Vittoria FEOLA
Abstract. This study reinterprets the ‘Catholic question’ in AngloSpanish relations between 1570 and 1600 through the analytical lens of intelligence history. By examining both English and Continental espionage networks, directed by Francis Walsingham, William Cecil and their Spanish counterparts, such as Bernardino de Mendoza and Robert Persons, this essay challenges the traditional depiction of the period as a binary confessional struggle. Drawing on primary intelligence materials from the State Papers and the Simancas Archive, and engaging in the revisionist historiography of early modern statecraft, it argues that religion served not as a fixed ideological boundary but as a malleable instrument within systems of information exchange and manipulation. Intelligence gathering, surveillance and disinformation became central mechanisms through which both monarchies negotiated legitimacy, managed dissent, and defined enmity. Reconsidering these dynamics reveals Anglo-Spanish relations less as a crusading conflict of faith than as a contest for epistemic authority and informational control: a reconfiguration that demands a broader transnational understanding of early modern
power.
Keywords: intelligence history, espionage, revisionism, Anglo-Spanish relations, Elizabethan England, Catholic question, diplomacy, early modern statecraft