This is more than mere papist-baiting or iconoclasm from this high church atheist (or is he now an ex-atheist?) Wilson's attitude to Catholicism, at least in The Elizabethans, is frankly hostile. Take for example his comment that "some of the vandalism" to English churches, monasteries, and abbeys "— the ripping up of copes and chasubles and the use of missals to line pudding basins — should be seen in the light of those patriotic enthusiasts in 1939-40 who turned signposts the wrong way round to confuse any Nazi storm-troopers who might have come marching down the English roads." Following Wilson's logic, all those whose instinct is to preserve their religious heritage are turned into Nazi sympathisers. This is strong language, and it must necessarily give the modern reader pause to consider what it augurs to hear Catholics allied to Nazis and terrorists.

What sort of countermeasures does Wilson have in mind, "given the twin threats still posed to the world by Islam and Roman Catholicism"? He doesn't appear averse to the idea of poverty, imprisonment and torture being inflicted upon a whole swathe of English citizens. Although such measures were "intrusive" and "caused great hardship and suffering", they were nonetheless justified because, well, "they were hard times". "It is difficult to think of any political system, any state, that could tolerate in its midst those who plotted the murder of the head of state and the overthrow of the system. Comparable cases today, in which Islamists have been involved in terror plots or attempts to bring about a pan-Islamic world order, are rooted out as thoroughly as governments are able." Which is fine if you're talking about Osama bin Laden, but not when you're talking about a wife and mother like Margaret Clitherow, squashed to death for the grievous crime of harbouring a Catholic priest so that she and her family might continue to worship (in private) according to conscience.

It doesn't take a giant leap from this position to justify the torture of political prisoners. Wilson makes light of torture inflicted by Elizabeth's spymasters, presenting the narrative of Elizabethan torture as nothing more than a "cult" invented by "martyrologists" who like "to dwell on the quasi-pornography of torture". From this point of view Margaret Clitherow brought her grisly, but titillating, end upon herself by effectively committing suicide, and Elizabeth is "not the monster queen" that revisionist historians have made her out to be.