Nicholas Sanders

Sanders made his headquarters at Louvain, where his mother and his siblings joined him as refugees from anti-Catholic recusancy laws.

[1] After a visit to the Imperial Diet at Augsburg in 1566 (in attendance upon Commendone, who had been largely instrumental in arranging the reconciliation of England with the Holy See during the reign of Queen Mary I), he threw himself into the literary controversy between Bishops John Jewel and Thomas Harding.

By 1575 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald had formed an alliance with Sir Thomas Stukley to launch a projected 1578 Irish expedition, which Sanders was to have accompanied.

Stukley abandoned the Irish invasion and sailed his troops to Morocco, where he was killed at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir in August 1578.

[3] Sanders and Fitzmaurice landed a force of some 600 Spanish and Italian freelance troops with arms for 4,000 rebels and covert Papal support at Smerwick harbour in Ireland, launching the Second Desmond Rebellion.

Sanders paraded the papal banner at Dingle before trying to arm local Irish clans and Gerald FitzGerald, 15th Earl of Desmond and others seeking their backing, but they never linked up.

[4] After spending months as a fugitive in the south-west of Ireland, Sanders is believed to have died of cold and starvation in the spring of 1581.

This had many editions, and was used as a basis for other works, starting with its continuation after 1558 by Edward Rishton, supposedly printed at Cologne in 1585, actually by Jean Foigny at Reims.

British Protestant reactions included that of Peter Heylin, who called Sanders "Dr Slanders", and Gilbert Burnet who was prompted into his History of the Reformation at the end of the 17th century.