her spies informed her. The Jesuit Robert Persons soon became popularly associated with it, which was published under his name in later editions. Although he denied authorship in his memoirs, he was involved in smuggling the book from France to England. Scholars now generally believe that Persons was not the author. Ralph Emerson, a Catholic activist, was arrested in possession of several copies but could not or would not identify the author when questioned. Some modern scholars have suggested that there was no single author and that several members of the exiled Catholic community based in France wrote the text as a group effort, the chief candidates being Charles Arundell and Charles Paget. The original intention of the text is probably linked to a factional struggle at the French court. It favoured the party of the Guises, supporters of the Catholic League, against those with a more positive attitude to Elizabeth and England. Suppression The work was welcomed by exiled Catholics as the best weapon that they had. Francis Englefield, who served Philip II of Spain, wrote on hearing of it: "Instead of the sword which we cannot obtain, we must fight with prayer and pen". Those kinds of books, he thought, "ought to be to this Queen of England's annoyance... who I hope shall have a fall at last". Elizabeth's government made considerable efforts to suppress the work, but according to D. C. Peck, "from the evidence of the book's circulation and its later effects, however, the government's attempts at suppression must be said largely to have failed". The Queen published an official condemnation of the libel: "Her majesty [testifieth] in her conscience, before God, unto you, that her Highness not only knoweth in assured certainty, the libels and books against the said Earl, to be most malicious, false and slanderous, and such as none but the devil himself could deem to be true". She offered an amnesty for anyone who handed in the book but threatened imprisonment for those found with it in their possession. Attempts to identify and suppress printing of it in France were unsuccessful, but imported copies were seized and Elizabeth managed to get King James VI of Scotland to impound copies. Nevertheless, handcopied versions of the book circulated widely. Sir Philip Sidney wrote a defence of his uncle against the attacks in Leicester's Commonwealth and dismissed most of the charges as alehouse talk but