — Tom Holland (24:28)

5. The Emerging Catholic Threat: Rebellion and Infiltration

• Noble Conspiracies and Rebellion: The Duke of Norfolk’s plot to marry Mary, Queen of Scots, supported by Catholic factions, signals domestic peril (36:24–37:47).
• Cecil’s Tactics: He responds with arrests, exposés (via ‘leaked’ pamphlets), and ruthless suppression, laying the ground for the rise of Francis Walsingham as his spymaster ally (40:13).

“He [Walsingham], like Cecil, has no room for complacency. He thinks it's much better to be paranoid than complacent. ‘There is less danger in fearing too much than too little.’” — Tom Holland, quoting Walsingham (41:49)

• The Ridolfi Plot: The uncovering of a pan-European plot, with money flowing from the Pope via Roberto Ridolfi, ties English conspirators directly to Catholic powers abroad (43:35–46:12).

6. International Context: Civil War, Massacre, and English Exceptionalism

• France’s Religious Civil War: The Guise family’s vendetta and violence (including the massacre at Vassy) set chilling precedents for what could occur in England (46:22–52:41).
• Spanish Oppression in the Low Countries: Philip II’s use of the Duke of Alva to stamp out Protestantism inspires horror and gives English exiles cause for unity (50:56–52:41).

“People in England... look across the seas and they do see this great arc of slaughter and bloodshed... and they do think of Elizabeth as a kind of fairy queen.” — Tom Holland (52:41)

• England’s Stability: The hosts argue that the Tudors’ main achievement was maintaining unity and preventing bloody chaos at home, in contrast to continental Europe (54:11–54:33).

7. Conflict Escalates: Suppression and Excommunication

• The Northern Rising: Catholic lords in the north attempt rebellion, aiming to put Mary on the throne. Elizabeth responds with ruthless force, executing 700 rebels (56:58–59:22).
• Papal Bull of Excommunication: In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicates Elizabeth, escalating the religious struggle and instructing Catholics to renounce her—a 16th-century “fatwa” (59:51–61:29).

“He’s issued a fatwa against Elizabeth the First.” — Dominic Sandbrook (61:29)

8. Fabricated Evidence and Double Agents:

• The Ridolfi Plot’s Blurred Lines: Cecil and Walsingham exploit the plot to undermine Mary, possibly using fabrication and Ridolfi as a double/triple agent; the historical record is ambiguous, Le Carré-style (63:33–65:15).

“Cecil’s agents... do this essentially by turning Ridolfi and getting him to make kind of statements that can then be used.” — Tom Holland (65:15)

9. Aftermath and Legacies

• The Execution of Norfolk: The nobleman is executed; Mary, Queen of Scots remains under protection, as Elizabeth refuses to set a precedent by executing an anointed sovereign (65:44).
• Cecil Rewarded: He is elevated to the peerage as Lord Burghley for his service and cunning (68:00).
• The Shadow Grows: Despite setbacks for their enemies, threats continue to loom; the next episode will cover the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and further Catholic plots.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Elizabeth’s Perilous Throne (05:22):
  “The country's future as Protestant hangs really by a single thread... and this thread is Elizabeth's life.” — Tom Holland

• Spy-Thriller Parallels (08:20):
  “There is a kind of Cold War context to this conflict... spy chiefs... dirty tricks departments... plots to topple Elizabeth are really present dangers.” — Tom Holland

• On Cecil’s Motivation (18:03):
  “Although it may not be an open war, it is a cold war in which falsehood is attempting to overthrow truth and hell is raging against the forces of heaven.” — Tom Holland

• On the Risk of Elizabeth’s Celibacy (22:37):
  “If Elizabeth dies or is killed, then from Cecil's perspective, this will spell the triumph of Antichrist.” — Tom Holland

• On Paranoia vs. Complacency (41:49):
  “There is less danger in fearing too much than too little.” — Francis Walsingham (quoted by Tom Holland)

• On Papal Excommunication (61:29):
  “He’s issued a fatwa against Elizabeth the First.” — Dominic Sandbrook

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Key Timestamps for Reference

