'Your Holiness and your Catholic Majesty must know that all the nobility and the entire people of that kingdom wish to walk as usual in the footsteps of their forefathers, and to remain firm, steadfast, and constant in the same faith and unity of the Catholic Church, and to persevere to the death in perpetual obedience and devotion to the supreme Pontiffs and to the Apostolic See. They hate and abhor sects and heresies so much, that they prefer to leave their homes and go abroad rather than to live under heretics, or to acquiesce in the errors and restlessness of the English, who, in the last schism under Henry VIII. and Edward VI., plundered and devastated the churches and monasteries of Ireland, proscribed and afflicted Catholic bishops and religious persons, and threw the whole population into the greatest confusion. This Queen Elizabeth has revived the tragedy, and has imprisoned the chief bishops and other religious persons of the kingdom for their perseverance in the faith and their Catholic obedience, and throughout the whole island has executed the policy of her father and brother with the greatest determination and vigour, sending new preachers and heretical bishops with great store of heretical books to be circulated among the people. Wherefore the people of that kingdom with all humility pray God without ceasing that He will pity their calamities and end their afflictions, and that He will condescend so to inspire the minds of his Holiness and of the most clement Catholic King, that they may be pleased to make it their immediate care that that people, devoted as it is to God, to his Holiness, and to his Catholic Majesty, shall not be contaminated and destroyed by the accursed and contagious heresy which flourishes in England.
'Your Holiness and your Catholic Majesty must know that it has long been, and now is, the highest desire of the nobility and all the people of that kingdom to come absolutely under the patronage and protection of his Holiness, and of the most clement and Catholic King of Spain, to whom all men of position and property in that island look directly for the means of avoiding the affliction and danger of the heresy and schism in the ever-changing kingdom of England. They have, therefore, deliberately resolved, with God's help and the favour of the most clement Catholic King, to accept the person of any active Catholic Prince of his Catholic Majesty's blood, whether of the Spanish or Burgundian branch, specially appointed by him for the purpose, and to receive him and crown him as their true, legitimate, and natural King, and thus to re-establish in perpetuity the royal throne of that island,[199] and to venerate the presence of one King, one faith, and one kingdom, the donation of that island having been first obtained from and confirmed by the Apostolic See. Thus they hope to remain henceforth for ever in their accustomed obedience and devotion to the supreme Pontiff, and in union with the Holy Catholic Mother Church of Christ, and in their pristine friendship and alliance with the Royal House of Spain, from which nation the whole nobility of that kingdom derived its origin.