Altogether there were 42 Marian exiles returned to the Parliaments of Elizabeth. Their numbers varied from 26 in 1563 to none at all in 1597 and 1601. The greatest concentration was in the first four Parliaments of the reign, with 19 in 1559, 26 in 1563, 17 in 1571 and 20 in 1572. Thereafter, the totals decline: only 9 were in the Parliament of 1584, 6 in 1586 and 1589, and 3 in 1593.1

This pattern is perfectly consistent with the circumstances of the exiles’ careers. Fewer sat in the first Parliament than in the second because many potential MPs did not return to England in time to stand for election in 1559. The writs for that Parliament were issued on 5 Dec. 1558, just 18 days after the death of Queen Mary; consequently, there was little opportunity for an exile in Geneva, Frankfurt, Zurich or Strasbourg to receive the news, terminate his affairs on the Continent and travel home to seek a constituency. As a result, many waited until the second Parliament before entering the House.

Subsequently, after maintaining a relatively constant representation in the Parliaments of 1571 and 1572, the exiles’ numbers fell to a very few after 1584. Many of the most prominent gentlemen among the Marian exiles had been older men in 1558 and were either dead or too old to sit in the later Parliaments. Some, like Sir Francis Knollys and John Astley, continued to hold their seats even in old age but in general the decline in the numbers of former emigrés returned to the Commons simply reflected the passage of time.

The fact that a significant contingent of Marian exiles had been returned to the early Parliaments of Elizabeth should not, however, imply that they had in any way constituted a coherent faction which mixed parliamentary experience with a commitment to some pre-formulated policy.2 There was indeed a vocal religious opposition throughout these sessions; and some former exiles, such as Sir Anthony Cooke and the Knollyses, played important parts in the organization of that faction’s programme. Nevertheless, to attribute either its zeal or its disposition to the Marian exiles in Parliament as a group is mistaken. It may seem reasonable to assume that the experience of exile would impose a kind of solidarity on the movement, and that the English expatriates might return to Westminster prepared to construct, through the astute management of parliamentary business, a godly polity in England based on continental models, but such a suggestion cannot withstand any detailed investigation of the careers of the emigrés either in exile under Mary or in Parliament under Elizabeth.

Initially, it must be established that there had not even been a cohesive, unified exile movement on the Continent. Despite the bond of persecution, the refugees were themselves divided over the very issues of religion and policy which later seemed to provide them with the appearance of unity, and it was their internal quarrels that finally defeated their cause during Elizabeth’s reign. The text of William Whittingham’s Brief Discourse of the Troubles Begun at Frankfurt (1554) traces the most significant of the doctrinal altercations, that between those English laymen and clerics who wished to establish a church in exile based upon the second Edwardian prayerbook of 1552 and those who did not care to maintain ‘an English face’ in their congregation, desiring instead a total adoption of a Calvinist form of worship. The result of this dispute was that the large refugee community at Frankfurt divided physically as well as theologically, with the more radical protestants, led by John Knox, going to Geneva, and the traditionalists remaining in Germany.

Geneva, then, represented the most radical of the English companies on the Continent: it also provided the fewest Elizabethan MPs of any major exile community. Indeed, even after the death of Mary was announced, the wolves did not come out of Geneva, but remained abroad. The doctrine and the pamphlets of their leaders, Knox and Christopher Goodman, had alienated them from the new Queen as well as from the mainstream of their fellow exiles on the Continent, at least in 1558.

Therefore, of the 212 individuals who were registered with the English Church at Geneva from March of 1555 to October of 1559,3 only one man, John Bateman, was returned for certain to either of the first two Parliaments of Elizabeth.4 In part this was due to the high proportion of lower class and female emigrés present in the Genevan congregation who were, of course, unlikely or ineligible to stand for election;5 but the real reason was that the former exiles whom Elizabeth had chosen as bishops, Privy Councillors and royal officials had resided in the more conservative of the refugee communities, such as those at Frankfurt, Strasbourg or Venice; and it would be naive to expect these men to have forgotten the bitter conflict of 1554, the polemics of Knox’s Monstrous Regiment of Women or Goodman’s How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed.

