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

How did Elizabeth I rule England? Why was she constantly in mortal peril in 1569? Who was Sir William Cecil, and why was he so crucial to her reign? And, how did his network of spies keep her alive, and England uninvaded…? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the secret war raging in the heart of Elizabeth I’s Tudor England, the religious unrest flaming throughout Europe, and Elizabeth’s master of Spies: Sir William Cecil. _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. Summer sale is here: get an annual membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over: https://therestishistory.com/club?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=summersale26&utm_term=listeners&utm_content=epdescriptionsummer To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  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's head. Hi, everybody. That was a 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.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  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, is 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.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  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 of 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 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

• 7:02Speaker 00

  couldn't be happier at the prospect, because they regard Protestant England pretty much as the United States today regards Iran, as a rogue state to be toppled.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  So to pursue that parallel, when the United States attacked Iran, the thinking in Washington and in Israel was that 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, there had 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?

• 7:52Speaker 00

  It is, and 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 South East, where 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 furthestmost regions, maybe in Wales, in Cornwall, and particularly in the North of England, there, I think, there is a 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.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  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 brewing all the time. There are codes that he needs to have cracked. There are moles buried deep within the establishment. So they didn't have the word spy so much, they used the word intelligencer. But you could imagine a novel called Tinker Tailor Soldier, Intelligencer, and it would echo lots of the Le Carre themes. But having said that, as well as this story of espionage, we will also be seeing some of the greatest and most dramatic episodes of the age.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  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 the 8th of February 1587 and there we will be witnessing

• 10:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  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 is the principal secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth the first, and he is unquestionably the most powerful man in England at this point, isn't he?

• 11:29Speaker 00

  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, who have 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 again.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Great us in Welsh history.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. 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 the first, 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

• 12:30Speaker 00

  of Henry the eighth. The son was Edward the sixth 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 in.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  He loved to whitewash.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  He loved to 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 the sixth was great. And so Cecil, you know, the board of Tudor board of snakes and ladders, he is shooting up those ladders under Edward the sixth. 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 the eighth's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who is both very Catholic and very Spanish.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  And Mary has inherited a fondness for Catholicism and the Spanish that will result in England kind of doing a massive reverse turn from Edward's Protestant settlement. So Mary returns England to papal 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 swathes of the New World. So all those lands that the conquistadors have conquered.

• 14:06Speaker 01

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

• 14:12Speaker 00

  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 he ends up not doing? Who will then the heir be? And the answer is it will be the, 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 the eighth in favour of Anne Boleyn, who was Protestant. And Anne Boleyn was Elizabeth's mother.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  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 has 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 feelers to Elizabeth and kind of serving really as her,

• 15:42Speaker 00

  her kind of right hand man, her teacher, her instructor in the arts of statecraft.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Her concierge.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Yes. And so by 1558, it is becoming clear that not only is Mary not going to have a child, but that she is dying.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  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 lead England 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?

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Elizabeth says to him, I want you as minister to do what you think is right for me and the country, even if I may not necessarily agree with you. So that is an incredible degree of trust, a kind of contrast with 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.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  I think that's, that's part of it, but I think it's, 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, of English government. I mean, he's definitely the most tireless. So to quote Stephen Alford, 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 of the Privy Council.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  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 the eighth'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.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  I think also Cromwell 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, sense to, to rule God's chosen people and to help kind of bring them out of the bondage of popery and superstition. But also what steals him in his sense of mission, I think,

• 19:12Speaker 00

  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 Elizabeth and England in this period.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  It is fundamental to the way that Cecil sees the world.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  So simultaneously a man of subtlety and 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, 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, is great. He, 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.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  I mean, if you read that briefing paper, which is, 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.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  And Cecil describes it as being her coldness and forbearing from the beginning of her reign to proceed in marriage.

• 21:33Speaker 01

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

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Well, there's the example of Mary Tudor, who had married Philip of Spain. And lots of Englishmen, not necessarily Protestants, felt that this had subordinated England to Spain's interests. And Elizabeth doesn't want to repeat that mistake. And as you say, she absolutely has very good politic reasons for remaining a virgin. And in a way, it's amazing that Cecil can't see this.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  And also, I think what's surprising, considering how astute Cecil is, that he doesn't recognise 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.

