ration of English-Spanish relations that took place in the late 1560s.
These two threads would converge again, nearly two decades later, and in a far more consequential way, when Elizabeth finally had Mary put to death at Fotheringhat in 1587, and the Spanish Armada appeared off the English coast the next year. By that time, and in part due to the failure of the 1569 rising, the religious situation in England had changed dramatically; English Catholicism was by then no longer a holdover from the past, but virtually a new force, intimately associated with the international Counter Reformation. Thus, many of the seeds of 1586-88 were planted, albeit indirectly, by the events of 1569.
A third thread in the crisis of 1569 related to court politics within the Elizabethan court. The Duke of Norfolk, as we shall see, played no direct part in the rising in 1569, though he was in a sense its natural leader. He was cast into that role, however, not primarily by religion, or even by the supposed charms of Mary Queen of Scots--whom Norfolk had never met when he di
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