The thought of a new book, from a proverbially establishmentarian imprint, on Elizabeth I’s spymaster is not one that immediately gladdens the heart. Anyone who has actually been expected to spend time in modern England – rather than simply viewing it through a Downton-Abbey-generated haze – knows perfectly well that English anti-Catholicism has reached during the last 15 years its highest level since the mid-19th century, if not since the 1780 Gordon Riots. The Tony Blair imperium’s successful bullying of Catholic adoption agencies into accepting the homosexualist agenda inspired no serious opposition, from either the national episcopate or what passes for the wider national intelligentsia. English bishops and their lay stooges who repeatedly screamed themselves into a state of laryngitis about the evils of “racism” and “fascism”, not to mention the SSPX’s incurable depravity, found that appeasing Organized Sodom raised no moral issues whatsoever.
If anything, English hatred of Catholics has been for decades much more virulent among so-called conservatives of the Hugh Trevor-Roper breed – a breed of which Andrew Roberts represents the present age’s best-known genetic freak – than within even the blatant Maoist Left. One can well imagine the loutish chauvinist Roberts subjecting Sir Francis Walsingham to unashamed hagiography, making him a kind of Christopher Hitchens avant la lettre. (Indeed, the future possibilities for Roberts’s anti-Catholic non-scholarship seem almost endless: Titus Oates As Thatcherite Hero; Katyn: Anatomy of a Suicide Pact; The Nazi Myth of F.D.R.’s Wheelchair.)
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