There is doubtless fierce competition for the title “forgotten man of the English Reformation,” but John Ponet (1516–1556), as Mark Earngey demonstrates in this significant new biography, has surely had less than his commemorative due. If Ponet is remembered at all, it is principally for his Shorte Treatise of Politike Power, a work of exile advocating resistance to the ungodly rule of Mary Tudor, up to and including tyrannicide. Earngey offers an insightful re-reading of this key text, but also a wider assessment of Ponet’s ecclesiastical career and the influence of his theological thought. Central to this is Earngey’s impressive achievement in reassembling, from multiple repositories, the core of Ponet’s personal library – a total of 53 books bearing his signature, and often replete with revealing marginalia.
Cambridge is at the heart of the story Earngey wants to tell. As a precocious fellow of Queens’ College, Ponet was a younger associate of Thomas Smith and John Cheke, part of their humanist ‘Athenian tribe’ set to revive ancient Greek. It involved (controversial) changes of pronunciation, rejecting the conventional “iotacizing” that shortened a range of vowel sounds. Smith and Cheke were pioneers here, but as university Greek lecturer Ponet promoted the reform. At the same time, he developed a strong interest in astronomy, which enabled him, around the time he became a royal chaplain, to design an elaborate sundial and present it to Henry VIII.
It is Ponet’s importance for the Edwardian Church, however, that in Earngey’s view has been most seriously underestimated. He served as a chaplain to Thomas Cranmer, and, Earngey argues, may well have been the author of an anonymous Confutation of Unwritten Verities, traditionally associated with the archbishop. Ponet’s elevation to the diocese of Rochester in May 1550, and in the following year to that of Winchester, made him the youngest bishop of the Tudor era. His willingness – in contrast to John Hooper – to be consecrated in vestments and with an oath evoking the saints was not, Earngey suggests, mere pragmatism, but the result of Ponet’s understanding of positive law as permitting rulers to determine matters of policy that did not contravene divine mandates.
As a bishop, Ponet enforced the duty of preaching on priests in his diocese, and served on commissions to root out anabaptists and reform canon law. Most significantly, he authored the Short Catechism of 1553, a work with decidedly Reformed character. Earngey is at pains to point out that the 42 Articles originated as a kind of appendix to the Catechism, and that contemporaries tended to bundle them together as the Church’s authoritative doctrinal statement. Ponet can thus claim a place at the heart of the Edwardian evangelical establishment. Having published (in 1549) a treatise defending the marriage of priests, Ponet practised what he preached. But there was embarrassment in July 1551, when his union had to be dissolved after it turned out his wife was married (or at least pre-contracted) to a Nottingham butcher. Ponet’s conservative opponents of course made much of this, but the episode suggests at least a degree of carelessness, and Earngey is perhaps a little too eager to minimise its significance.
Clerical marriage continued to occupy Ponet in exile, when, after the accession of Mary I, he decamped to Strassburg and there exercised a quasi-episcopal ministry for the expatriate English community. Ponet’s treatise of 1549 was attacked by the Catholic polemicist Thomas Martyn, and in 1555 Ponet blasted back with An Apologie Fully Answeringe… A Blasphemose Book. In an important contribution to scholarship on the Reformation debate over clerical marriage, Earngey has identified a manuscript in the British Library (Additional MS 89067), comprising Ponet’s own copy of Martyn’s book with extensive notes and annotations. This “Draft Reply” offers intriguing insight into how literary controversies were generated. It also allows Earngey to argue that Ponet was planning a multi-volume programme of refutation, and that his unpublished writings on the topic of clerical marriage substantially shaped Elizabethan treatises by Matthew Parker and John Veron.
On Ponet’s political thought, Earngey has further insights to offer. His conventional characterisation – in company with the Genevan exiles John Knox and Christopher Goodman – as a proponent of “Calvinist resistance theory” is wide of the mark. Calvin features hardly at all in the corpus of Ponet’s marginalia, and the French reformer did not in fact move to a comparable position until 1559, making him, Earngey mischievously suggests, a “Ponetist Resistance Theorist.” For Ponet, tyrannicide by private individuals was the last resort, to be permitted only after all legal and political remedies had been exhausted. His emphasis on public resistance to ungodly rule was shaped by personal experience: in early 1554, Ponet took part in Wyatt’s Rebellion until, at a critical moment, discretion got the better of valor, and he decamped to Germany. The approach also reflected Ponet’s Cambridge humanism, and his immersion in classical literature: a familiarity with ephors – magistrates able to temper the rule of kings within the Spartan polity – can be tracked to Ponet’s personal copy of Aristotle’s Politics. Earngey makes a persuasive case for seeing Ponet’s resistance theory as a gradual working out of earlier commonwealth ideals, and as a vindication of the importance of “Athenian” Cambridge for the course of the English Reformation.
Eardgey’s claim that to remember Ponet correctly “transforms our understanding of the early English Reformation” is perhaps a touch hyperbolic. Nonetheless, he presents powerful arguments for regarding Ponet as a leading intellectual of the age, perhaps the closest the evangelicals came to finding their John Fisher or Cuthbert Tunstall. It is also hard to dissent from the assessment that, had he not died of plague in 1556, Ponet would have gone on to become “a Colossus of the Elizabethan Church” – though how he might have navigated the controversies around vestments and “prophesyings” must remain an unanswerable question. Certainly, all students of the English Reformation in its formative era will welcome this illuminating intellectual biography of an unjustly neglected figure.
