This article examines the experience of English Catholics within Spanish naval service during the Elizabethan period. It explores their status and roles, as well as the range of motives that led them into Spanish service—religious conviction, familial or military loyalties, the pursuit of fortune, or, in the case of prisoners, the necessity of survival. During the Anglo-Spanish War, the number of English sailors serving on Spanish vessels increased, driven in part by Spain’s demand for English navigational expertise and intelligence-gathering skills. Nonetheless, these mariners often faced mistrust and suspicion from their Spanish hosts, as well as financial hardship and the psychological strain. The article also demonstrates that English and Irish priests played a key role in aiding their adaptation and protection, while also drawing upon the mariners’ expertise to support clandestine operations and contribute to invasion plans aimed at the Catholic restoration of England.

The survival of the Jacobite court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was largely dependent on subsidies from the Catholic courts, from favourable contacts in the British Isles or from the hands of businessmen and other private benefactors. This article will examine the strategies employed by one of its members, Lady Sophia Bulkeley (c.1650-c.1718), dame of honour to Queen Maria Beatrice d’Este, to gain access to part of the bequest of her distant relative Sir William Godolphin (1635-96), a former English ambassador to Spain and a Catholic convert resident in Madrid. From the outset, her aim was to stress the exceptional nature of her precarious financial situation, which stemmed from the constraints imposed by a forced exile in the convulsive geopolitical context following the Nine Years’ War. It will be argued that, ultimately, it was the confessional value of her case—that of a well-placed courtier whose husband had abjured Catholicism before his death—which convinced the Jesuit missionaries and, in particular, Edward Meredith (1648-1715), the trustee in charge of Godolphin’s Roman legacy, that she should be helped to become a proselytising instrument and to prevent attitudes like that of her late husband’s from permeating Saint-Germain.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the Society of Jesus were responsible for some of the most significant new Catholic church-buildings in England since the Reformation. Jesuits were involved in all aspects of building, as active and informed patrons and sometimes as priest-architects who designed and even helped to build their buildings. They cared about architecture, architectural identity, and architectural style. Notwithstanding this, English Jesuit church-building is one of the least-developed areas within the field of global Jesuit studies. How architecturally and visually aware were the English Jesuits? How did they acquire the knowledge and skills to be active participants in building? What role did the Jesuits’ central House Libraries at Stonyhurst play in their architectural culture? This article considers how their academic studies and priestly formation gave the Jesuits the tools to build. It constitutes the first published research specifically focused on the architectural holdings of the Jesuits’ House Libraries. Consideration of the provenance, development, and contents of these libraries enhances our understanding of how the Jesuits were able to play an active and hands-on role in their building works. In so doing, it seeks to draw attention to the significance of the English Jesuits’ engagement with architecture.