Mendoza drew confidently on the resident agents and travelling emissaries of that disciplined and devoted company whose strategic deployment stiffened the ranks of Catholicism on every battle-front from Poland to Galway. Unless contemporary observers were mistaken and circumstantial evidence misleads, Bernardino de Mendoza by 1587 had struck an alliance with the Jesuits closer than he ever told his king.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 79