"[B]rilliant" -- Wall Street Journal "This vivid richly packed, absorbing book presents the human truth of all these momentous events. Apart from anything else, it is a parade of extraordinary characters and a banquet of Elizabeth and Jacobean prose. As you read, you marvel." --Simon Callow, The Guardian (Book of the Week) "A tale of spies and skulduggery, of casuistry and unshakable belief, of torture, martyrdom, and the ferocious collision and confusion of politics and religion. God's Traitors is scholarly, absorbing, even-handed and relevant." --Ben MacIntyre , The Times (Book of the Week) "A superb account of cloak-and-dagger religious intrigue in Tudor England. God's Traitors describes a John le Carré-like world of political double-dealing and 'spiery' as a mainstream history it is little short of a triumph." --Ian Thomson, Financial Times "[An] excellent new book.
Ms. Childs has written an engaging history of English papists, filled with memorable episodes." --The Economist "In considering the fundamentalisms of today, it's as well not to forget our own gruesome and intolerant past, and Childs has employed her impressive research skills and storytelling verve to bring that past vividly to life." -- Daily Telegraph "This vivid, minutely researched and brilliantly original history is a much-needed look at the dark side of the Elizabethan age." -- Sunday Times "God's Traitors is both a dramatic and thrilling story of fear, faith, courage, and deceit and an important exposé of the terror of life as a Catholic in Elizabethan England." --The New Statesman "Truly excellent. Jessie Childs tells an exciting story. her research is really very thorough God's Traitors crosses the divide between popular and academic history.
It raises issues of some real historical importance, not least of how much archival material, more often glimpsed than analysed, might still be out there which has things to tell us about the period but which is often excluded from mainstream versions of it." --Professor Michael Questier, The Spectator ". this is a fine book: extraordinarily learned, exciting (most of the time), and beautifully written. And what a story it tells: plots and counterplots, assassinations and Armadas, horrendous torture and unspeakably gruesome executions, stinking prisons, secret messages written in orange juice (invisible until heated), spies and traitors and clandestine printing presses. Hollywood could not have made it up." --J.J. Scarisbrick, The Weekly Standard "A triumph of storytelling, backed by first-rate research.
" --Antonia Fraser "A riveting account of resistance in an age of intolerance, God's Traitors brings alive the story of the men and remarkable women of a defiant family." --Leanda de Lisle, author of Tudor: The Family Story "Jessie Childs brings to us, with vivid storytelling and in-depth scholarship, the heroic witness to Catholic faith in a time of persecution."- Kenneth J. Zanca, The Catholic Historical Review.