Bishop John Ponet (1514-1556) was the highest ranking English ecclesiastic on the continent during the Marian exile. From Strasbourg he authored a treatise on political theology (Politike Power, 1556), which according to former US President John Adams, ‘contains all the essential principles of liberty, which were afterwards dilated on by Sidney and Locke’. This was the first piece of political theology written by an English reformer that advocated for limited monarchy, and even tyrannicide in the case of an ungodly ruler. Various modern political historians and theologians have assumed Ponet received his ideas from John Calvin and have thus cast him as a ‘Calvinist resistance theorist’. However, this is not the case. By surveying a range of newly discovered books owned and annotated by John Ponet we will observe that his political ideas were rooted in the classics rather than Calvin. Indeed, these were ideas that were born during his time in Cambridge but only came to fruition during the conditions of exile.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 