Consequently, the Genevan community of exiles, whose democratic notions of church government were in any case alien to the circumstances of England, never achieved any significant representation in the House, though ironically enough their opinions, which had appeared so distasteful in 1558, had become by the 1570s consonant with those of the presbyterian wing of the parliamentary opposition. The largest contingent of Genevan exiles was three members—William Morley, John Pelham (these two had been resident in Padua before travelling to Geneva late in 1557) and Thomas Stanley—in the short 1571 Commons, a number which declined the next year to only one (Bateman again), rising in 1584 to two with the addition of Thomas Bodley who had been but a child during his residence in Geneva. Bodley alone remained of that group in 1586, and thereafter no exiles who had known Calvin sat in the Commons.

Significantly, the Marian exile community which enjoyed the largest and most consistent representation in Elizabeth’s Parliaments was the Venetian, a group of essentially political rather than religious refugees. It is of course manifest from their choosing a Catholic country that the Venetian emigré community had motives which were fundamentally different from those of the exiles in Germany and Switzerland whose concern was to find a climate congenial to their religious beliefs. This difference is emphasized by the social status of the group in Italy, which tended to attract only protestant laymen of good birth and education who had fled abroad without their families after the failure of Northumberland’s coup d’état or Wyatt’s rebellion. A great many of these men had been holders of high office under Edward VI, and most of the remainder were university men, especially from Cambridge, who were attracted to the Venetian Republic by the growing interest in Italian culture in England and by the reputation of the University of Padua.

The most obvious attraction of Venice, however, was the opportunity it provided to work against the government of Philip and Mary. The Venetian ambassador in England had intrigued continuously from before the death of Edward VI to avert the spread of Imperial influence in England, and had even supported Wyatt by providing him with cannon from a Venetian ship anchored in the Thames.6 The Republic, then, offered a convenient and secure location from which those political malcontents, former supporters of the Duke of Northumberland, could plot rebellion in favour of the two most acceptable pretenders to Mary’s crown: the Princess Elizabeth and Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, who was himself to leave for Italy in 1555.

Therefore, when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne in November 1558, the members of the Venetian exile community had a powerful claim on parliamentary seats. Of the 42 Marian refugees returned to Parliament between 1559 and 1593, 24, whose names are printed in italics in the table at the end of this article, had spent at least part of their exiles in Italy. Another five MPs (Sir Ralph Bagnall, Edward Horsey, Thomas Randolph, Sir Edward Rogers, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton) had been political rather than religious exiles in France, so that a total of 29 can be described as political exiles.7 In other words, 69% of all the former emigrés represented in Parliament were men who had been driven abroad more by political than by religious opposition to the government of Queen Mary.

Let us examine some of these personalities. A significant number of leading diplomats and ambassadors had been Marian exiles in Venice or France before taking their seats in Elizabeth’s House of Commons: Henry Killigrew, the agent most often employed by the Queen, had been in Dudley’s service in France and had intrigued together with Courtenay in Italy; Thomas Dannett, a member of Sir William Pickering’s embassy to France under Edward VI, had refused Mary’s recall, eventually fleeing to Venice John Tamworth, Elizabeth’s special envoy to Mary Queen of Scots to discuss the dangers of the Darnley marriage, had been a member of the English company at Padua; Edmund Tremayne had lived in Courtenay’s household in Venice before leaving for France to join his brothers; Hugh Fitzwilliam, who received a licence to go to Italy under Mary, became chargé d’affaires in Paris on the death of his friend and fellow exile in Venice, Sir Thomas Hoby, in 1566; and Thomas Randolph had been active in France under Mary as had Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, both of whom were to play important roles in Elizabeth’s foreign policy.

Furthermore, some important administrative offices under Elizabeth were held by former members of the English community in Italy: John Astley, the Queen’s cousin, was appointed master of the jewel house and returned to six Parliaments after his residence in Padua; Humphrey Michell rose from Courtenay’s household in Venice through the patronage of the 2nd Earl of Bedford to become clerk of the works at Windsor castle, and five times an MP; Sir Peter Carew was appointed constable of the Tower; Edmund Tremayne, in addition to his diplomatic responsibilities, held various west-country offices and became clerk of the Privy Council; and finally, two Elizabethan principal secretaries had been members of the emigré community in Italy: Francis Walsingham and Thomas Wilson. Walsingham studied law at Padua and became consiliarius, or spokesman for the English law students there, before migrating to Basle; and Wilson was an intimate of Courtenay’s at Padua where in 1556 he delivered that nobleman’s funeral oration a short time before leaving for Rome to intrigue against Cardinal Pole.