• 02:12 – Opening: Cecil’s bleak briefing on England’s dangers
• 08:20 – Spy thriller/Cold War analogy, rise of espionage
• 11:03 – Introduction of William Cecil’s background and rise
• 23:54 – Mary, Queen of Scots’ threat and dramatic flight into England
• 36:24 – The Duke of Norfolk’s marital plot for Mary Queen of Scots revealed
• 40:13 – Emergence of Walsingham; pamphlet war against Catholic sympathizers
• 43:35 – The Ridolfi Plot and Walsingham’s interrogation of Ridolfi
• 50:18 – Religious civil war in France; Protestant trauma
• 52:41 – Spanish repression in the Low Countries; English exceptionalism
• 56:58 – Northern Rising and Elizabeth’s harsh reprisals
• 59:51 – Papal Bull excommunicates Elizabeth I
• 61:29 – “Fatwa” against Elizabeth; tightening Catholic noose
• 63:33 – Fabricated evidence, espionage tactics, the blurred line between real and manufactured plots
• 65:44 – Execution of Norfolk, Elizabeth’s refusal to execute Mary
• 68:00 – Cecil becomes Lord Burghley
• 69:19 – Hints at the next episode: The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

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Tone and Style

The episode is richly narrated with the hosts’ trademark blend of humor, vivid analogy, and dramatic tension. Colorful metaphors abound—Elizabeth as “fairy queen,” Cecil as Le Carré’s spymaster, and even the excommunication likened to a “fatwa.” The conversational style makes complex political maneuverings accessible and engaging.

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Conclusion

This deep dive into Elizabethan power politics lays the groundwork for understanding how Protestant England survived in a world rife with enemies and conspiracy. The partnership of Elizabeth, Cecil, and Walsingham ensured stability through paranoia, espionage, and sometimes ruthless force—defining a formative era in English and European history. The story sets up the dramatic events to come, promising further intrigue and bloodshed in the next installment.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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[C]

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[B]

A short memorial of the state of the realm. The perils are many great and imminent Great in respect of both the persons and the matters persons. The Queen's Majesty who plays the part of the patient. The Pope, the King of France and Spain as the authors and workers on her the Queen of Scots as the surgeon's knife, whereby the matters shall be attempted against the Queen's Majesty. The matters for the recovery of the tyranny to the Pope which of late years hath been discovered and so weakened the eviction of the Crown of England from the Queen's Majesty to set it upon the head of the Queen of Scots, changing the estate of England to Popery, which cannot be accomplished while the Queen's Majesty liveth, nor so assuredly and plausibly any way as by putting the crown of England upon the Queen of Scots head. Hi, everybody. That was rather downbeat, indeed, positively gloomy briefing that was written in the early months of the year 1569 by Sir William Cecil, who was the chief minister to Queen Elizabeth I. So Elizabeth I, perhaps the most celebrated of all England's monarchs, had at this point been on the throne of England for just over a decade. She is 35 years old. She is the second daughter of King Henry VIII. So England has broken from Rome. The Reformation has taken place. However, even after a decade, Elizabeth remains embattled. She feels herself threatened by enemies within and enemies without. And that is the subject of this epic new series in which we will be delving into the realm of Elizabeth I and her various challenges, not least the Queen of Scots, Mary, Queen of Scots. So, Tom, take us through William Cecil's briefing paper, because he sets out perfectly there the challenge that we're going to be discussing in this series.

[A]

