Between 1539 and 1547, a handful of English evangelicals went into exile. These men and women formed part of what was already becoming an honourable tradition of exile within European Protestantism. For those reformers faced with the unenviable choice between recantation and death, exile was an acceptable third alternative. The study of exile movements has long held an equally honourable place in Reformation historiography. The importance of exile movements in supporting Protestant churches ‘under the cross’ in France and the Netherlands has become a historical commonplace. Moreover, this is one part of the drama of the European Reformation in which England is generally acknowledged to have played a leading role. England provided a home for Protestant refugees, from the days when Scottish reformers such as Alexander Alesius and George Wishart took refuge south of the border, through the shelter which Edward VI's regimes gave to Protestant grandees such as Martin Bucer and Bernardo Ochino, to the formal ‘stranger churches’ which became permanently established in London and elsewhere. Equally, English reformers were themselves forced into exile in large numbers under Queen Mary. The Marian exiles both formed the backbone of Protestant resistance to the Marian regime and had a lasting impact on English Protestantism. After their return, another exile movement played an equally important part in maintaining, and influencing the direction of, English Catholicism.