It has generally been fashionable to find fault with any book on the grounds that very few if any historians can honestly claim to have mastered the virtues of perspicacity, flawless research, and utter objectivity. Not long ago an editor of Scholarly Books in America wrote a brief note on the quality of books which university presses publish. He said that most are neither so brilliant as to leave the reader gasping and exhausted nor so poor that he is terribly disappointed. Father Loomie’s study is a better than average book which, though it is not particularly distinguished by either stylistic polish or completeness, has adequately covered some aspects of part of the history of the Spanish Elizabethans. If one occasionally gets the uneasy feeling that he is cheering the home team from an obscure place on the sidelines while sometimes finding fault with the strategy of the opposition, it may only be that he has followed a worthy rule of thumb—that often the best books are written by authors who have a sympathy for and an identification with their subject. If that violates the sanctity of absolute historical objectivity, at least it may insure that dull books will not be foisted on an already tired public.

The Spanish Elizabethans is meant for the specialist, for the truncated allusions to domestic politics in England, Flanders, and Spain are too brief to allow the layman any comfort that he really understands what the author intends to say. Quite properly, Father Loomie has limited his subject matter to one segment of Elizabethan and Jacobean recusant history. It would be doing him an injustice to suggest that he ought to have better related the continental to the English activities of the exiles, even though the two groups are closely related. To have done otherwise would have cluttered the narrative with already established facts and trends and unduly lengthened the book. The point is that an author can rarely succeed in covering every phase of a particular subject in the short space of one book.

Although it is implied on page 182 that this study was meant to be “A History of the Spanish Elizabethans,” it is actually an admirable collection of essays on the careers of only five representative English Catholic exiles together with thumbnail sketches of several others whose paths they crossed. After a brief introduction of thirteen pages, Dr. Loomie surveys in turn the lives of Sir Francis Englefield (A pensioner), Hugh Owen (An “Intelligencer”), Lady Jane Dormer (“A Leader”), Sir William Stanley (A Soldier), and the Jesuit Joseph Creswell (A “Seminarie”). The short concluding essay is commendably cautious and judicious. Three appendices list the students registered in St. Alban’s College in Valladolid in 1589-1603, the size of Stanley’s regiment in 1588-1600, and a “census” of the Spanish kings’ pensioners “attached to the Regiment” in 1587-1603. Here at last is a rather complete dossier of the more important Spanish Elizabethans drawn from contemporary lists that one does not find in the narrative. These individual essays are interwoven only slightly, and the chapters are of uneven quality both in their thoroughness and in their historical importance. The careers of the spy Hugh Owen and of Father Creswell are very well done and vital to a study of recusant history under Elizabeth. But the activities of Lady Jane Dormer, dutchess of Feria, are not sufficiently important, in my judgment, to warrant the attention she has received.

Father Loomie concludes that the Elizabethan exiles “earned a reluctant hearing” at the Spanish Court and caused “an outspoken animus” in England, yet he later goes on to say that “A great power [Spain], still pursuing the hardheaded ambitions of its traditions, was seriously concerned about their [the exiles’] troubles.” As has been the case with so many immigrant groups, ties of language and customs, and the pangs of homesickness originally bound the Spanish Elizabethans together, but after a time their normal prejudices and animosities and the vagaries of human nature itself drove them apart. The exiles were generally mistrusted by the Spanish authorities until they proved their reliance and worthiness in long apprenticeships in Hapsburg service, which the Spanish expected them to serve in return for the small pensions most of them received. Father Loomie goes on to say that even though some of the exiles tried to identify themselves more closely with the Spanish cause, which they also felt was the English Catholic cause, as a whole they did not coalesce into a “Spanish Faction.”

Finally, this reviewer is deeply impressed with the amount of research that went into this book, as is evidenced by the array of sources drawn from libraries, record offices, and archives of Spain, Italy, Belgium, and England. And if one may be permitted a personal note, he has also made the research of this reviewer on a loosely related topic somewhat easier.