The brief revival of state-sponsored Catholicism in England under Mary I relied heavily on prelates, clergy and intellectuals who had been imprisoned or gone into exile after the initial Reformation under Henry VIII. Stephen Gardiner spent years in the Tower of London before becoming Lord Chancellor, while Reginald Pole, the Pope’s legate to England, had been in exile for decades. These two would be critical to the shaping of the new religious settlement. Equally, many of the religious who repopulated England’s monasteries and convents (or at least those which were restored) were returning from the Continent.
The restoration of the Catholic Church during the years 1553 to 1558 was a vigorous and credible project with a distinctive flavour and a theology which mixed traditional English thinking with some of the themes emerging from the Continent. It drew inspiration from many wells, but the fact that several of its key players had been excluded in one way or another – even the Queen herself had suffered a kind of internal exile after the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katharine of Aragon – was a strong influence on the resurgent and combative nature of the Marian Reformation. Its architects knew what they had lost and what they had to rebuild, and also knew how to deal with dissent, having learned the hard way through personal experience.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 