Free The Watchers by Stephen Alford Page A

Catholics, in an action that made their obedience to the queen very difficult to prove beyond doubt, Pius freed Elizabeth’s subjects from loyalty, duty, fidelity and obedience to the Tudor crown.
    When Pius V’s bull was nailed to the gates of the Bishop of London’s palace near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, in one of the most public precincts of the city, Elizabeth’s government responded robustly. In 1571 parliament passed a Treasons Act and a law to prohibit and punish the bringing into England of bulls and other instruments from Rome. To deny Elizabeth’s right to the throne, to claim that anyone else should be king or queen, to call Elizabeth a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper: all, whether expressed on paper or spoken out loud, were, if proved by a court of law, offences of treason. So,too, was the reconciliation of any English subject to the Church of Rome by means of a papal bull or document. Loyalty to the English Church and the English state became impossible to disentangle one from the other. Both sides – the Pope in
Regnans in excelsis
, Elizabeth’s government in treason law – had marked out the lines of the long battle ahead.
    To Elizabeth’s advisers Pius V’s bull was hardly unexpected: they were used to what they called the malice of Rome. But what made it especially sinister was the fact that
Regnans in excelsis
was published within weeks of the suppression of the Northern Rising, the first major rebellion of Elizabeth’s reign. Late in 1569 two English Catholic noblemen of the border country with Scotland, Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Nevill, sixth Earl of Westmorland, raised their tenants against the government. Militarily it was an insubstantial rising that was soon put down by a royal army. But its significance lay in the rebels’ aims. After only a few years of disintegrating personal rule in Scotland, in 1568 Mary had sought sanctuary in England and found herself an unwanted guest put under restraint. One of the rebels’ objects was to free Mary Queen of Scots from this English captivity. The rebellion in the north was also a Catholic rising, marked by the symbolism of a mass celebrated in Durham Cathedral.
    The earls of Northumberland and Westmorland failed. Both men forfeited their titles and lands. Westmorland and his wife, the sister of the fourth Duke of Norfolk, escaped to the Netherlands from Scotland. Northumberland, also an escapee to Scotland, was eventually handed over to the English government, which executed him in 1572. To Elizabeth’s advisers the message of the Northern Rising was as clear as the government’s judicial response was savage. Responding to a military assault against the queen’s rule, it determined that those rebels who had been captured should be hanged by martial law, their bodies left to rot on the gibbets as a warning to the men and women of the north. Church bells that had rung to raise rebellion would be pulled down. Those fifty or so rebels who were able to escape abroad with their families were fugitives and outlaws, marked for the rest of their lives.
    To Elizabeth’s government there were obvious connections between the military ambitions of Philip of Spain, Pope Pius V’s excommunication of the queen, the objectives of Mary Queen of Scots and hersupporters, the fact of open rebellion in England and the known plottings of English Catholic nobility. They were shown in exact detail by the discovery in 1571 of a conspiracy against Elizabeth in favour of the Queen of Scots funded by the Pope and encouraged by the Spanish ambassador at Elizabeth’s court. The principal conspirator was Roberto di Ridolfi, a merchant of Florence who had lived in London for a number of years.
    The story of the plot begins in 1569, the year Ridolfi, on the face of it a respectable businessman, was caught bringing money into England from the Pope. For a time, in