- Published: 1 July 2015
- ISBN: 9781784700058
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 480
- RRP: $32.99
God’s Traitors
Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England
- Published: 1 July 2015
- ISBN: 9781784700058
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 480
- RRP: $32.99
Plots and priest holes abound
Caroline Sanderson, Bookseller
A triumph of story-telling, backed by first-rate research
Antonia Fraser
Absorbing, exciting and relevant
Ben MacIntyre, The Times Book of the Week
This vivid, minutely researched and brilliantly original history is a much-needed look at the dark side of the Elizabethan age
Dan Jones, Sunday Times
Truly excellent... God's Traitors crosses the divide between popular and academic history. It raises issues of some real historical importance
Michael Questier, Spectator
Excellent... An engaging history of English papists, filled with memorable episodes
The Economist
God’s Traitors, with its crisp prose and punctilious scholarship, brilliantly recreates a world of heroism and holiness in Tudor England... It is little short of a triumph
Ian Thomson, Financial Times
Childs is a lucid, passionate writer and she gets under the skin of her subject... It's not often that history books get the balance of expert research and storytelling with chutzpah just right but Childs has managed it with this informative and entertaining book
Doug Johnstone, Big Issue
[A] moving historical account... Childs paints a vivid, sometimes even humorous picture of devout Catholics keeping up appearances
Daisy Dunn, Daily Mail
In the quality of her research and sensitive handling of issues that remain raw to this day, Jessie Childs succeeds in evoking ‘the lived experience of anti-Catholicism’ as few have done before... Childs’s language is lively and inventive... By picturing Elizabethan recusants in all their complexity, Jessie Childs has enabled them to speak for themselves at last
John Cooper, Literary Review
Superb and groundbreaking... It isn’t possible in the space of a review to do justice to the breadth and depth of Childs’ research and insight; but they illuminate the entire landscape of English life...a superlative, flawlessly written book... Childs’ description of an exorcism at Lord Vaux’s house in Hackney...is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever read
Matthew Lyons, author of The Favourite
This superbly researched and vividly narrated account conjures a lost world of exorcisms, priest’s holes and miracle-performing relics
David Gelber, Country Life
Vivid but measured…never has the actual experience of the recusants been rendered with such a wealth of searing detail…richly packed, absorbing… It is a parade of extraordinary characters and a banquet of Elizabethan and Jacobean prose
Simon Callow, Guardian (Book of the Week)
[A] fascinating work of narrative history… What makes Childs’s book different is that she concentrates not on the derring-do of the foreign diplomats and priest-adventurers – who invariably ended up hung, drawn and quartered – but on the stay-at-home English Catholics who were obliged to negotiate their divided loyalties in these trickiest of times
Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday
Splendid book… Childs does a splendid job of explaining this unenviable situation and of putting it in the wider context of Elizabethan Catholic life. There are many fruitful digressions
Jonathan Wright, The Tablet
An impressive history
Daily Telegraph
A gripping account of an aristocratic family defying Elizabeth I’s thought police and executioners
Camden New Journal
· Thorough research coupled to a vigorous, readable style… This colourful saga of a downwardly mobile family on the losing side of national events reminds us that history is not all about the winners
Derek Wilson, History Today
All the way through, you ask: just how far would I go to protect and express my faith?
Sinclair McKay, Evening Standard
It’s been eight years since Jessie Childs’ last book, and her latest…was worth the wait
Chris Skidmore, BBC History Magazine
Thought-provoking and timely
Ben Macintyre, The Times
There have been many books on the turbulent lives of Catholics in post-Reformation England, but Childs’s nuances account of the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall in Northhamptonshire convinced me there is still new ground to explore or, at least, revisit with fresh eyes
Jonathan Wright, Herald
Thrilling
New Statesman
Brilliant
Wall Street Journal
Richly packed, absorbing... A parade of extraordinary characters
Simon Callow, Guardian
Beautifully written... Hollywood could not have made it up
Professor JJ Scarisbrick
A timely exposé of our gruesome, intolerant past
5 stars, Daily Telegraph
[A] gripping and superbly written book
Mail on Sunday