Author: HOGGE, ALICE
Title: God's Secret Agents - Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
Description: London, Harper Collins. 2005, First Edition. (ISBN: 0007156375). Hard Cover, 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. A Fine unmarked copy with near Fine dustjacket which is not price clipped. First Edition, First Printing. vii + 445 pages. 40 illustrations. 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 - and 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. 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. Using contemporary documents, the book pieces together a deadly game of cat-and-mouse as Elizabeth and her ministers fought to defend the State and English Catholics struggled to defend their souls, and follows the priests - God's Secret Agents - from their schooling on the Continent, through their perilous return journeys and lonely lives in hiding, to their gruesome deaths on the scaffold. NOT EX LIB L. Fine/Near Fine.

Keywords: Elizabeth 1 of England, Jesuit Priests in 16th Century England, Gunpowder Plot, Sir Francis Walsingham, Henry Garnet, Father Claudio Aquaviva, 16th Century English Catholics 0007156375


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