After the death of the Earl of Devon in September of 1556, the Englishman in Italy with the greatest personal prestige and highest rank was Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford, to whom a number of Courtenay’s former retainers and servants as well as many private gentlemen resident in the Venetian Republic gravitated in hope of employment. However, of greater interest in the analysis of the role which these exiles played in Elizabeth’s reign is the fact that Bedford’s patronage of these gentlemen did not end with their repatriation but rather continued until his death in 1585. Of Bedford’s immediate entourage in Venice, those men whom the Signory permitted to bear arms in July of 1555,8 at least four (there are identification problems over two more sufficient to exclude them from being accepted as Elizabethan Members) of the twelve named eventually sat in the commons: Sir John Chichester, a friend and relation of Bedford’s; John Brooke alias Cobham, a younger son of the 9th Lord Cobham, whom Bedford had attracted from Padua where he had been resident for some time; Thomas Fitzwilliams, who had also lived in Padua; and Henry Kingsmill, of the Hampshire family, who had been staying in Padua earlier in Mary’s reign, probably as a student of law. Some of these, and other servants of lower rank who entered Bedford’s service in Italy after having been in the employment of Courtenay or some other Englishman, afterwards sat for parliamentary boroughs under Bedford’s control. Humphrey Michell had been Courtenay’s bailiff in England before joining his master in Venice. Dismissed for an unknown offence before the Earl’s death, Michell passed at some time into the household of Bedford, whom he continued to serve in England. Partly through Bedford’s patronage and partly through his own skill as a hydraulics engineer, perhaps acquired in Italy, Michell rose to responsible office and a place in the Commons. William Page, another servant, had served two previous masters in Italy. Originally in the service of Peter Vannes, the English agent in Venice, Page was arrested on Vannes’s orders for publicizing his intention to kill Queen Mary. The Venetians, hostile themselves to Mary, refused to prosecute him or even allow Vannes to interrogate his servant within the territories of the Republic. Page then, partly through Vannes’s intercession,9 passed into the household of Sir Philip Hoby, a leading figure in the English exile community in Italy. After Hoby’s departure for England in 1556, Page entered Bedford’s service, and was repeatedly returned to Parliament through his patron’s influence.

The case of Edmund Tremayne is somewhat different. A younger son of a good family, Tremayne had been a retainer of Courtenay’s both in England and in Venice, indeed he had been arrested and tortured in the Tower after Wyatt’s rebellion in an unsuccessful attempt to force him to implicate his master. Having escaped from England, Tremayne joined Courtenay in Italy. Tremayne’s brother, Nicholas, had been one of Sir Henry Dudley’s emissaries sent from France to ensure Courtenay’s involvement in the Dudley conspiracy, the other being Henry Killigrew. Deciding to join Dudley and the Staffords himself, Tremayne left Courtenay’s service in May 1556, travelling to Paris. At what point Tremayne actually began to serve Bedford is unclear; it might have been in France in 1557 when the Earl had a command there with the English army; or it might have been later, after both men had returned to England. In the outcome, Tremayne advanced quickly under Elizabeth, becoming eventually clerk of the Privy Council. Altogether about a third of the future Elizabethan MPs abroad in Venice during Mary’s reign were associated in some way with the Earl of Bedford.

The strongest bond connecting the members of the English community in Italy was not the two great English aristocratic households in Venice, but the remarkable patterns of marriage and kinship which operated within the group. The Astleys were a Norfolk family related to the Boleyns of Hever Castle, Kent, making John Astley a cousin of Queen Elizabeth. Astley’s wife Catherine, the governess of the Princess Elizabeth, was the daughter of Sir Philip Champernown of Devon, a close relation of the Carews. Her sister, Joan, had married Sir Anthony Denny and was thus the mother of his three young sons resident in Padua from 1554, the same time as their uncle, John Astley. Furthermore, Martha Denny, sister of Sir Anthony, had married Sir Wymond Carew of Cornwall and was thus the mother of two other residents of Padua under Mary, Matthew and Roger Carew. Moreover, another sister of Sir Anthony Denny, Joyce; married William Walsingham of Chislehurst, Kent, and consequently became the mother of Francis Walsingham, whose own sisters also married emigrés: Anne Walsingham married Thomas Randolph; Christian married John Tamworth.