Well, the metaphor in that briefing paper is a very brutal one. I mean, it's kind of conjuring up an image of Elizabeth as a patient who's been strapped down, and the King of Spain, the King of France, the Pope, are descending on her with their butcher's knives, and the worst blade that they have is the Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart. And so, as you said, this is a very downbeat report, and the briefing that he goes on to list all the challenges that he sees his mistress, Queen Elizabeth, as facing. So Elizabeth is on the throne of England as a Protestant queen, but the two most powerful monarchies in Christendom, Spain and France, are both Catholic. And so these two monarchies, in alliance with the papacy, which it goes without saying, is also Catholic, are very keen to see England return to the Catholic fold. And Cecil sees it as his job to stop that happening. But he also feels this is a massive, massive task, because the prospects of England returning to Catholicism as he sees it, are actually very, very real. So the issue for Cecil, and for all English Protestants is that the country's future as Protestant hangs really by a single thread. And this thread is Elizabeth's life, because she rules famously as a virgin queen, which means she has no child, she has no heir. And that in turn means that if Elizabeth is toppled from her throne by assassination, perhaps, or maybe by armed invasion, then who is best placed to succeed Her. And the answer to that is someone we have done an entire series about on the rest is history. And that is Mary, Queen of Scots. So she is Elizabeth's cousin. Terrible taste in husbands, hanging out with a squad in which everyone is called Mary. Very kind of glamorous and romantic, but an incredible threat to Elizabeth because she is a Catholic. And so getting the Catholic Mary onto Elizabeth's throne, you know, the kings of France and Spain couldn't be happier at the prospect because they regard Protestant England pretty much as the United States today regards Iran, as a kind of a rogue state to be toppled.

[B]

So to pursue that parallel, when the United States attacked Iran, the thinking in Washington and in Israel was that would weaken the regime because there are lots of people in Iran who chafed against the regime. And in fact, there had been riots earlier this year, there'd been the student protests have been all the killings and whatnot. Now, in the 16th century, if you're in the court of France or Spain, presumably you think very similar things because you look at England and you say, well, Protestantism is only a recent transplant onto the body of England, and perhaps there are actually a lot of people who can't wait to be rid of this mad regime that they've got. Is that right?

[A]

It is. And that Cecil thinks it too. I mean, he is also painfully aware that Protestantism in England has very shallow roots and that essentially outside London and the southeast, where it's. It's really pretty strong by now, most of the English, I think, remain instinctively Catholic. I mean, maybe not militantly Catholic, but instinctively Catholic. And in the north, so in the furthest, most regions, maybe in Wales, in Cornwall, and particularly in the north of England, there, I think there is a kind of more militant strain of Catholicism that is aching to see the old ways brought back. And so Cecil's great anxiety is not just about foreign intervention, Spain and France or whatever, but the fact that England is full of potential traitors.

[B]

So that feels very modern, actually, doesn't it? It feels very 20th century, the idea that you have two ideologically opposed blocks, but within each one there is a tremendous paranoia about the enemy within.

[A]

I mean, I think it would be very familiar to anyone who's read Le Carre's Cold War novels, the Smiley novels, because there is a kind of Cold War context to this conflict. So there are war conflicts being fought out beyond England on foreign battlefields between Protestants and Catholics. And this is going to be part of the story that we're telling in this series. But you also have this war Going on in the shadows. You have spy chiefs, they are employing code breakers, they are employing double agents, they have dirty tricks departments. The plots and the narratives will be very, very familiar to anyone who has read contemporary spy espionage thrillers. And Cecil, when he is warning about plots to topple Elizabeth and to replace her with the Catholic Mary, I mean, he is not crying wolf. These are really present dangers. There are conspiracies that are kind of brewing all the time. There are codes that he needs to have cracked. You know, there are moles buried deep within the establishment. So, you know, they didn't have the word spy so much. They used the word intelligencer. But you could imagine a novel call Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, intelligencer, and it would echo lots of the kind of Le Carre themes. But having said that, as well as this kind of story of espionage, we will also be seeing some of the greatest and most dramatic episodes of the age. So we will be in Paris as the streets run red with the blood of protestants on the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. And we will be out on the ocean wave on the Pacific as top son of Devon, Francis Drake carves out a name for himself as one of the greatest heroes of the age. Or if you are Spanish, of course, one of the greatest pirates of the age. And we will be going to the Low Countries as well. The scene of the Dutch Revolt, one of the most seismic episodes in European history. And then the climax of this series, we will be in Fotheringay Castle on 8th February 1587, and there we will be witnessing an execution that will reverberate across Europe and will make inevitable the launching by Spain of a great armada. And that will be the climax of the series.

