The Title Page of Ponet's Short Treatise

Activist as well as a free-thinking theologian and intellectual, Ponet fought to allow the Reformed clergy to marry while Bishop of Rochester and later Winchester. He fought in Wyatt's Rebellion in 1554; defeated by Bloody Mary's loyalists, he fled into exile in Strasbourg, where he wrote his great Treatise supporting limited monarchy and a subject's right to kill a tyrannical king.