University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+250. Hb, $99.95.

The exiles one encounters in Domínguez’s monograph lack the confessional mobility of later English Catholic refugees. The more sedentary exiles discussed herein burned their bridges as they settled in Spanish lands and lobbied at Spanish courts. Some, not discussed here, did in fact seek to re-cross the Channel and end their exile through an accommodation with the Elizabethan or Jacobean government, but the price for a return was high. From the late Middle Ages, Italianized English were judged to be the incarnate devil (“un inglese italianizzato è il diavolo incarnato”). More terrifying would have been Hispanized Elizabethan English. These unnatural subjects had access to Philip ii’s court, to the royal ear itself, to cajole, convince, and congratulate the monarch. Not all Elizabethan refugees in Spain are deemed “Spanish Elizabethans” by Domínguez: he restricts the term to those “who played a role in Spanish political culture, believed that Spain and England would have an entwined future, and became an abettor and promoter of the Habsburg regime” (8). In brief, the analysis “focuses on a group of Spanish Elizabethans, mostly priests, allied with William Allen and Robert Persons: the so-called Allen-Persons party” (8). The writings of this party proclaimed loudly to the continent the sufferings Catholics endured in England as they urged Philip to correct them. Confrères in the kingdom, less vocal and confrontational, decried a proactivity that only aggravated the problem. These writings in addition to highlighting Catholic perceptions of the English scene also provide insight into contemporaneous Spanish political-ecclesiastical culture.

Nicholas Sander, who died as papal legate in the wilds of Ireland in 1581 after a failed rebellion, left a “secret” history, an unfinished manuscript later edited and published as De origine et progressu schismatis Anglicani (Cologne, 1585), that purportedly revealed the dirty little secrets that lay at the heart of the Tudor court. The additions to Sander’s original text prioritized Jesuit activity and Jesuit suffering as the Society set the pace in the conflict with Queen Elizabeth I. This is, as Domínguez points out, “plain cheerleading” (55). The struggle would be long because Protestants were crafty liars, but Catholicism would eventually win. To hasten that eventuality the Allen-Persons party turned to Philip. As Spain planned its mighty Armada, Philip endorsed the tract’s translation into Spanish. The Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Historia eclesiástica del scisma del reyno de Inglaterra (Madrid, 1588 [now available in English translation: https://brill.edhh.ma/view/title/33602]) arrived in time for the Armada. Ribadeneyra extolled Jesuit involvement in England with an insistence that they preferred “‘pure torments’ over separating ‘one hair from the confession of the true Catholic faith’” (75). Despite elements of hagiography and martyrology, once again the Spaniard found himself in trouble with his religious superiors because of his venturing into political matters. Yet Domínguez argues that Sander’s and Ribadeneyra’s treatises had the same goal as the more overtly spiritual treatises: they fostered “pious lessons” (90).

Pious lessons were not sufficient after the debacle of the Armada. Spaniards grumbled about ungracious, unappreciative, undependable English Catholics. The Spanish Elizabethans feared that Philip, nursing his wounded ego, would forget English Catholic travails in his quest of the French crown for his daughter in the final throes of the French religious wars. To capture Spain’s attention, the Allen-Persons party publicized their greatest asset: the martyrs. “English martyrs,” as Domínguez observes, “allowed for the participation in a kind of holiness that otherwise required a sophisticated historical imagination. Now martyrdom became more communicable” (102).

As English Catholics through publications and appeals strove to prevent Philip’s attention from drifting totally from their homeland, long-simmering tension between the Spanish monarch and the Society of Jesus bubbled forth. Philip resented Jesuit independence from the Inquisition and resistance to his effective control over the church. During this so-called memorialista controversy, as some Spanish Jesuits independently or collectively, sent memorials against current Jesuit practice and governance to the king, the Inquisition, and the pope, Philip threatened to subject the Society within Spain to an official inspection from a non-Jesuit visitor. Persons meanwhile successfully secured Philip’s financial assistance for colleges and seminaries, and successfully used his influence at court to prevent the non-Jesuit visitation and the memorialists’ curtailing or upending of Claudio Acquaviva’s generalate.

Of the later works produced by the Allen-Persons party, the two most significant are R. Dolman, A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (n.p., n.d. [Antwerp, 1594]) [I must be the only person to insist on referring to Persons as the editor and not the author of this treatise] and Persons’s “Memorial for the Reformation of England” subsequently published as anti-Catholic propaganda: The Jesuit’s Memorial for the Intended Reformation of England, under their first Popish Prince, ed. Edward Gee (London, 1690). The former raised the forbidden topic of Elizabeth’s successor, motivated arguably by a desire to refocus Philip’s attention to England and his daughter’s claim to its throne after having failed to secure the French title for her. The original publication proclaimed its impartiality, but its pro-Spanish bias could not be hidden, a bias less obvious in Persons’s Latin translation for the pope, a translation in which Persons, diplomatically and arguably disingenuously, acknowledged that the pope was the final arbiter whose approval was required to advance the pretensions of the Spanish claimant.

The second treatise explicated what would happen in England after the overthrow of the heretical regime. Described by Domínguez as a “white paper […] pitched in such a way that it would be palatable to other English Catholics” (182), the “Memorial,” which circulated in manuscript, was intended to bring about the invasion necessary for the renewal. One does wonder, however, just how palatable English Catholics found it. Was its wide dissemination a sign of favor or of fear? Domínguez argues that Persons “embraced a reformist plan in line with a vision articulated by other Jesuit writers with whom he was close” (193), specifically Juan de Mariana and Ribadeneyra. This is an important point that I hope the author develops in future writings within the context of the memorialist crisis: Mariana was an extremely vocal critic of strong, centralized Jesuit government as exemplified in the governance of Acquaviva, Persons’s trusted superior and collaborator, and Ribadeneyra somewhat ambivalent. A curious detail that might spur future research is the important role assigned by Persons to bishops in the thorough reformation of the post-invasion church. As Persons was writing the “Memorial,” English Catholics were petitioning Rome for a bishop: they were granted an archpriest. In the “Memorial,” Persons had hoped that England would become an example, a spectacle, for the whole world, and the launching-pad for the re-Catholicization of northern Europe. Instead, during the subsequent archpriest controversy, it became an embarrassment.

In the first line of “Acknowledgments,” the author attributes the monograph’s existence to Peter Lake: “under his mentorship […] I have learned the historian’s craft” (ix). Under Lake’s direction, Domínguez has revisited, refocused, and reset the significant studies of Albert J. Loomie, S.J., The Spanish Elizabethans: The English Exiles at the Court of Philip ii (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963), and Thomas H. Clancy, S.J., Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572–1615 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1964) into a significant monograph that translates their research from the myopic world of recusant history into the more expansive one of early modern English Catholicism.

doi:10.1163/22141332-00704008-03