God's Secret Agents

<p>A thrilling account of treachery loyalty and martyrdom in Elizabethan England from an exceptional new writer.</p> <p>As darkness fell on the evening of Friday 28 October 1588 just weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada two young Englishmen landed in secret on a Norfolk beach. They were Jesuit priests. Their aim was to achieve by force of argument what the Armada had failed to do by force of arms: return England to the Catholic Church.</p> <p>Eighteen years later their mission had been shattered by the actions of a small group of terrorists the Gunpowder Plotters; they themselves had been accused of designing ‘that most horrid and hellish conspiracy’; and the future of every Catholic they had come to save depended on the silence of an Oxford joiner builder of priest-holes being tortured in the Tower of London.</p> <p>‘God’s Secret Agents’ tells the story of Elizabeth’s ‘other’ England a country at war with an unseen enemy a country peopled – according to popular pamphlets and Government proclamations – with potential traitors fifth-columnists and assassins. And it tells this story from the perspective of that unseen ‘enemy’ England’s Catholics a beleaguered alienated minority struggling to uphold its faith.</p> <p>Ultimately ‘God’s Secret Agents’ is the story of men who would die for their cause undone by men who would kill for it.</p>