5 - Exiles for Christ: Continuity and Community among the Marian Exiles

Summary

According to John Foxe, Katherine Willoughby fled her London home for the continent on New Year's Day 1555 to escape religious persecution. She and a loyal group of servants braved hostile informants, endured lost luggage, and survived shipwreck before they arrived safely in the Netherlands. Her decision to forsake her ‘possessions, lands, and goods, your worldly friends and native country’ to become ‘an exile for Christ’ won the praise and admiration of the godly community. Yet, Foxe's account of Willoughby's escape and historians’ retelling of it often distort the circumstances of her flight and exile. The duchess and her husband delayed their relocation for eighteen months after Mary I's succession while they made extensive arrangements for their resettlement. She kept her friends informed of her plans, and the news of the public sale of her furniture at Grimsthorpe circulated in Lincolnshire and London. Her departure could hardly have been a surprise to Marian officials. Like other exiles, Willoughby and her family continued to rely on their kinship and patronage ties to find a residence abroad, transmit revenue from their English estates, and establish a religious community with other English exiles after their resettlement.

The evidence of Marian exiles’ experiences raises questions about Reformation scholarship that views the restoration of Catholicism in 1553 as creating a crisis in the evangelical community, pushing some of its members in a more radical direction. The reign of Mary I has often been depicted as a seminal moment in the development of two distinct groups of Protestants: conformers who remained in England and reconciled themselves to Catholicism, and exiles who fled abroad rather than compromise their beliefs. After Elizabeth I's succession, conformers served as the primary architects and supporters of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement while exiles acted as some of its most virulent critics. More recent scholarship has argued for a more complex understanding of Protestantism under Mary I. Historians such as Andrew Pettegree and Diarmaid MacCulloch have stressed that both conformers and exiles shared a sincere commitment to the restoration of Protestantism even if they disagreed over the details of that settlement. Moreover, these studies often emphasize the influence of Reformed theology on evangelicals during Edward VI's reign rather than suggesting that exiles were molded into Reformed Protestants by their experiences abroad.

This chapter argues that the experiences of Willoughby and other exiles further demonstrate the continuities in exiles’ beliefs throughout the 1550s.