 The plot of book one is similar to "Foxe's Book of Martyrs", which was about the persecution of the Protestants and how Catholic rule was unjust.Spenser includes the controversy of Elizabethan church reform within the epic.Gloriana has godly English knights destroy Catholic continental power in Books I and V. Spenser also endows many of his villains with "the worst of what Protestants considered a superstitious Catholic reliance on deceptive images".