Allan Massie
Sympathy For A Devil
Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England
By Robert Hutchinson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 320pp £20 order from our bookshop
It is difficult now to look on the Elizabethan Age as Victorians like Charles Kingsley did. We know too much of its seamy side, of its torture chambers and treason trials, to regard it as simply the glorious dawn of English Protestant liberty. Our experience of the ideological divisions of twentieth-century Europe has darkened our view of the sixteenth century, and the work of recent historians has taught us what the men who engineered and maintained the Protestant Revolution knew very well: that, as an Elizabethan Privy Councillor, Sir Ralph Sadler, wrote, ‘the ancient faith still lay like lees at the bottoms of men’s hearts and if the vessel was ever so little stirred, comes to the top’. Even our understanding of Shakespeare has been changed by the evidence that most of his family and connections were either still Roman Catholics, or at least Catholic sympathisers.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad