From religious nonconformists to kings and princes, exiles in the early modern period included people from various faiths, professions, and positions in society. The exile was defined by their metaphorical closeness to, and physical distance from, their homeland. Exiles carried with them the etymological memory of classical Latin exilium or exsilium, which signified not only the fact or condition of banishment, but in post-classical Latin stood also for ruin, waste, and destruction. From its earliest uses, the exile’s separation from the local and familiar highlighted the precariousness of their identity..[1] As one fourteenth-century author described, an individual was ‘in gret periil To lese his londes and ben exil’.[2] Writers recognized that exile involved physical as well as legal and emotional isolation through separation, with the ‘solitary place of myn exile’ being away from ‘native soil’ and ‘homeland’.[3]
The early modern exile often articulated his or her identity through classical references to epic heroes or banished poets, and to biblical stories of Babylonian captivity. The pain of displacement found literary echoes in the works of the Roman poet Ovid, whose poems were widely translated in the seventeenth century. Metamorphosis, where Ovid channels his own anguish at being exiled through the myths and stories of the classical world, sparked the imagination of early modern English audiences. Translations of Metamorphoses highlighted early modern responses to the social implications of exile, describing how when ‘Gods exile thee’ you become ‘most abhord’, becoming ‘despis'd, and torne’.[4] Similarly, Puritans in the seventeenth century cherished the history of the Babylonian exile, as it reinforced that all human beings were exiles from Eden and through sin were distanced from God. Such exile carried an element of future restoration into the folds of belonging, for God’s dealings with the tribes of Israel during the Babylonian captivity reinforced the belief that he would eventually restore his faithful and return them home. By the seventeenth century this concept had a long history, having first occurred in medieval texts detailing that ‘[a]lle be people of it was in Babiloyne, and for-thy Jerusalem wepte and gretely sorowede here exile’.[5] Whether volunteered or forced, exile involved painful separation, where a return to one’s native soil was not guaranteed.
The boundaries between forced and voluntary exile were blurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at a time of profound socio-economic, religious, and political change in Europe. State regimes could swiftly change from Protestant or Catholic and back again depending on the personal preferences or ambitions of a monarch, putting subjects in positions of danger and crisis. At varying points between 1550 and 1700, English Catholics and Protestants moved to, or fled from, England, settling in Europe or further afield. The English Catholic cardinal William Allen reported those ‘afflicted and banished Catholikes of our nation’ who had sought and received shelter from the King of Spain by his ‘speciall compassion and Regall munificence principally supported in this their longe exile’.[6] Even the Calvinist archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, acknowledged the ‘many Noblemen, and worthy Gentlemen’ who were ‘most zealous in the Catholique Religion’ and had lost their lands to live in ‘some exile’.[7] From the 1620s, many Puritans fled to Europe and America, often establishing close-knit communities of ‘many faithfull Exiles’ in the Netherlands and eastern North America.[8] As well as the individuals and communities that went into exile beyond England, there were also domestic exiles within England, cast out of their local communities over confessional divides. This included ‘[m]any godly and sweet Ministers’ ejected from their parishes or, as Isaac Ambrose pointed out, more specifically ‘exiled from Yorkshire’ and other counties by the Act of Uniformity..[9] Many were subsequently banished by the Five Mile Act (1665), which prevented them from living near former congregations and parishes.[10] This could be a profoundly unsettling experience, as much of a person’s sense of worth and identity in early modern England came from their parish communities.
