John Ponet

[3] Ponet rejected outright the idea that the King was ordained by God to rule his Church on Earth.

His major work was A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (1556), in which he put forward a theory of justified opposition to secular rulers.

[9] An anonymous work, it had seven chapters, and a conclusion, and proposed a radical resistance theory, of the Calvinist type and based on biblical exemplars.

[20] This work also presented some recent political history, in Ponet's account of the palace revolution of 1549, and the fall of Somerset.

[22] In October 2013 a manuscript A Traictise declarying and plainly prouying, that the pretensed marriage of Priestes … is no mariage (1554), from the Mendham Collection and sold by the Law Society, was barred from export by Ed Vaizey.

[23] In 1556 appeared An Apologie Fully Answeringe ... a Blasphemous Book, an answer to A Defence of Priestes Mariages by Thomas Martyn.

[24] In 1549 also, Ponet published A Trageodie, or, Dialogue of the Unjust Usurper Primacy of the Bishop of Rome, a translation of a work by Bernardino Ochino.

It argued against the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome; and in claiming the Papacy had fallen into heresy, may have been intended to undermine expectations of the effectiveness of the Council of Trent, convened from 1545, by proposing that conciliarism was a dead letter.

[29] Other works attributed to Ponet are Diallecticon viri boni et literati (1557) which was edited by his friend Anthony Cooke, and translated into English by Elizabeth Hoby in 1605;[30][31] and possibly An Answer unto a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation (1550) as ghost-writer for Cranmer.

In July 1551, his first wife was found by a consistory court at St Paul's Cathedral to have a legal pre-contract marriage to a butcher and he was forced to divorce her and compensate him.

He married his second wife, Maria Hayman, on 25 October of the same year; she was the daughter of one of the Archbishop Thomas Cranmer's financial officers.

[35] After his death, having sold his books to Anthony Cooke, Mary Ponet had to apologise to Peter Martyr, some of whose volumes were in the sale.