• 22:43Speaker 01

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

• 23:03Speaker 00

  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 agonisingly 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 some poison, or, you know, take out a dagger, or even a pistol. You know, this is an era where assassins are starting to think, well, we could shoot ahead of state. So the jeopardy is enormous. And again, I think this is something that listeners have to bear in mind. We know that Elizabeth survives to a ripe old age.

• 23:46Speaker 00

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

• 24:20Speaker 01

  So we did a whole series about Queen, Mary, Queen of Scots last year, didn't we? And we were talking, I mean, we talked in that series. She's Elizabeth's cousin. She has Tudor blood in her veins, so she's not just a Stuart, she has Tudor blood. She is a Catholic, and she's actually one of the worst kinds of Catholics you can find, because she is...

• 24:37Speaker 00

  She's a French Catholic, basically.

• 24:39Speaker 01

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

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Yes. So I don't think any patriotic Englishman wants a queen like that on the throne. And not least, because you mentioned the Gies. So the Gies, 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 Gies 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

• 25:33Speaker 00

  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 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 loch, and they had forced her to abdicate.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  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'd 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 Dundrenan Abbey in Galway, very eerie place. I went and visited it at the New Year.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  And she gets into a fishing boat, and she rows across the Solway Firth to Cumbria in England, West Mulund 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 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 Gies,

• 27:40Speaker 00

  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 licence her execution. But there is a problem, because although Elizabeth has no fondness for Mary, and although she entirely recognises the danger that Mary as a Catholic represents to the future of

• 28:20Speaker 00

  Protestant England, the salient thing from Elizabeth's point of view, even more important than Mary's Catholicism, is the fact that she is an anointed monarch. And you cannot, from Elizabeth's point of view, simply chop off the head of an anointed monarch, because Elizabeth herself is an anointed monarch, and she does not want to be the queen who established the precedent that said it was okay to execute an anointed ruler.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:08Speaker 01

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

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  Watch Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston, Thursday at 8pm on National Geographic.

• 30:15Speaker 01

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• 31:16Speaker 00

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

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• 32:24Speaker 01

  Welcome back to the Rest is History. So we are in the autumn of 1569 and we are in Westminster on the Strand. Specifically, we are in Cecil House. So this is the family home of the man we were talking about in the first half, William Cecil, the Chief Minister of Elizabeth 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

• 33:08Speaker 01

  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?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  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, how, you know, it's exquisite, it's beautiful, it's ordered, and it's this great nerve center in which Cecil's mighty political brain is kind of pulsing like a beacon. But beyond the walls, the very thick walls of Cecil House, you have seething alleyways, you have kind of squalid

• 34:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  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, 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

• 35:52Speaker 00

  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?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Well, let's start with England, England itself. I mean, you said, oh, you know, people think of it as maples and all of this kind of thing, Elizabethan England. But actually, when Cecil looks, if you can picture him kind of looking at his map or his dashboard or something, the lights are flashing red, there are enemies everywhere on the map. And there's good reason for that, because England has been a very troubled place in 1569.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  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 is 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

• 37:16Speaker 00

  actually secretly been negotiating behind your back to marry Mary, Queen of Scots. I hope you're all right with that."

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Insane.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Elizabeth is absolutely not all right with this because the Duke of Norfolk is her own second cousin. So he has royal blood. So if he marries Mary, Queen of Scots, I mean, that is a very, very kind of dangerous combination. He's also incredibly rich. He's by far the wealthiest landowner in the country after Elizabeth herself. And the worst thing of all is that even though he's been raised a Protestant, everyone knows that he's a crypto Catholic. I mean, I suppose if they all know he's crypto Catholic, he's not really crypto.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  He's hiding in plain sight.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Well, everyone knows basically he's Catholic. So he's, 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.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  And yet a member of the aristocracy. I mean, who could possibly have guessed that?

