"The Sweetness of Polish Liberty:" Sixteenth-Century British Jesuit Exiles to Poland-Lithuania

Abstract

From the late 1550s until 1601, twenty-two men who fled Britain to join the Society of Jesus lived for a time as exiles in Poland-Lithuania. This number included eleven English Jesuits and eleven Scottish Jesuits. Of these men, the first to enter the Society was an English coadjutor brother, William Lambert, who joined in 1557. The last to join were Scotsmen David Leonard Kinard and James Lindsay, who both entered in 1601. Yet beyond a recitation of the bare statistics, the idea of men from the western reaches of Europe negotiating their lives so far east suggests three meaningful historiographic questions that this article explores: Who were these individuals and what can we uncover about their backgrounds? Why did the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth prove an amenable home for Catholic religious exiles, especially British Jesuits, in this period? And, most importantly, what does an examination of the lives of these Jesuits reveal about the nature of religious exile in Early Modern Europe?