Excerpt from Treason and Plot: Struggles for Catholic Supremacy in the Last Years of Queen ElizabethThe adoption of the Reformation by England was an event which did not alone concern the nation itself, but threw out of balance the whole edifice of European power, built upon traditional alliances and international policies that had survived for centuries. However much it may have suited the temporal ends of Spanish monarchs to incite their subjects to religious exaltation, it was not crusading zeal or spiritual fervour which impelled them for half a century to lavish the blood and substance of their countries, and to exhaust every expedient, from marriage to murder, for the purpose of bringing England back to the Catholic fold. A Protestant England and a divided Germany inevitably meant the decadence and final ruin of the great Spanish empire which the Catholic sovereigns had reared upon a base of bigotry.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.