While heralded as heroic figures for their crusades against Muslim imperialism during the Middle Ages, the Knights of Malta had fallen into disrepute by the mid-sixteenth century. Up until the Reformation, this pan-European religious and military order had received substantial support from the English crown, but in 1540 King Henry VIII dissolved the Order in England, and outlawed their customary apparel with its distinctive Maltese cross. As a Catholic Order the Knights' allegiance was to the pope, not the king, and in addition to this their increasing association with piracy and other lawless behavior made them identifiable with the loathsome figure of the renegade. Subsequent to their denouncement in England, a variety of English publications condemned the Knights for their Catholic allegiance and their corsair activities, accusing them as well of sexual promiscuity and other forms of overindulgence – of living “betwixt bawds and banquets.” Protestant English writers in fact attributed the Knights' degraded morals to their Catholic vows, and in particular to the vow of celibacy, so redolent of the priesthood. Nonetheless, the Knights reappeared on the popular stage in at least five plays between the late 1580s and the early 1620s. In this chapter I explore why English playwrights featured members of this outlawed and denounced Order in roles that often celebrate their heroism against the Turks, and redeem their disgraced reputations not by making them conform to Protestant ideals but by rehabilitating the very vow of celibacy that had come to define them in the popular imagination as incorrigibly Catholic.