This fine book sweeps away old assumptions: the emphasis is on mobility, hardly ever banishment, and never exile in a fit of religious fervour. The travellers were not ‘paper thin’, super-devout figures, but puzzled Christians with divided loyalties and ‘malleable memories’. Later, they would ‘sanitise’ their personal journeys for Catholic audiences. Certainties about why people decided to move, to stay and to return have vanished, leaving Frederick Smith free to probe his bountiful sources. The range is transnational, but controlled, divided into four parts, corresponding to phases of the journeys: ‘departure’ (often in Henry VIII’s reign); then, ‘translation’, not just of texts, but of people and ideas passing across European borders, mostly in the 1540s and 1550s; third is ‘repatriation’, usually during the reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor; last, ‘legacies’, in Elizabeth I’s reign. Smith keeps a firm hold, making all these travels and homecomings profoundly human, and accessible to all, including undergraduates.
A few stalwarts, such as the Franciscans Henry Elston and William Peto, left early, soon after struggles about Henry VIII’s divorce started, but many stayed on and agonised about leaving friends and finding refuge elsewhere. It took the Carthusian, Maurice Chauncy, eleven years after first being offered the supremacy oath until he finally departed in 1546. Several, like John Helyar and Thomas Goldwell, left England but remained at first on reasonably good terms with Henrician stay-at-homes; for his first four years in Italy, Reginald Pole maintained ‘studied silence’ about King and Pope. Smith argues that, later, mobility and exile had a powerful ‘radicalising’ effect on most émigrés, leading to a ‘more uncompromising understanding of what it meant to be “Catholic”’. There were exceptions: George Bucker, later called Adam Damplip, seems to have learned during exile how not to be catholic. Richard Pate was a slow-mover, waiting in conscience until relieved of his embassy in December 1540 and then defecting to Rome, there to become a steady supporter of the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, usually identified with Protestants: he was an exception and a true original.
The second section reveals Smith’s conviction that translation was a crucial part of émigré activity. Its roots ran through medieval and Erasmian piety, stemmed from humanist education, and crossed the boundaries of religious denominations. Moving deftly from Johannes Tauler and the Imitatio Christi to Juan de Valdés and Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, Smith shows how these émigrés ‘immersed themselves’ – and subsequent generations – ‘in some of the most vibrant spiritual movements within European Catholicism’. But not just Catholicism. They quoted Protestant writers too. The former prior of Newcastle’s Dominicans, Richard Marshall, fled to Scotland and transferred Augustinian and some Lutheran ideas about salvation into the (Catholic) Scottish Catechism. Smith views translation across confessional borders as ‘less a weapon than a potential remedy for a fracturing Christianity’. While noting the ‘radicalising’ effect of exile, he is clearly deeply interested in the disposition to irenicism, building bridges, and reconciliation.
In the section on ‘repatriation’, Smith asks ‘Had the émigrés who returned to Marian England given up on their more irenic aspirations?’: he notes texts published in Mary’s reign which could be seen as irenic, such as William Peto’s reprinting of an English translation of Imitatio Christi and William Peryn’s Spirituall exercyses, a synthesis of Rheno-Flemish and Ignatian traditions. Yet the controversial Beneficio di Cristo was ‘conspicuous by its absence’. I think problems arise with Smith’s claim that this work, revised in Cardinal Pole’s household in Viterbo, ‘encapsulated the irenic aspirations of the spirituali’. Certainly, the book taught the doctrine of salvation by faith alone and quoted many Protestant writers (no names given), but I do not agree that it was ever ‘irenic’. Later chapters strike an aggressive note: people who disagree with the writers’ defence of solifidian doctrines are ‘false Christians’ who have ‘Hebrew minds’. Three years after Il Beneficio was published, its main author, Marcantonio Flaminio, referred to ‘the abominable Zwinglian sect’. In this era of confusion, Catholics who embraced ‘Protestant’ doctrine did not necessarily advocate reconciliation. Moreover, by the reign of Queen Mary, Il Beneficio had been on the Venetian Index since 1549 and had been adopted by Protestants – gleefully. Returning exiles who became ‘agents of the Marian Counter Reformation’ did not dare to risk the book’s publication in England, least of all Cardinal Pole.
On ‘the Protestant problem’ and the related ‘Pole problem’, Smith, emphasises the importance of Vatican politics, ‘la presa di potere’, that power-grab in Rome which made the intransigent Cardinal Caraffa into a mercurial Pope Paul IV (1555-9). Pole’s chief confidante, Cardinal Morone, was imprisoned and a dossier detailing accusations of Pole’s own involvement in heresy was prepared. Smith emphasises how far this sapped irenicism and reinforced the will of émigrés to stay out of Rome and to keep the Cardinal out too. ‘Should Pole fall, they would be next’. Quite so. They were, argues Smith, ‘unable effectively to pursue a more conciliatory approach to religious division in Marian England’ (reviewer’s italics). Nearly 300 protestants were burned. Pole tried to save some – but, in an unsent letter to the Pope, he used his own persecution of heretics in England as a defence against the heresy charges against him in Rome. It was a grim exchange. So, to Elizabeth’s reign and the ‘legacies’ of mobility and exile during three tortuous Tudor reformations. In 1558, erstwhile exiles usually left England again, but many other Catholics conformed - later to be called ‘church papists’. Recusant households, however, were still sustained by the spiritual literature which had been translated or introduced in Mary’s reign. These well-worn books could not be reprinted in England, but they were a powerful legacy of exile, sustaining English Christians through persecutions to come. Did the Marian church ‘invent the counter-reformation’? Smith thinks not, showing how foreign and English observers alike berated its ‘missteps’ and divergences, even while revering the many achievements of Pole and his legatine synod.
The word ‘transnational’ in the title also describes Smith’s whole approach, and this perspective has produced a book which has true significance and staying power. Were the weaknesses of the Marian church, largely run by émigré-agents, responsible for ‘the loss of Religion in our Country’, as Robert Persons claimed? Smith contextualises once more, looking outward, to left and right: alarms about lax and spineless faith were sounding everywhere; puritan Protestants were on anti-Nicodemite alert; impending ruin was predicted even in the heartlands of counter-reformation Europe. The Marian church had fallen short, but not totally or fatally. English Catholicism remained ‘truly transnational’, ‘radicalised’ and Roman, often re-invigorated by the trauma of dislocation and enforced mobility.
