John Ponet--Thomas Cranmer's chaplain, bishop of Rochester and Winchester, Marian exile, and first Protestant advocate of limited monarchy--is one of the more influential forgotten men in literary history. Actually, he is not quite forgotten: John Adams, introducing his Defense of the American Constitutions (1787), writes that Ponet's Short Treatise of Politic Power (1556) "contains all the essential principles of liberty, which were afterwards dilated upon by [Algernon] Sydney and [John] Locke." Nevertheless, apart from this striking statement from a framer of the U.S. Constitution, the rest (more or less) is silence. Sydney and Locke do not acknowledge him--nor does John Milton, who (in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649) quotes Ponet's arguments for popular sovereignty and elective kingship but misattributes the quotation. So as Ponet's ideas rose in currency, his name sank into relative oblivion.

Nothing is known of Ponet's parentage, and indeed little is known of his origins...