The Carews had numerous connexions, both in Devon and Cornwall. The Devonshire Carews were represented in Italy by Sir Peter Carew, whose mother was the daughter of Sir William Courtenay of Powderham Castle, thus linking Carew not only to the two Courtenay exiles in France (Sir Edward and John Courtenay) but, more distantly, to the Earl of Devon. Also, Sir John Chichester married Gertrude, daughter of Sir William Courtenay; and Richard Tremayne, brother of two rebels and exiles, Nicholas and Edmund Tremayne, brought his family into the Courtenays through his marriage to a daughter of Sir Peter Courtenay in 1569.

Another Carew relation was John Pelham of Sussex, a student at Padua. He was the son of Nicholas Pelham by Mary, daughter of Sir Richard Carew. John Pelham later married Judith, daughter of Lord St. John of Bletsoe, a relation of Margaret St. John, wife of the 2nd Earl of Bedford. Two of Pelham’s cousins were also at Venice: William Morley and his brother John. Indeed, William reinforced this relationship by marrying Anne Pelham and serving as the executor of the will of Nicholas Pelham, John’s father. Finally, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, an exile in France, married Anne, daughter of Sir Nicholas Carew.

The marriages of the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke provide another example of this sort of inter-relationship. Mildred married Sir William Cecil; Anne, the translator of Ochino, married Nicholas Bacon, whose daughter by her in turn married Francis Wyndham, a brother of the two English expatriates in Italy, Edmund and Thomas Wyndham; the third Cooke sister, Catherine, married Henry Killigrew, having by him a daughter, Anne, who subsequently married Henry Neville, the son of Killigrew’s fellow exile, Sir Henry Neville I; Elizabeth, the fourth Cooke sister, married Sir Thomas Hoby, the translator of Castiglione and an exile in Italy with his brother, Sir Philip Hoby. After the death of her first husband, Elizabeth Hoby married John Russell I, the son of the Earl of Bedford.

Family, then, provided another, more intimate connexion among the members of the English community in Venice, a group already homogeneous in status, religion, education and ambition. But their political programme ended with Elizabeth’s accession. Their opposition to Mary had been motivated by the loss of office and expectations which followed the suppression of Northumberland’s coup, and by a general patriotic hostility to the Spanish marriage. This exile company saw religion as a corollary to the political situation, not as the primary motive for sedition and exile as did their fellows in Germany and Switzerland. Elizabeth’s coronation was the consummation of the activities of the English in Italy under Mary in so far as it ensured the establishment of an independent English protestant monarchy in which they might expect to rise to places of influence and authority.

The suggestion that the Marian exiles who were returned to the Elizabethan House of Commons did not form a ‘party’ or a ‘cabal’10 can be extended from the example of the Italian community of exiles to the refugee movement as a whole. Certain emigrés among the members of Elizabeth’s first Parliament did indicate their disappointment with the conservative nature of the 1559 settlement, most notably, Sir Anthony Cooke and Sir Francis Knollys. However, there was no organized parliamentary action on the part of the former exiles as a group. The luxury of free opposition in print and in speech which the exiles had enjoyed on the Continent might have made those who subsequently adhered to the opposition bolder and more effective, if not more united, but those exiles returned to Elizabeth’s Parliaments admitted no leadership among themselves and followed no coherent programme or policy. Committed and active puritans like Cooke and Knollys had indeed been abroad under Mary, but so had conservatives like Francis Alford, who throughout six Parliaments consistently and eloquently spoke against every major measure of the puritan opposition to the point where he urged leniency towards Mary Queen of Scots, and questioned the jurisdiction of English justice in any proposed trial of the Scottish Queen. Similarly, while many of the puritan movement within the House represented the conventional image of the pious Christian magistrate dedicated to the erection of a reformed and godly polity, there were among the former exiles those such as George Acworth, whose personal life was so disreputable that the offices which his father-in-law, Bishop Horne of Winchester, acquired for him were rescinded and he was banished to Ireland.