[B]

Very exciting, very exciting and loads to look forward to. But let's start with our protagonist. So this is the man whose voice we heard at the beginning of the episode. This is William Cecil. He's the Principal Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth I. And he is unquestionably the most powerful man in England at this point, isn't he?

[A]

He absolutely is. So we have met him before in the series we did on the young Elizabeth. But those who haven't listened to that or forgotten it, just to remind ourselves who he is, what he's lived through, what he's about. So he's from a relatively humble background of Welsh extraction. So a little bit of Welsh history.

[B]

Again, great test in Welsh history.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Ye. He's from Lincolnshire. He's a very committed Protestant. But even more than that, the thing about him is he's unbelievably alien, I would say perhaps the ablest minister in the whole of British history. And as you said, under Elizabeth I, he's definitely the most powerful figure in the kingdom. And that is because he has all kinds of qualities. He's very loyal, he's very subtle, he has an insane capacity for hard work. And basically he's the master of all the arts of statecraft. And he's also very experienced. So in 1569, he is 49 years old. And by this point, he has served three Tudor monarchs in succession. And these are the three children of Henry VII. The son was Edward VI, and he had come to the throne as a young boy in 1547. I mean, very young, but he was a very ardent Protestant. You know, if there were kind of churches to be painted white and rude screens to be smashed, he'd be piling it.

[B]

He loved to whitewash.

[A]

Loved a whitewash. And this is great for Cecil, who, as we said, is an ardent Protestant. So to be very able and to be an ardent Protestant under Edward VI was great. And so Cecil, you know, the. The board of Tudor, board of Snakes and Ladders, he is shooting up those ladders under Edward VI. But then in 1553, total disaster for Cecil, because Edward dies at the very tender age of 15, and he is succeeded by his elder sister, Mary. And when I say elder, I mean she's really elder because she's 37 at that point, and she is the daughter of Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who is both very Catholic and very Spanish. And Mary has inherited a fondness for Catholicism and the Spanish that will result in England kind of get doing a massive reverse turn from Edward's Protestant settlement. So Mary returns England to pap obedience. She marries a very, very Catholic husband. And this is Philip of Spain, who is the heir to an enormous empire. So not just Spain itself, but the Low Countries, huge chunks of Italy, great sways of the New World, so all those lands that the conquistadors have conquered.

[B]

But what about Cecil during this period? Because presumably he as an ultra Protestant. Yeah, this is not good for him.

[A]

Yeah, so we said he's subtle. I mean, his subtlety at this point consists very much in keeping his head down, but also kind of looking around and thinking, well, what if Mary doesn't survive? What if she doesn't have a child, which she ends up not doing. Who will then the heir be? And the answer is it will be this very Protestant half sister of Mary called Elizabeth. And Mary hates and fears Elizabeth for reasons that go a very long way back. Because we said Catherine of Aragon, this Catholic Spanish princess, who is Mary's mother, Henry's first wife, had notoriously been divorced and dumped by Henry VIII in favor of Anne Boleyn, who was Protestant. And Anne Boleyn was Elizabeth's mother. So as Elizabeth grows up, Mary's supporters and Catholics more generally see Elizabeth as this kind of bastard daughter of a heretic, a witch, a whore, this woman who had been executed in the Tower of London. And so Elizabeth is the great kind of bogey for Catholics. But that of course makes her the great prospect, the great heroine for Protestants like Cecil. For large stretches of Mary's reign, Elizabeth is kept pretty isolated, either actually in the Tower for several months or kind of in the depths of the countryside. But Cecil, he is kind of putting out felis to Elizabeth and kind of serving really as her, her kind of right hand man, her teacher, her instructor in the arts of statecraft, her consigliere. Yes. And so by 1558, it is becoming clear that not only is Mary not gonna have a child, but that she is dying.

[B]

So then, on the 17th of November 1558, the long awaited moment comes. Mary does die. Elizabeth becomes Queen. She's 25 years old. And as everybody expects, her new chief secretary is William Cecil. And his priority is to have a new U turn after Mary's U turn, to turn back to what he regards as the true faith and to leading them into the sunlit uplands of Protestantism. And he has a fair bit of leeway to do this because Elizabeth basically is placing a colossal amount of trust in him. I mean, he's got a lot of power, hasn't he?