Depending on where they placed their confessional and political identities, the difference between ‘forced’ or ‘voluntary’ exile was slim. Some were ‘forced to forsake their native country, & live in exile’ while others described choosing to ‘enter into Monasteries into voluntary exile’.[11] The law seemingly only allowed for an individual to be a voluntary exile. For example, ‘no Fréeman’ could be ‘taken or imprisoned or disseised of his Fréehold or Liberties or Frée Customs, or be Outlawed or exiled’.[12] However, the forced or voluntary status of an exile was often blurred by the language of persecution or regime change. In a sermon to the House of Commons in 1641, the presbyterian Cornelius Burges evoked those ministers who ‘underwent voluntary exile’ during the ‘heat of the Marian persecution’.[13] Similarly, one anonymous English author, who titled himself ‘A Friend to the Protestant Cause’ wrote of those protestants in Spain who had ‘escaped the Devils paw’ by going into ‘voluntary Exile[s]’.[14] Even following his father’s defeat, authors would later call Charles II a ‘voluntary exile’, ignoring the fact that he and his siblings were effectively ejected by parliamentarian forces during the English civil wars.[15] In these cases, and many more like them, immense religious, political and physical persecution and crisis raised the question of how ‘voluntary’ such exile really was, and according to whom.
Exiles could keep close links with home through private correspondence or friendship/kin networks. The English Protestant community in Amsterdam was well known to Puritans in England. The nonconformist clergyman and scholar Henry Ainsworth was the ‘teacher of the English exiled Church in Amsterdam’ whilst in 1649, a Master Woolsey wrote to the ‘exiled church’ there.[16] The influential Puritan divine John Cotton wrote in 1648 that allies and enemies alike in England had become ‘inquisitive into the cause’ of why so many had fled England into ‘voluntary exile’.[17] Some years later Samuel Mather wrote of this connection and support to Congregationalists in England describing those settled in Massachusetts as ‘Exiles for the same Cause’.[18] Similarly, Samuel’s brother, Increase Mather wrote how their ‘exile’ in New England was an opportunity to ‘vindicate our selves’, highlighting the success of their godly way of life and the ‘Congregationalist government’ that they had established in Massachusetts to their supporters and detractors in England.[19]
Whether living in Northeast America or the cities of Northern Europe, exiles found themselves obsessed with the conditions of their exile and their hopes of returning home. Following the failed uprising against Elizabeth I in 1569, the Catholic noble Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmorland, first fled to Scotland and then after capture exiled himself to the Low Countries. In the early years of his exile, Neville retained hopes of returning to England, and wrote to his wife from Louvain of his willingness ‘to accept of the Mediation’ from the Earl of Leicester ‘for his return from Exile’, going so far as to offer ‘to submit to any Pains her Majesty should inflict, saving his Life & Conscience in point of Religion’.[20] Westmorland’s attempts to return through mediation failed, but he continued to seek to return to England, even using force by commanding a contingent of English fugitives during the Spanish Armada. Despite these attempts, Westmorland died penniless in Europe in 1601. In 1641, the Protestant residents of Antrim, Downe, Tyrone, and Ulster petitioned for religious sanctions to be lifted on their ministers so that they ‘may have leave to returne from exile’ and be ‘freed from the unjust censure imposed on them’.[21] For the veteran exile Robert Ferguson, the prospects of exiled Protestants returning to England was of vital importance not only to himself but also for the ‘Preservation of the Reformed Religion in Britain’.[22] Ferguson had been ejected from churches in Scotland and England and then forced to escape to the Netherlands following his involvement in the failed Monmouth Rebellion. Aiding William III of Orange in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ not only offered him the opportunity to return to England, but he hoped it would ‘revive the hopes’ of many who had similarly fled their homeland by laying ‘a foundation for the Redemption and Restauration of persecuted and exiled Protestants’.[23] Exiles like Ferguson saw their separation as making possible their desire to live the religious life they wished, but it was related to a continual hope to influence the home they departed, so that they might one day return.
