The English inquisition

Early on in this fascinating history Stephen Alford makes an important point: because Elizabeth I and the settlement between monarchy, church and state survived, because the threat of foreign invasion was thwarted or failed to materialise, and because the sense of national identity fostered by the Tudors proved robust, we see that first Elizabethan age as a confident and assured success story. But to those involved it was far more precarious, with victory anything but assured and survival a daily challenge.

Alford dramatises this by imagining Elizabeth’s assassination in St James’s Park, followed by invasion by the superpower, Spain. Aided by popular uprisings, the live burnings of Elizabeth’s ministers and clergy — who history would have portrayed as an aberrant heretical clique — and the suppression of English translations of the Bible, England would have returned to the Catholic fold as Hapsburg England under the hero of Christendom, King Philip of Spain. For much of Elizabeth’s reign this was a plausible scenario.

Alford’s subject is the intelligence organisation at the heart of the militarily weak Elizabethan state, and the question as to whether the ‘more obsessively a state watches, the greater the dangers it perceives’. The organisation was run mainly by the Queen’s secretary, Thomas Walsingham, ‘the cool, organising intelligence at the centre of things’. After his death in 1590 it was overseen by the two Cecils, William and Robert, the father and son team who effectively ran the country.

Walsingham was an austere, devoutly religious man who amassed no fortune and who was deeply influenced by witnessing the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacres in Paris when up to 6,000 Protestants were butchered. That was what he, the Cecils and their queen were convinced would happen if Elizabeth were deposed.