[A]

Yeah. So Elizabeth says to him, I want you as minister, to do what you think is right for me in the country, even if I may not necessarily agree with you. So that is an incredible degree of trust to kind of contrast with her. Her father, of course, he was very prone to chopping the heads of ministers with whom he ended up disagreeing. Elizabeth is saying, I won't do this. And she stays true to that word.

[B]

Do you think she does that partly because she's a woman? Do you think she feels that she needs a reliable, stable chief minister? She can't go through them as her father did?

[A]

I think that's part of it, but I think it's more the case that Elizabeth has a very, very astute eye for talent and she can recognise what she has in Cecil. And maybe the measure of that is that Normally, a king or queen is served by various secretaries, but Cecil is her only secretary. And effectively I said, he's the ablest man in the history of English government. I mean, he's definitely the most tireless. So to quote Stephen Orford, who's written the definitive biography of Cecil, by design and by instinct, he was at the heart of Elizabeth's court. He controlled the machinery of power. He ran the Royal Secretariat and chaired meetings at the Privy Council. He advised the Queen daily and read every piece of paper that was sent to her. He was Elizabeth's voice to the world, for he wrote her letters and proclamations and drafted the instructions to her ambassadors, with ready access to her in her private rooms and a mastery of the government machine. He saw and heard all that went on at court. So he has a finger in every pie going.

[B]

So some people might be reminded of, especially people who've read Wolf hall and the successor books, might be reminded of Thomas Cromwell, who was another very mighty chief minister. But I suppose the difference is that Thomas Cromwell, who was Henry VIII's chief minister, was a bit of a blunt instrument, wasn't he? Whereas Cecil operates more cleverly in the shadows. He's smoother, I suppose, I think.

[A]

Also, Cromer was loyal to Henry, but not sufficiently loyal in the end. Whereas Cecil is always loyal. And even when he is going against what seems to be Elizabeth's wishes, Elizabeth is confident that he is ultimately serving her purposes and her cause, and she never doubts that. And I think she's right not to doubt that. And the reason that Cecil is loyal to Elizabeth isn't just a personal loyalty. It's a conviction that God has placed her on the throne to serve as a kind of a Deborah, a judge sent to rule God's chosen people and to help kind of bring them out of the bondage of popery and superstition. But also what steels him in his sense of mission, I think, is a sense that within England, Protestants are surrounded by enemies, and that within Europe, England is surrounded by enemies, and that these enemies are working to destroy England's path to godliness. And that therefore, although it may not be an open war, it is a cold war in which falsehood is attempting to overthrow truth and hell is raging against the forces of heaven and Satan against Christ. And I think that unless you accept that this is fundamental to Cecil's vision and purpose, you don't really understand what is at stake in Elizabethan England in this period. It is fundamental to the way that Cecil sees the world.

[B]

So he's Simultaneously a man of subtlety, nuance, but also a man who at his heart believes this is ultimately a straightforward clash between right and wrong, truth and lies, you know, the way of heaven and the way of hell, I guess. So we started and we were 10 years on, effectively more than a decade on from Elizabeth's coronation. And when Cecil wrote that briefing paper, I mean, he doesn't say, well, 10 years on and everything is great. He actually, there is a sense of sort of existential urgency to his, to his briefing because he thinks that Elizabeth is more in battle than ever before. And this comes back to the issue of her great rival, doesn't it? Mary, Queen of Scots.

[A]

I mean, if you read that briefing paper, which is very detailed and fascinating, he doesn't quite put it in these terms, but essentially Cecil sees all of England's problems as stemming from two women. And the first of these two women is actually the Queen herself, Cecil's royal mistress, Elizabeth Tudor. We've said Cecil is devoted to her, but he also finds her completely infuriating. He finds her willful, mercurial, obstinate in all kinds of matters in which he thinks she should not be obstinate. And her absolute worst mistake, in Cecil's opinion, is to cling to a policy that she is held to right from her coronation. And Cecil describes it as being her coldness and forbearing from the beginning of her reign to proceed in marriage.

