These studies focus on Spain's relations with England from the last stages of the Elizabethan war to the opening years of the Cromwellian regime. Particular attention is given to the issue of religion and to the character and conduct of peacetime diplomacy - and intelligence gathering. In the first studies, Professor Loomie deals with the policies of Philip II and preparations for the 1597 Armada. The following articles examine Spanish attitudes towards the Stuart court and an unknown cultivation of the 'Independents' during and after the Civil War.

In 1606 when the Spanish court learned about the recent Draconian laws against the Catholics in England in the aftermath of the notorious Gunpowder Plot, Joseph Creswell, a well-known Jesuit living in Madrid, wrote a public letter to Sir Charles Cornwallis, the ambassador of James I. His carefully reasoned tract argued that violence against the consciences of Englishmen and women was no longer in place after the peace treaty arranged between the two hostile Catholic and Protestant kingdoms was signed. To rally support among influential leaders in the court capital of the Spanish king, he printed a Castilian translation of the "letter" for simultaneous circulation. Readers have, for the first time, an annotated edition of both Creswell's English text, based on the original copy presented to the ambassador (now located at the British Library) and his contemporary Castilian version from the unique copy in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. In this book, historians, political philosophers, and scholars of Jacobean prose and polemics will find a new author added to the library of English recusant literature of the early seventeenth century. Joseph Creswell drew upon his considerable personal knowledge to write the earliest printed contemporary comments about the events in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. Hereto known only as a close associate of more famous writers of the counter Reformation, such as Robert Persons or Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Joseph Creswell can now be seen as an original and lively polemicist seizing an opportunity to address both an English and Spanish audience.

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.