Heretic Hunting beyond the Seas: John Brett and His Encounter with the Marian Exiles

Abstract

The story of beleaguered Protestants who fled to the continent during the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s is well-known, but less familiar is the attempt by the queen and her representatives to order some of those exiles apprehended and brought back home for confrontation or punishment. One agent placed in charge of tracking down a few of the more prominent exiles and serving them with papers was John Brett: over the course of several months, in which he himself was pursued, insulted, beaten, and ultimately chased from Frankfurt and Strasbourg by protestant sympathizers, Brett persisted in his attempt to reach figures such as Katherine, the godly duchess of Suffolk, and her family; the result however was utter failure, described in an account of the tribulations written by Brett himself after his empty-handed return to England.' Brett's adventure constitutes a tale of drama in its own right, but more important are aspects within the narrative that illuminate larger issues of the law, jurisdiction, exile, and strategies of resistance on the part of a community growing more confident and intellectually justified in its opposition to the queen (and her agent). Not only does Brett's narrative capture a tense moment in the lives of notable Marian exiles with a vividness and intimacy that supercedes other exile accounts;2 even more, it unwittingly provides a complete portrait, at a specific and significant moment in time, of a community that is self-sustaining yet fearful, and one that directly relates in its behavior to resistance tracts such as fellow exile John Ponet's Treatise of Politike Power, written in the same year as Brett's visit. At the same time, Mary's decision to dispatch Brett overseas was not necessarily outside the law either, and neither was it especially persecutory in the larger context of Tudor behavior over the course of the sixteenth century. Brett's attempt to deliver his letters to a select list of exiles was simply an attempt to assert Crown privilege over wayward (indeed, politically dangerous) subjects, in an age when legal understandings-specifically concerning land law and international law-were undergoing profound transformations, and