[B]

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, as a, as a queen, and you hand all of that over to, to your husband. And she just doesn't want to make that mistake.

[A]

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, and Elizabeth doesn't want to repe. 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. 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. And it Enables her to play France and Spain off against each other.

[B]

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 you're. And that's it, you're gone. And if she dies, everything that he's building will have been for nothing.

[A]

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 us in poison or, you know, bring out, 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. You know, she. 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, as we've said, is the second woman to haunt his nightmares. And this is Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots.

[B]

So we did a whole series about 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 Cathol you can find, because she is.

[A]

She's a French Catholic, basically.

[B]

So her mother was from the. The great Catholic aristocratic dynasty, the Guise dynasty.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yes. 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 killed her own husband, Lord Darnley, who listeners may remember was described as the great cock chick, kind of terrible man. 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, 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. 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 at the new year, and she gets into a fishing boat and she rows 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, and then madly to Cecil, and she says, I have the hope of obtaining the assistance of your good counsel. And that. That is mad, because, of course, Cecil is her deadliest enemy. Cecil hates her. In fact, you know, 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 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. 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.

[B]

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

[A]

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.

[B]

Now in Pompeii, out of Time with Tom Hiddleston. Hiddleston will guide you between past and present. He will uncover the real of the people who lived through one of history's most notorious disasters.

[A]

It is a cinematic masterpiece from the makers of Loki, and it brings the ancient world vividly to life.

[B]

Watch Pompeii out of Time with Tom Hiddleston, Thursday at 8pm on National Geographic. Hello, everybody. We have absolutely sensational, spectacular, stupendous news about a forthcoming Rest Is History live show.

[A]

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.

[B]

And it's.

[A]

Well, I don't say it's brilliant, but it's mad, isn't it?

[B]

It is mad. To give people a bit of context, it's an amazing story. The emperor of Abyssinia to Wodros 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.

[A]

History, yes. And that 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.

[B]

Totally.

[A]

So anyone who enjoys Flashman will enjoy this. And we are going to be doing it at the Southbank 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. 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 thereestishistory.com.

[B]

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. The family home of the man we were talking about in the first half, William Cecil, the chief minister of Elizabeth I. 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. 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, Dom, 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?

[A]

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, you know, it's exquisite, it's beautiful, it's ordered and it's this great nerve centre 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. 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. So in the short memorial of the state of the realm, which you began the episode with a reading from, he'd 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, 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, you know, 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 Scots? So is Mary Stuart really the danger that Cecil thinks that she is?

[B]

Well, let's start with England, England itself. I mean, you said, oh, you know, people think of it as maypoles and all of this kind of thing, Elizabethan England. But actually, when Cecil looks, if you can, you can picture him kind of looking at his map or at 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 troubled place in 1569.

[A]

Well, more specifically, there's been this terrifying warning that no one can ignore, which is the fact that 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 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. 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.

[B]

Insane.

[A]

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 a crypto Catholic, he's not really.

[B]

He's hiding in plain sight.

[A]

Well, everyone knows, basically, he's Catholic, so he's kind of rich. He's got royal blood, he's Catholic. 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.

[B]

I mean, who could possibly have guessed

[A]

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? 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 can marry Queen of Scots because I, you know, I am basically a king.

[B]

That's insane. That really is absolutely bonkers.

[A]

Yeah. So Elizabeth is furious. She kind of tells Norfolk to go back to his estate and stay there. And 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, he has a private meeting with the Queen. 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 Cecil manoeuvre. 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 League. And this pamphlet very savagely attacks Norfolk as a Papist, says, you know, he's not a Protestant at all, 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. And this is a man who will be playing a key role in our story. He's a man called Francis Walsingham.

[B]

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 purist written look and sort of vibe to him. He's quite. He looks sort of austere.

[A]

He wears black, white rough, but otherwise.

[B]

Yeah, white rough. Yeah, he's. He's got a sort of watchful, contemplative, subtle, dangerously quiet. That's the kind of person he is.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Hooded eyes, but as a double act. I mean, they must be, they must rank alongside. I mean, they're not. 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.

