Post-Reformation England was jittery with fears of a Catholic revival. Sir Francis Walsingham, the spymaster and priest-hunter at the court of Elizabeth I, regarded Jesuits as a sinister sect involved in popish attempts to dethrone his patron-monarch. Spain\u2019s ill-fated attack on England in 1588 intensified Walsingham\u2019s clampdown on perceived traitors. In the paranoid post-Armada years, Jesuits and other \u201cRomish\u201d\u009d suspects were smoked out of hiding and publicly executed.<\/p>\n
Historian Jessie Childs won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography with her first book, Henry VIII\u2019s Last Victim. Now she has written a superb account of cloak-and-dagger religious intrigue in Tudor England. God\u2019s Traitors describes a John le Carr\u00c3\u00a9-like world of political double-dealing and \u201cspiery\u201d\u009d (as the Elizabethans called it). This was a time when moles were planted in Catholic seminaries abroad and Elizabethan diplomacy created a looking-glass war in which priest was turned against priest, informant against informant.<\/p>\n
The brutal and insistent Protestant dogma under Elizabeth I had much in common with the anti-Protestant Inquisition in Spain. The Spanish courts of inquiry controlled by Philip II, like the Tudor courts of inquiry controlled by his arch-enemy Elizabeth I, extracted confessions by means of the rack or burning tongs. Its methods of intimidation and control were designed above all to spread fear and suspicion.<\/p>\n