• 38:19Speaker 00

  There's a certain Andrew Mountbatten Windsor quality to his political antennae, I think. And so when Elizabeth explodes and she says, what, you know, what are you thinking? What, 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.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  That's insane. That really is absolutely bonkers.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  You know, go in hard, rip out 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

• 39:52Speaker 00

  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 leak. And this pamphlet very savagely attacks Norfolk as a papist. Says, you know, he's not a Protestant at all. He's, 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 Gies, the sinister French noble family, the

• 40:35Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Well, he's another very impressive man, isn't he? So he's an ultra Protestant, and he has a sort of, well, didn't Elizabeth call him a rank Puritan? And he has a very sort of Puritan look and sort of vibes in him. He's quite, he looks sort of austere. He wears black.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  White ruff, but otherwise, yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  White ruff, yeah. He's, he's got a sort of watchful, contemplative, subtle, dangerously quiet. That's the kind of person he is.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  Yes. Hooded eyes.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  But as a double act, I mean, they must be, they must rank alongside, I mean, they're not Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, that's for sure. I mean, they rank alongside the most effective political double acts in, in England's history.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  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 can't. I mean, that's another reason. It's not just that she's a woman. She recognizes that she has a role to play as a figurehead for her people. But she needs competent, brilliant people who are doing her work. And Cecil, she's appointed Cecil, Cecil has appointed Walsingham. So it's kind of working.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  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, he's a master of tongues, right? He speaks French, Italian, he's travelled in Europe, you know, he's, he's a very impressive and sophisticated person.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  So he understands how, how the Catholic powers work. I mean, he, he is, he's a consummate kind of cold warrior, if you want to put it like that. He, he understands the enemy. It's because he understands the enemy that he is so committed to fighting the enemy. And like Cecil, he has no room for complacency. So he thinks it's much better to be paranoid than complacent. And in 1568, he had written to Cecil, there is less danger in fearing too much than too little, which is, I think, a motto not just for the 16th century, but for the ages. I mean, it's the universal motto that all governments should bear in mind. And so he is very committed to supporting Cecil in trying to kind of snuff the flame

• 43:31Speaker 00

  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

• 44:14Speaker 00

  who's been based in London since 1561, and his name is Roberto Rodolfi. And he has been caught red-handed bringing money into England from the Pope. So the worst of the worst.

• 44:28Speaker 01

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

• 44:32Speaker 00

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

• 45:09Speaker 01

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

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Dominic, this, 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, we will see. But I think that for Cecil and for Walsingham, what the Rodolfi plot suggests is first of all, that yes, the Duke of Norfolk is definitely embroiled in an overly treasonous conspiracy. But worse, that this plot does have an international dimension. Because if the Pope's involved, then it suggests that all the kind of the Catholic powers on the continent are probably involved on this. And, you know, the Pope, the Pope has no divisions. But he is the,

• 45:56Speaker 00

  the Holy Father to both the kings of France and Spain. So what might the Pope's agents have been saying to Philip the Second of Spain and to, and to France? And let's come to France first, because of course, France is the traditional enemy, always happy to stir up mischief in England, even if you take out the whole Catholic Protestant thing. And Cecil's anxieties about France are focused on this family that we've been mentioning throughout the series, the Gies. And in particular, on one guy in particular, who's only 19 years old, he is the, the Duke of Gies, Henri, the Duke of Gies, but let's call him Henry.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  And to Protestants in England, Henry of Gies is the absolute archetype of a sinister Catholic Machiavell. 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 Gies, 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.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:20Speaker 01

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

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, or Gaddafi's. So Henry of Gies'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 Gies 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, fifty Protestants in French Protestants have been left dead, and these included five women

• 48:07Speaker 00

  and one child. And to Cecil, this massacre serves as evidence of what a Catholic nobleman like the Duke of Norfolk might do in England, given half a chance, and in turn, what the consequences might then be for the stability of the English state. Because in France, that massacre perpetrated by Francis of Gise, the father of Henry of Gise, 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'd had massacre

• 48:47Speaker 00

  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 a 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 Gise 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 Gise, this guy who is, you know, he's still in his teens, he embodies both these, you know, the sectarian and the personal.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  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 Gise blames for the murder of Francis's father is a very distinguished soldier from Burgundy called Gaspar de Colligny. And Colligny'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 the French kingdom. And originally, Colligny and Francis of Gise had been great mates.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  They hung out at the court, they, you know, had a great time, complete lads together. But then in 1558, Colligny had become a Protestant. He'd had a kind of Calvinist conversion. And Calvin, actually, the great Protestant reformer, had written to him, and they'd become kind of pen pals. And so by the 1560s, he is the leader of the Huguenots in this civil war against the Catholics, against the Gise. And whether Colligny had actually commissioned the murder of Henry's father, Henry of Gise's father, is unclear. But definitely, Henry of Gise thinks that Colligny had commissioned it. And therefore, there is a personal as well as a religious motivation