Religious difference was not the only impetus. Related to this, political upheavals led to the exile of individuals and families. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England hosted multiple exiled nobles, princes, and monarchs, including the Douglas Archibald, Earl of Angus and the Prince and Count Palatine of Rhine, Rupert, both exiled due to conflict and internal political struggles in their own countries. In the case of political exiles, the English court often hosted nobles providing they swore allegiance to the Crown. In harbouring them, English leaders saw an opportunity to undermine the authority of their enemies at home and abroad. After fleeing Scotland in 1529, the Earl of Angus was granted permission to remain at the court as Henry VIII’s guest if ‘the Earl swear allegiance to him as supreme lord of Scotland, to pay him yearly 1,000l. until he has been restored to his lands in Scotland’.[24] Unlike these beneficial political exiles from other countries, the English viewed their own political exiles in a somewhat different light. Following the defeat of their father, the future monarchs Charles II and James II were forced to flee, which one contemporary described as being ‘exiled as Traytors’.[25] James II fled to France after a brief reign, living ‘in exile, banished his Kingdoms by his own Children and Subjects’ following the events of 1688.[26] He became known as a ‘Prince that would not hear the Counsel of the Wise, but embraced the Advice of Fools’ and ‘expected by his Exile, when he left his People, to return Triumphantly an absolute Monarch’.[27] James II’s case highlighted the possibility of exile as banishment or a permanent state of being. In 1696, one contemporary celebrated the ‘universal Joy and Satisfaction throughout the Realm’ at the failure of James’s ‘[r]eturn of an Exile’. [28]
In America, exile took a different conceptual resonance for settlers, who often saw their migration across the Atlantic as a form of either voluntary or forced exile. The exiled religious communities that moved to America over this period understood and developed their identities in complex, often hybrid, ways, feeling a strong connection to England while also adapting to their new environments. As Christopher D’Addario has suggested, those religious exiles who settled in Massachusetts ‘developed and displayed a specific notion of their endeavor in the New World that at once engages with their homeland and their particular relationship with that homeland’.[29] Despite relocating themselves across the ocean into ‘voluntary exile’, the men and women who settled in Massachusetts through familial, legal and cultural ties ‘maintained a strong sense of their identity as Englishmen’.[30] Furthermore, they perceived almost simultaneously to be both forced and voluntary exiles whose religious beliefs had caused them to set out from England to establish a godly republic for both themselves and for England.[31] At the same time, as Susan Hardman Moore has demonstrated, many of the English men and women who travelled to New England during the ‘Great Migration’ of the 1630s often actively sought to return home, viewing their exile as necessary but impermanent.[32]
From the vantage point of the seventeenth century’s religious and political turmoil, literature projected exile as a kind of death, confirming studies that have highlighted that royalists, and not just Puritan supporters of the parliamentarian cause, came to terms with their identities through the lens of ‘exile’.[33] Settlers who ventured to America used the Virgilian language of being ‘expell’d and exil’d’ to describe their migration.[34] Admire only you have found me breathing, / After so many years here in Exilement’, speaks the Ovid of the cavalier Sir Aston Cockayne, who spent time in exile with Charles II.[35] Ovid weepes English now’, wrote the minister Zachary Catlin in 1639, ‘...I had lost Ovid, and in Extasie/Wept for your Exile, and thought you were here’.[36]
In many ways, exile was in the eye of the beholder. To the New England poet Anne Bradstreet, life in Massachusetts brought relief from the blood and turmoil of Old England. Godly exiles had, in essence, exiled themselves from those who had become estranged from redemption as a result of their own sin. In the tumult of the civil wars in her ‘wicked land’, ‘[s]ome sin’d, from house & friends to exile went’.[37] A variety of different and often conflicting facets, therefore, comprised the identity of early modern exiles. From the biblical language of the Babylonian captivity to resonances of Ovid and political exile, the exile, whether a king or yeoman, was defined by their separation and distance from the land they called home. For the traveller and colonist George Sandys, who translated several books of Metamorphoses while in Jamestown in the 1620s, exile was ‘cruell and deplored’.[38] But despite the language of placeness and lament, departing from one’s homeland did not always mean a complete separation. Rather, exiles developed a complex relationship with their homes, retaining simultaneous identities as both English and exiled. The blurred distinctions between forced and voluntary exile highlight how early modern exiles considered themselves both passive and active agents in their own fate, affected by their own actions as well as events beyond their control. For many, the connection between the exile and his or her homeland operated as a two-way mirror, serving to remind them why they had left, and admonishing those who remained.
