Marian exiles
The Marian exiles were English Protestants who fled to continental Europe during the 1553–1558 reign of the Catholic monarchs Queen Mary I and King Philip.
[citation needed] According to English historian John Strype, more than 800 Protestants fled to the continent, mainly to the Low Countries, Germany, and Switzerland, and joined with Reformed Churches there or formed their own congregations.
Notable English exile communities were located in the cities of Aarau, Basel, Cologne, Duisburg, Emden, Frankfurt, Geneva, Padua, Strasbourg, Venice, Wesel, Worms, and Zürich.
The next largest group was composed of gentry (166) who, with others back in England such as Sir Rowland Hill (who would be identified on the frontispiece as the publisher of the Geneva Bible), financed the exiles.
The conflicts that broke out between the exiles over church organization, discipline, and forms of worship presaged the religious politics of the reign of Elizabeth I and the emergence of Puritanism and Presbyterianism.
The chief members of the Frankfurt congregation during its existence were David Whitehead, Sandys, Nowell, Foxe, Bale, Horne, Whittingham, Knox, Aylmer, Bentham, Sampson, Roger Kelke, Chambers, Isaac, both Knollyses, John and Christopher Hales, Richard Hilles, Bartholomew Traheron, Robert Crowley, Thomas Cole, William Turner, Robert Wisdome.
All records of the group were destroyed in World War II with the Frankfurt city archives, and only partial transcripts from prior scholarship remain.
Led mainly by Knox, the largest, most politically and theologically radical concentration of English exiles was at Geneva, reaching a peak of 233 people or about 140 households.
Names, dates of arrival, and other information is preserved in the Livre des Anglais (facsimile edition by Alexander Ferrier Mitchell), a folio manuscript kept at the Hotel de Ville of Geneva.
This was opposed by many other English exiles, especially those seeking favor with Elizabeth I, such as John Aylmer, who published a retort to Knox called Harborowe for Faithful and True Subjects in 1559.
Christopher Goodman took a more circumspect approach in a How superior powers ought to be obeyd of their subjects & wherein they may lawfully by Gods Worde be disobeyed & resisted, for which Whittingham wrote the preface.
Laurence Humphrey, working out of Strasbourg, claimed to be clarifying what Knox, Ponet, and Goodman really meant when he defended passive resistance only and supported the legitimacy of female rule in De religionis conservatione et reformatione vera (1559).