• 50:56Speaker 00

  in the fact that the Gise 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 Colligny and Gise at the head of the respective sides in this French civil war, of the wounds being kind of bound up and healed.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  So when Cecil and Walsingham look at their map, which they're in doubt about, you can imagine them together in the study, looking out over the garden, and then looking down at the map and shaking their heads in a sort of performative way. So they see France, and they say, well, France is an object lesson in what happens when you have religious tension, when you have plotting, when you have Catholic conspirators, all of this. But then they look slightly to the north east. 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? So that's Belgium and Holland, effectively.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Yes, because there you have Philip II, who rules the Low Countries. He's, you know, he's their lord. Their Protestantism has put down really quite strong roots. And Philip II, as a devout Catholic, is absolutely determined to eradicate it for good. So in France, you have civil war between Catholics and Protestants. And in the Low Countries, you have a Catholic superpower trying to crush and stamp out the green shoots of godly religion. And this had been prompted in 1566 by this great firestorm of iconoclastic fury, the Beeldenstorm, it's called in Dutch, which was Protestant mobs kind of running amok, ransacking Catholic churches,

• 52:36Speaker 00

  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'd fought in Italy, and he is a brilliant general. And he arrives in the Low Countries with a very large Spanish army. And he sets up this Council of Troubles, it's called, to repress the Protestant insurrection. And the Protestants are very soon calling it the Court

• 53:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  That was a great episode.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  But we didn't really talk about that on the impact of all this on England. Because in England, the repression and the slaughter in the Low Countries, it provokes outrage, it provokes horror, it provokes calls for solidarity. Refugees are being given sanctuary in 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

• 54:23Speaker 00

  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 protectoress. 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. Even, and that is why Cecil is so desperate to stop the

• 55:06Speaker 00

  threatening march of history, if you want to put it like that.

• 55:09Speaker 01

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

• 55:31Speaker 00

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

• 56:11Speaker 00

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

• 56:56Speaker 01

  So to use another analogy from a series 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 process that 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.

• 57:26Speaker 00

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

• 58:10Speaker 00

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

• 58:55Speaker 00

  in the politics of northern England. So Thomas Percy, heir of the Persis, 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

• 59:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

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

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  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 Ex celis, 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 Pope takes his chance. Philip is distracted and he kind of publishes it. And this is really, really devastating for Elizabeth and for her government, because

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  it doesn't only licence 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 afore, said that they do not dare obey her orders, mandates, and laws. Those who shall act to the contrary, we include in the like sentence of excommunication."

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  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 of plotting and indeed of assassination. If you're a good Catholic, and you want to, I mean, this is effectively like a fatwa. He's issued a fatwa against Elizabeth I.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  So 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 Guise, you've got Henry the Duke of Guise, you've got the Duke of Alva. They both have massive armies on the other side of the channel from England, steeped in Protestant blood. So that's very bad news. And at the centre of the web, all along, the whole time, the person to whom all these plots are leading back, you have the blood-gorged spider that is Mary Stuart. And so in 1571, Cecil feels that

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  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 Rodolfi, that Florentine banker who'd been supplying Norfolk and Mary Stuart with the funds from the Pope, Cecil's agents have been working really hard behind the scenes to bring the full facts of the plot to light. And what their efforts have resulted in is very, very shocking. So Cecil's agents have managed to prove that the Duke of Norfolk had been plotting to free and then marry Mary, that he and Mary had been working hand in glove, not just with papal ambassadors,

