The Spanish Elizabethans

Albert J. Loomie began the study of the political implications of Spain's concern about English Catholicism during the latter part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This led him to probe one over-riding issue within that problem: the relationship of the activities of the English Catholic exiles to the political objectives of Kings Philip II and Philip III. In the documents of the Estado collection at Simancas, the archive of St. Alban's in Valladolid, the letters and reports in the Jesuit archives in Rome, and the "State Papers, Foreign" of the Public Record Office he found considerable new evidence. The basic research was presented in a doctoral dissertation at London University in 1957 entitled "Spain and the English Catholic Exiles, 1580-1604." Since then Loomie has prepared an extensive revision of that original study. He has attempted here to explore the principal ways in which Spain tried to assist the exiles during the Anglo-Spanish war, and the complexity of the problems that its policy raised, but did not always solve.