ABSTRACT
While the Crown and Parliament acted swiftly in the late 1550s to undo Mary I’s Roman Catholic policies, historians are increasingly aware that in the country at large – the move from Catholic to Protestant was often very much slower and more piecemeal. Mary was the Catholic pretender to Elizabeth’s throne and the Queen did not want her so near at hand, but she could hardly employ English arms to reimpose Mary’s rule upon the Protestant Scots. The ambassador thereupon drew up a grandiose plan to topple Elizabeth, and urged Philip II openly to espouse the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1586 he got wind of a new plot to murder Elizabeth and release Mary with the help of a Spanish army, in which the go-between was a young English Catholic named Anthony Babington. The Queen’s foreign policy can be characterized as limited and cautious, formed as a reaction to external events rather than seizing the initiative.
