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Demosthenes to his fellow countrymen. John Jewel was a talented Oxford lecturer who had fallen under the spell of Peter Martyr when the latter, attracted to the university by Cranmer, taught there between 1547 and 1553. He followed his hero to the continent and acted as Peter Martyr’s assistant. Richard Cox, formerly Chancellor of Oxford University, turned up at Strasbourg and became famously locked in theological dispute with another exile, the fiery Scot, John Knox. Two bishops, John Bale of Ossory and John Posset of Winchester, used the safety of their European havens to launch anti-papal polemics across the Channel. Posset died at Strasbourg in 1556 but the others went on to be members of the Elizabethan establishment.
    But the two men who would make the biggest impact in the nextreign were William Whittingham and John Foxe. It was they who gave England the two books which changed it for all time. Whittingham who, though a layman, became minister to the English community at Geneva, supervised the production of a new translation of the Bible. Its Calvinistic tone shaped the theological thinking of two generations of English Christians and it was not superseded until the appearance of the Authorized Version in 1611. Foxe gave his fellow countrymen a bestseller which set in aspic their perception of the Church of Rome – the
Acts and Monuments of the Christian Religion,
better known as the
Book of Martyrs.
    This enormous and immensely influential work, which went through four editions (each larger than the one before) during the author’s lifetime, covered the entire history of the Christian church and, in particular, those members of it who had died for their faith. Foxe continued the work of fellow exiles, notably John Bale and another religious refugee Edmund Grindal (later to be Archbishop of Canterbury), and their writings were not mere academic exercises produced by men with time on their hands. They sprang form the anguished need of the 1550s émigrés to find answers to such questions as ‘Why was God permitting the slaughter of his English saints?’, ‘How had the Catholic church fallen into such grave error?’, ‘What role was England destined to play in the establishment of the true faith?’ and ‘How did all this fit in with the divine eternal scheme of things?’ These were certainly questions which were exercising Walsingham and we shall not understand his later career if we do not address the deep concerns that he and his fellow asylum-seekers felt or the theological and philosophical mindset they developed to deal with those concerns.
    Bale and Foxe, like their fellow evangelicals at Basel, had no doubt that England was marked by providence for a special destiny. Their writings combined Biblicism and nationalism. Bale’s
Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Catalogus
traced the history of England from such illustrious semi-mythical figures as Brutus, Joseph of Arimathea and King Arthur down to the mid-sixteenth century. In parallel it chronicled the development of the papacy, represented in the early centuries by faithful and devout pastors but, from the time of BonifaceVIII (1294–1303), by agents of Antichrist, who tried to usurp the temporal authority of kings and emperors. But human history was not just played out on the temporal plain. Bale’s prayer was the same as Milton’s, a century later:
                                what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That in the height of this great argument
I many assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. 4
    Everything that happened was predestined by God and foretold in his word, particularly in the Book of Revelation. St John’s vision was the key to:
    all the chronicles and most notable histories which hath been written since Christ’s ascension, opening the true natures of their ages, times and seasons. He that hath store of them and shall diligently search them over,