[A]

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 recognizes how effective they are, and they're playing the role that she as Queen Car. 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 Cecil, she's appointed Cecil. Cecil has appointed Walsingham. So it's kind of working.

[B]

And they're both. I mean, Walsingham, like Cecil, is completely devoted to the regime, isn't he? If Elizabeth falls, you know, he's for the high jump, effectively. I mean, he's got tremendous qualities. He's a master of tongues, right? He speaks French, Italian. He's traveled in Europe. Europe. You know, he's a. He's a very impressive and sophisticated person.

[A]

So he understands how the Catholic powers work. I mean, he's a consummate, kind of cold warrior, if you want to put it like that. He understands the enemy, and 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. 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 isn't 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. 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. So the worst of the worst.

[B]

And he's been giving it to the servants of the Duke of Norfolk.

[A]

Correct. So this is what Walsingham discovers in the process of his interrogation. And not just to the Duke of Norfolk, work 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 via this guy, Ridolfi, and Ridolfi 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?

[B]

Just one question about Ridolfi, the Ridolfi plot. There's no suspicion that he's been framed,

[A]

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 Ridolfi plot suggests is first of all, that yes, the Duke of Norfolk is definitely embroiled in an overcoming fairly 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 you know the Pope, the Pope has no divisions, but he is the, the Holy Father to both the kings of France and Spain. So what might the Pope's agents have been saying to Philip II of Spain and to, and to France and let's come 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 Geese, and in particular on one guy in particular who's only 19 years old. He is that the Duke of Guise, Henri, the Duke of Giza, let's call him Henry. And to Protestants in England, Henry of Guise is the absolute archetype of a sinister Catholic Machiavel. 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.

[C]

Right.

[A]

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.

[B]

He's like one of Saddam's sons or something.

[A]

Yes, yes. Or Gaddafi. So Henry of Guise's father, Francis, this is the guy who had been Mary Queen of Scots uncle. And so he's the ultimate Cecil bogeyman. He'd also captured Calais in 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, 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 in French Protestants had been left dead. And these included five women and one child. And to Cecil, this massacre serves as evidence of what, 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. 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 marksman. 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. And Henry, the young Duke of Guise, this guy who is, he's, he's still in his teens, he embodies both these, you know, 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. It means that basically he's number two to the constable of France, who is the kind of the main military officer in. In the French kingdom. And originally, Coligny and Francis of Guise had been great mates. They hung out at the court. They, you know, had a great time, complete lads together. But then in 1558, Coligny had become a Protestant. He'd had a kind of Calvinist conversion. And Calvin, actually the. 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 Coligny had actually commissioned the murder of Henry's father, Henry of Guise's father is unclear. But definitely Henry of Guise thinks that Coligny 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 Coligny and Guise at the head of the respective sides in this French civil war, of the wounds being kind of bound up and healed.

[B]

So when Cecila and Walsingham look at their map, which they undoubted, you can imagine them together in the study, looking out over the garden and then and 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? It. So that's Belgium and Holland, effectively, yes,

[A]

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 power 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 Bildenstorm, 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 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. 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. 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.

[B]

That was a great episode, but we

[A]

didn't really talk about that on the. 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 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. 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 protectress. 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. And that is why Cecil is so desperate to stop the threatening march of history, if you want to put it like that.

[B]

I think that's true of the Tudors generally, Tom. Actually, that's my controversial opinion about the Tudors, is people would think of the Tudors as melodramatic and colorful, 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.

[A]

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 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. 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 energy 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 succoring of the persecuted. In other words, for taking the side of the persecuted Protestants in France and in the Low Countries.

[B]

So 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. Leads to the outbreak of the First World War. Well, 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 supporting terrorists completely.

[A]

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 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. The late 1560s, you know, 1569, when Cecil wrote that report, it's. No, 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. There's this whole courtship thing between the Duke of Norfol 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 Ridolfi, 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 to 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. And these are very, very significant players in the politics of northern England. Sir Thomas Percy, heir of the Percies, the great family of Northumberland, he's the Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, the Earl of Westmoreland. So on the other side of the coast from Northumberland, the pair of them rise in revolt. And their object, they make this clear, is to liberate Mary Stuart 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. 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 death of 300 heretics. You know, Elizabeth has sanctioned the execution of 400 more people than that.

