Scarisbrick on God's Traitors

A good bit of our understanding of religious freedom and establishment is shaped by the legacy of reformation, restoration, persecution, and toleration in Tudor and Stuart England, and so along comes historian J.J. Scarisbrick in the Weekly Standard with this review of Jessie Childs's God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England (Oxford UP). A short excerpt is pasted below. As an aside, Scarisbrick is a remarkable figure in his own right--the author in 1968 of the definitive biography of Henry VIII (which inaugurated the revisionist view of Eamon Duffy and others arguing that the English Reformation was not all light and progress) and, along with his wife Nuala, one of the founders of the British pro-life movement.

[W]hat a story [God's Traitors] tells: plots and counterplots, assassinations and Armadas, horrendous torture and unspeakably gruesome executions, stinking prisons, secret messages written in orange juice (invisible until heated), spies and traitors and clandestine printing presses. Hollywood could not have made it up.

Jessie Childs is not Roman Catholic, but she is remarkably fair and astute in her judgments and (though she should not say that Catholics believe that the Eucharistic presence is a physical one) has a deep understanding of Catholic culture. She understands how bewildering it was for Catholics to find that the faith of their forefathers (and of English kings and queens since time immemorial) was now treason and that they apparently had to choose between queen and pope—let alone between queen and the king of Spain, who conveniently believed that Holy Mother Church was best served by Spanish imperialism.