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  but with the French and the Spanish ambassadors in London, that there was to be a rebellion in London, that a Spanish army was to cross from the Low Countries. So that was why Elizabeth had closed the ports on the eastern coast to stop them from landing there, and that Mary, Queen of Scots, was to be proclaimed Queen of England. And all of this, you know, it's been done undercover. Cecil wants it out in the public, so he does the classic wheeze of, you know, a leak. And he does it in the form of a fabricated letter, which gets published and unsurprisingly goes viral. So it's kind of like the equivalent of a newspaper expose. Everybody's reading it and going, oh, this is terrible.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  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, Rodolfi, during the process of interrogation by Walsingham, might have been turned and actually become a double agent, have ended up working for Cecil and for Elizabeth's cause. And we will never know, because we don't have the papers to solve this. But I think these are absolutely the right kinds of questions to be asking.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  There is definitely a sense of a plot there. But who, you know, where exactly the lines are to be drawn in the, kind of, the balance of all the conspirators is more complex. And just to quote Stephen Alford again in his biography of Cecil, he offers the suggestion that Rodolfi 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.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, that it does. And that they need to expose it. And that they do this essentially by turning Rodolfi and getting him to make kind of statements that can then be used. And there is kind of evidence for this. So amazingly, Rodolfi has a private audience with the Queen at Greenwich Palace, which is quite odd. Also, when the plot is revealed, Rodolfi is safely back in Italy, where actually, you know, he, I mean, if he's a double agent, he then becomes a triple agent, because he ends up becoming a papal senator in Florence and lives to a very ripe old age. I mean, he dies in his 80s. So I think there's a definite, you know, there is a kind of real le carre quality to it. Smoke and mirrors, you're never entirely sure whose side Rodolfi is on. But I think, I think that while he

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  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 bank 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

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  Parliament to try and petition her. So you have the bishops in the House of Lords, "The late Scottish Queen have heaped up together all the sins of the licentious sons of David, adultery, murder, conspiracy, treasons, and blasphemies against God, and therefore should be put to death." But Elizabeth says, "No." And Cecil, as a result of this...

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Even as he's triumphant that he's followed the Duke of Norfolk's plot is kind of plunged into fury and despair at Elizabeth's obduracy as he sees it. You know, he just, he can't believe that he's not allowed to, to sweep Mary Queen of Scots from the board. But Elizabeth and Cecil, you know, they've had this massive bust up. But Cecil is still confident that he has Elizabeth's backing. You know, she may be capricious and infuriating, but she still trusts him. And I think that's the key to the teamwork that they, they embody. So in December 1571, Elizabeth expels the Spanish ambassador for his involvement in the Rodolphy plot. And she, it makes perfectly clear that she believes in the existence of this plot.

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  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, the rush, 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 in to that. But she does know that he has done her at 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.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  So William Cecil, this humble Welshman from Lincolnshire, he gets raised to the ranks of the nobility and he's given the title of the Baron of Burghley. And today, you know, people are endlessly be given titles and knighthoods and things by the government. But Elizabeth is much more cheery. So it is a huge deal for Cecil to be given this honour. And henceforth, he will be known as Lord Burghley. And that's what we'll be calling him, Lord Burghley. And Lord Burghley 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

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  still looking to menace the Protestants of England and the reign of good Queen Bess.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Well, it's actually, I mean, not only are they still looking to do it, but actually the threats are becoming more and more serious, aren't they? And the skies are getting darker and darker. Because just 12 weeks after the execution of the Duke of Norfolk, who I think everybody agrees had it coming, that was on the 24th of August, 1572, 12 weeks later, something happens in the streets of Paris that sends shockwaves through Protestant Europe. And this is a pogrom, a massacre beyond even Cecil's worst nightmares, the massacre of 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 the first to serve as her

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  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 have very sadly questioned in that these days.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  And we will also be looking at the road to the Spanish Armada, the attempt by Philip of Spain finally to crack down on what he sees as England's rogue terrorist Protestant state. So there's loads of exciting drama to come. Members of the Rest is History Club, they can hear all those episodes right now. So they're the members of our own rogue state. If you want to join them, if you want to cross the, um, cross the divide and come over to God's own side, then head to therestishistory.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.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  So you can sign up to the newsletter as well for free and you'll be getting all kinds of interesting tidbits about the reign of Elizabeth the first. I say tidbits, but actually articles, interviews, book extracts, you name it. We've got loads of fun things coming up. So on that bombshell, thank you very much, Tom. We will see you next time for the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. Goodbye. Bye bye.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Here we are getting a statement from number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 1:13:16Speaker 04

  We assess, uh, Prime Minister, with high confidence, it was Russian.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War Three.

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. You've got to ask yourself, you want to play? Oh, you're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing.

• 1:13:40Speaker 06

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order or frago.

• 1:13:51Speaker 07

  A frago that says to kill the president of Russia.

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

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