Alice Hogge - God’s Secret Agents - Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

*When Thomas Cromwell was made Chancellor of Cambridge in 1535, on the execution of Cardinal John Fisher, Oxford graduates saw Government preferment steered past them towards the students of Cambridge.

*Each college was provided at its foundation with an external ‘visitor’—part trouble-shooting ombudsman, part spiritual inquisitor.

*De Feria believed that the leading Catholics, in both the Commons and the Lords, had failed to put up a convincing fight during the crucial parliamentary debates from which the settlement sprang. However the Catholics were also under-represented in these debates: ten out of the twenty-six bishoprics were empty when Parliament opened on 25 January.

*Mrs Williams of the Swan was more than usually defiant in receiving Catholic priests: her husband was a justice of the peace and a city alderman.

*England’s sense of growing isolation from the rest of Europe, in spite of these entanglements, features strongly in the State Papers of the time. The Spanish ambassador reported back to Philip II a speech made by Sir William Cecil to the House of Commons in 1563, in which Cecil declared, ‘They had no one now to trust but themselves, for the Germans, although they had promised the Queen great things, had done nothing and had broken their word.’

*She is depicted as such in the Rainbow Portrait of c .1600 and was the subject of Walter Ralegh’s Book of the Ocean to Cynthia, in which he describes the anguished nature of his relationship with the Queen.

†Cecil’s own choice of suitably non-controversial debating matter for the week ahead was ‘Why is ophthalmia catching, but not dropsy or gout?’

*At the start of the sixteenth century Erasmus had placed English learning second only to that found in the Italian universities. Elizabeth’s concern over the standard of education in England extended as far as exempting schoolmasters from paying tax.

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