Position:Home>History> I need info on the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the Elizabethan

1532 Henry VIII breaks with Rome establishing the Anglican Church!. When Elizabeth comes to power she embraces protestantism!. She begins to levy taxes on Catholics, banning them from certain occupations, and for her efforts is excommunicated by Rome with a bounty placed on her head!. This sparks the Spanish, still sore from the Catherine episode with Henry, into creating the glorious Armada, which end in complete disaster (God was apparently Anglican that year, lol)!.
Elizabeth solidifies the Anglican Church and wins full autonomy from Rome!. However several plots were hatched against the monarchy by the remaining catholics in England!. The most famous being the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 "Remember remember the 5th of November" by Guy Fawkes and gang who believed that a change in government was needed and placed gunpowder barrels underneath the house of lords in parliament because the king (James at this point) was to be addressing parliament on that morning!. The plot failed but the idea was embraced as the age of enlightenment was in its infancy!.
All blood, guts, and sinew!. Good times!Www@QuestionHome@Com

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After the death of her half sister Mary and upon Elizabeth's ascension to the English throne, she restored England to Protestantism!. The Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament and approved in 1559, revived the antipapal statutes of Henry VIII and declared the queen supreme governor of the church, while the Act of Uniformity established a slightly revised version of the second Edwardian prayer book as the official order of worship!. Elizabeth's government moved cautiously but steadily to transfer these structural and liturgical reforms from the statute books to the local parishes throughout the kingdom!. Priests, temporal officers, and men proceeding to university degrees were required to swear an oath to the royal supremacy or lose their positions; absence from Sunday church service was punishable by a fine; royal commissioners sought to ensure doctrinal and liturgical conformity!. Many of the nobles and gentry, along with a majority of the common people, remained loyal to the old faith, but all the key positions in the government and church were held by Protestants who employed patronage, pressure, and propaganda, as well as threats, to secure an outward observance of the religious settlement!.
Militant Protestants pressured the queen for drastic
reform of the church hierarchy and church courts, a purging of residual Catholic elements in the prayer book and ritual, these demands were repugnant to the queen and she feared public disorder!. Elizabeth, moreover, had no interest in probing the inward convictions of her subjects; provided that she could obtain public uniformity and obedience, she was willing to let the private beliefs of the heart remain hidden!.
In 1569 a rebellion of feudal aristocrats and their followers in the staunchly Catholic north of England was put down by savage military force; while in 1571 the queen's informers and spies uncovered an international conspiracy against her life, known as the Ridolfi Plot!. Both threats were linked at least indirectly to Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been driven from her own kingdom in 1568 and had taken refuge in England!. The presence, more prisoner than guest, of the woman whom the Roman Catholic church regarded as the rightful queen of England posed a serious political and diplomatic problem for Elizabeth, a problem greatly exacerbated by Mary's restless ambition and penchant for conspiracy!. Elizabeth judged that it was too dangerous to let Mary leave the country, but at the same time she firmly rejected the advice of Parliament and many of her councillors that Mary should be executed!.
The alarming increase in religious tension, political intrigue, and violence was not only an internal, English concern!. In 1570 Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and absolved her subjects from any oath of allegiance that they might have taken to her!. The immediate effect was to make life more difficult for English Catholics, who were the objects of a suspicion that greatly intensified in 1572 after word reached England of the St!. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants in France!. Elizabeth was under great pressure to become more involved in the continental struggle between Roman Catholics and Protestants, in particular to aid the rebels fighting the Spanish armies in the Netherlands!. But she was very reluctant to become involved, in part because she detested rebellion, even rebellion undertaken in the name of Protestantism, and in part because she detested expenditures!. Eventually, after vacillations that drove her councillors to despair, she agreed first to provide some limited funds and then, in 1585, to send a small expeditionary force to the Netherlands!.
Fears of an assassination attempt against Elizabeth increased after Pope Gregory XIII proclaimed in 1580 that it would be no sin to rid the world of such a miserable heretic!. In 1584 Europe's other major Protestant leader, William of Orange, was assassinated!. Elizabeth herself showed few signs of concern—throughout her life she was a person of remarkable personal courage—but the anxiety of the ruling elite was intense!. In an ugly atmosphere of intrigue, torture and execution of Jesuits, and rumours of foreign plots to kill the queen and invade England, Elizabeth's Privy Council drew up a Bond of Association, pledging its signers, in the event of an attempt on Elizabeth's life, to kill not only the assassins but also the claimant to the throne in whose interest the attempt had been made!. The Association was clearly aimed at Mary, whom government spies, under the direction of Sir Francis Walsingham, had by this time discovered to be thoroughly implicated in plots against the queen's life!. When Walsingham's men in 1586 uncovered the Babington Plot, another conspiracy to murder Elizabeth, the wretched Queen of Scots, her secret correspondence intercepted and her involvement clearly proved, was doomed!. Mary was tried and sentenced to death!. Parliament petitioned that the sentence be carried out without delay!. For three months the queen hesitated and then with every sign of extreme reluctance signed the death warrant!. When the news was brought to her that on Feb!. 8, 1587, Mary had been beheaded, Elizabeth responded with an impressive show of grief and rage!. She had not, she wrote to Mary's son, James VI of Scotland, ever intended that the execution actually take place, and she imprisoned the man who had delivered the signed warrant!. It is impossible to know how many people believed Elizabeth's professions of grief; Catholics on the Continent wrote bitter denunciations of the queen, while Protestants throughout the kingdom enthusiastically celebrated the death of a woman they had feared and hated!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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