ABSTRACT
In the sixteenth century, long before the first English translations, Machiavelli was well known in the British Isles thanks to Latin and French versions and a significant manuscript circulation. His close association between political radicalism and religious dissent, between aspirations for Church reform and republicanism, drew the Italian religious dissidents towards the writings of the Florentine thinker, who had denounced the responsibility of the Papacy in the sixteenth-century Italian religious crisis. Machiavelli's republicanism had already fuelled the Italian Reformation's opposition to the Catholic Church; in Elizabethan England the Florentine thinker provided the Italian exiles with a language and a method to address contemporary political issues. To preserve religious freedom in Protestant Europe it was necessary to prevent the establishment of a universal monarchy, founded, like the Spanish empire, on the political use of religion and other practices described by Machiavelli.
