Exile in Europe during the English Revolution and its Literary Impact

The account we give of exiles abroad is impoverished, or at least incomplete, if we let it stop at the people who became exiles and look only at what happened to them. Exiles did not just languish in foreign courts, houses or caves, hoping to receive correspondence from home, and writing the odd angry justification of themselves. They interacted with the natives of their new places of residence, and these people took note of them. Native people looked carefully at the exiles and in some cases made something of them and their experiences in their own writing. It is a circumstance that has been explored in intellectual and science history, but is far less acknowledged, if it is, in religion, politics and literature.1 This, then, is an account of one aspect of the impact of the exiles on seventeenth-century Europe and, in particular, on European literature.