This chapter examines the role of two Cambridge colleges — Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex — in European politics and diplomacy. Emmanuel became the source of diplomatic chaplains appointed in the reign of James VI and I, all of whom made important contributions to European diplomacy and promoted the Church of England as a model for emulation abroad. Meanwhile, other members of both colleges promoted James’s diplomatic agenda from England, by assisting in the composition of defences of the English Royal Supremacy for a European readership. The chapter then looks at these colleges as a crucial institutional underpinning to Jacobean foreign policy and as evangelical institutions with ambitions to promote Reformation both within and beyond the British Isles. The ‘puritan’ colleges of Cambridge bore certain similarities to the early modern Jesuit colleges, but their significance for the divergent histories of Catholic and Protestant missionary endeavour has been almost entirely overlooked.
