The web of conspiracy at the Surratt household brings up other tests of love and loyalty. The genre of historical fiction and the narrative structure of this novel foster meditation on the virtues of justice, love, and loyalty.
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For all their training and efforts, Jenkins and Kaplan were amateurs. She loved opera; he loved that symphony. They poured themselves into that love that is at the root of the word amateur. Perhaps that’s why they receive our sympathy and even admiration.
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These sixteen martyrs represent the hundreds, beatified, canonized, or not who suffered in England for their faith from the 1570s to the 1690s — not to mention those imprisoned, fined, and exiled. They inspire us with their dedication and fortitude.
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Mary I was the first queen regnant of England; her anointing and crowning broke the taboo of those semi-sacraments being reserved for men; she and Reginald Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, revived and renewed the practice of Catholicism in England; and she possessed the Tudor charisma while being a hard-working and thoughtful monarch.
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The positive reception of God’s Traitors has benefitted from the fact that the author is not a Catholic — thus, removing any suspicion of special pleading in a nation still touchy on the subject of Catholicism. She demonstrates the hopelessness and frustration Catholics felt as avenues for participation in their native country were cut off because of their religion.
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William Byrd’s precarious role as a composer of sacred music in Protestant England was summed up by Andrew Carwood, conductor of the Cardinall’s Musick, in an interview in The Tablet comparing Byrd’s situation to that of Shostakovich in Russia under the censorship and threats of Stalin.
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