'Fears of the Catholic threat to Elizabeth were fuelled more by events on the continent than at home'. How far do you agree?

‘Vox Populi, vox dei’. So declared the title page of one of a number of anti-Marian tracts published by Edward Norton in 1570, painting the Catholic threat as an assault on the common good. Anti-Catholic sentiment amongst the population as a whole was mirrored in statute, with wide-ranging anti-catholic legislation passed in 1571. The following 30 years of Elizabeth’s reign saw a more hardline approach to the Catholic threat from Elizabeth than the decade following the compromise settlement of 1559. Key, however, were continental considerations. The period was one of rising confessional hostility not just in Britain but also on the continent, gripped by the French wars of religion and the Catholic counter-reformation underway in the Holy Roman Empire. The late 16^th century was a time of mobility, and protestant preachers returned from the continent fuelled with radical ideas of Genevan Puritanism and presbyterianism. The boom in print helped facilitate a rise in news and print culture, where anti-Catholic rhetoric was fuelled by tracts like those of Norton. Events in Germany and France were painted in lurid detail, outlining burnings of French Huguenots or oppression Bohemian Calvinists.
But anti-Catholicism did not have its roots only in continental events. At home, there was a very real Catholic threat posed by elements of Elizabethan society, particularly the nobility, who sought to overturn the protestant advances made in the years following the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559. The failure of a number of high-profile domestic Catholic plots against the Elizabethan polity, most notably the rising of the Northern barons in 1569 and the Ridolfi Plot of 1571, and the ongoing presence of Mary, Queen of Scots, fuelled fears of the Catholic threat. Ultimately, in an age of increasing mobility and speed of communication across wide areas, it is wrong to draw a clear distinction between continental developments and those within Britain. For both served to add fuel to the increasingly hysterical fire over the threat, real or perceived, posed by Catholics.