At its most basic, the purpose of this book is to recuperate a strand of Catholic polemical commentary on Elizabethan politics. It is prompted by four recent trends in the historiography. The first is the revisionist account of the Reformation, which, in emphasizing the slow, uneven, and much-resisted course of the English Reformation/s, has done two things: it has placed renewed emphasis on the prevalence and importance of bodies of opinion which might (in a variety of ways) answer to the name of ‘Catholic’ and it has reminded us that not only was the triumph of Protestantism not inevitable until, at the very least, well into Elizabeth’s reign, but also that contemporaries, on both sides of the confessional divide, remained very much aware of that fact. However much one may agree or disagree with the fine detail of the revisionist case, and I have been one of its sharper critics over the last few years, one has to acknowledge the absolutely central importance of those insights, the implications of which have still not been fully worked through for the history of the post-Reformation period.1 This book is intended as a small contribution to that wider process.