entity Updated 2026-08-25

John Stubbs

John Stubbs appears in 694. Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: A Treacherous Conspiracy (Part 4) as the Protestant pamphleteer who attacked Elizabeth I’s proposed marriage to Francois, Duke of Anjou. The episode says Stubbs had his right hand cut off for sedition after opposing the match.

Stubbs matters less as an individual political strategist than as a sign of domestic limits on Marriage Diplomacy as Strategic Option. Elizabeth could use Anjou as a French counterweight to Spain, but many English Protestants saw a French Catholic husband as a religious and succession danger.

The source pairs Stubbs’s Protestant objection with William Allen’s Catholic criticism, showing that the Anjou option was diplomatically useful precisely because it was politically explosive at home.

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