[B]

So the difference, though, is that they have risen in revolt. So if you rise in revolt, you know what you're getting into.

[A]

Yeah, you could say that. You could say that. But, you know, she is at least as robust in her approach to stamping out a sedition as Mary was.

[B]

We are very keen on robust statesmanship, but the rest is history. And I just want to make that very clear to all our listeners.

[A]

We've had this writing 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 Protestant regime.

[B]

I dread getting a papal bull. I mean, literally, when postman comes, I worry about papal bull.

[A]

So this papal bull is published, obviously, by the Pope. That's what makes it papal. And this is Pius V and it's called Regnans in Excelsis, which is the first line of the bull, which means reigning 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 holding the Pope on a tight leash. And I think the kind of the. The Pope takes his chance. Philip's. Philip is distracted, and he. 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, 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.

[B]

So this is really raising the stakes. If you want to, you know, stay in the bosom of the Church, you have to. 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, 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 fatwire against Elizabeth the First.

[A]

So it's, it's, 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 of the North. So he's behind that. You've got the Duke of Geese, 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 center 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. And for two years, so ever since the arrest of Roberto Ridolfi, 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 papal 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, the eastern coast, to stop them from landing there. And that Mary Queen of Scots was deployed 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, 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 is reading it and going, oh, this is terrible.

[B]

And we know for sure the letter was fabricated, right?

[A]

Yes, we do. So people might be. 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 Ridolfi, 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. There is definitely a sense of a plot there, but who, you know, where exactly the, the lines are to be drawn in the, the kind of, the, the balance of all the conspirators is more complex. And just to quote Stephen Allford is again, in his biography of Cecil, he offers a suggestion that Ridolfi was a plant, that the whole conspiracy was a setup from the start, a plot manufactured by Cecil to expose Mary Stuart for the danger he knew her to be.

[B]

Just to focus in on that for a second, Stephen Alford is not claiming that the whole thing is an utter fiction. What it's 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, they basically fabricated the evidence. But he's not denying, I mean, the plot definitely, as insofar as if plot is the right word. The, the, the scheme exists.

[A]

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, Ridolfi has a private audience with the Queen at Greenwich palace, which it's quite odd also, when the plot is revealed, Ridolfi 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 Le Carre quality to it, it. Smoke and mirrors. You're never entirely sure whose side Ridolfi 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. So he gets off it. But I mean, someone who doesn't get off scot free is the Duke of Norfolk because 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, banged 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 Parliament to try and petition her. So you have the, the bishops in the House of Lords. The late Scottish Queen hath 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 sweep Mary Queen of Scots from the board. 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 work that they, they embody. So in December 1571, Elizabeth expels the Spanish ambassador for his involvement in the Ridolfi plot. And she, 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, it's so like the Cold War in, in Britain or the United States where you know, spy networks get exposed in the, the rush of the Soviet Embassy and the Soviet Ambassador gets expelled. It's exactly like that. And so Elizabeth, 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 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 honour 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 the Baron of Burleigh. And today, you know, people are endlessly be given titles and knighthoods and things by the government, but Elizabeth is much more chary. So it is a huge deal for Cecil to be given this honour. And henceforth he will be known as Lord Burleigh. 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.

[B]

Well, it's actually. I mean, not only are they still looking to do it, but actually the threats are becoming, 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 24 August 1572. Twelve 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 nightmare as the massacre of St. 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 I to serve as her ambassador in France. And what Walsingham 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 be telling that story, won't we, next time as part of this epic sweep through the reign of Elizabeth the First. 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 the them, if you want to cross the cross the divide and come over to God's own side, Then head to thereestishistory.com and sign up. It is actually what God would have wanted, and indeed what Elizabeth first would have wanted. 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 tips about the reign of Elizabeth. 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 St. Bartholomew's Day. Goodbye.

[A]

Bye. Bye.