A number of the most eminent of the former exiles accepted the responsibility of high office from the Queen. Among these men were sincere puritans (for example, Sir Francis Knollys, Francis Walsingham and Thomas Wilson) who, although dissatisfied with the structure and doctrine of the established Church, found themselves having to support it in Parliament, and impose it on the more radical members of the puritan opposition. They were thus isolated from the radicals who began to direct the puritan movement in the House after the 1570s. However, it was in any case unlikely that the former Marian emigrés would have associated with the presbyterians. As has been shown, the largest representation of exiles in the Commons came from Venice, the group with the most conservative character, the least commitment to puritan policies and the least central organization, whereas the refugee company with the fewest members returned to Westminster was the Genevan, the most disciplined, committed and organized. In this way, the disjunction between the moderate puritans of the first half of Elizabeth’s reign and the presbyterian opposition of the second was anticipated by the divisions within the exile movement itself as it was represented within Parliament.

Furthermore, it may have been this lack of a coherent programme and a dynamic leadership which accounts for the Marian exiles’ inability to sustain a consistent representation within the House of Commons, a phenomenon due not only to the advancing age of the former refugees, but also to their tendency to sit for only one or two Parliaments. Indeed, nearly half of the exiles returned to Parliament under Elizabeth saw only one election, and of the remainder, only ten MPs from among the exiles were returned to four or more Parliaments. Had there been any significant devotion to the principles and objectives of the opposition faction, a greater proportion of Marian refugees might have kept their seats in an attempt to consolidate the puritan position. The fact that they did not do so indicates once again the essentially conservative character of the exiles.

It is clear, then, that the importance of the Marian exile movement for the reign of Elizabeth did not lie in the activities of a puritan parliamentary opposition. Except for those returned through the patronage of the Earl of Bedford, the former refugees sat in Parliament as individual, independent gentlemen whose support of any particular legislation represented not a continuation of the religious and political antagonism which they had shown during the Marian reaction but a considered decision determined by the circumstances of the new reign. The real contributions of the Marian refugees to the age of Elizabeth were more subtle and intangible: a new awareness and knowledge of contemporary continental culture, especially Italian Renaissance literary and artistic achievements; a more sophisticated and better informed diplomatic and espionage system built upon the contacts and information acquired abroad during the Marian diaspora; and a strong sense of the place of England in history, a concept which became canonized in the most lasting of the works produced by the exiles on the Continent, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.

Marian refugees in the Commons

(showing in italics those who had been in Italy)

Ref Volumes: 1558-1603

Author: Kenneth R. Bartlett

End Notes

• 1. This appendix has been contributed by Dr. Kenneth R. Bartlett, University of Toronto.
• 2. The most important proponent of this theory that the exiles returned to Elizabeth’s Parliaments formed a faction or party is C.H. Garrett, who writes: ‘As a political faction, a group of disaffected country gentlemen, for the most part closely related, left England in 1554: as a political party they returned to it again in 1558, augmented in numbers; allied for party ends’. Marian Exiles, 59.
• 3. H. J. Cowell, ‘16th cent. English-speaking refugee churches at Geneva and Frankfurt’, Hug. Soc. Proc. xvi. 211 ft.
• 4. Garrett’s theory (op. cit. 211-12) that Sir Francis Knollys had arranged for the flight of the English exiles with Calvin rests upon a liberal interpretation of just two documents and must be considered only conjecture.
• 5. There were only two knights among the English congregation in Geneva, Sir John Buttwick and Sir William Stafford. Cowell, 212.
• 6. CSP Span. xii. 88, 113, 122-3.
• 7. The distinction between the political and religious communities of exiles under Mary is conventional. See Garrett, 33; M. Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 93.
• 8. CSP Ven. vi. 145.
• 9. Vannes’s decision to comply with Page’s request to serve Hoby in Italy is curious. Rather than reflecting any sympathy for Page’s political views on Vannes’s part, Vannes’s recommendation probably represented the easiest method of ridding himself of an embarrassment. Harl. 50097. The refusal of the Venetian Signory to allow Vannes to interrogate Page, however, almost certainly indicates the extent of the Republic’s complicity in anti-Imperial intrigues.
• 10. The terms are Garrett’s, 59.