John Bale

John Bale (1495-1563) is a little bit of an enigma for historians.  In his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry John N. King labels him as an ‘evangelical polemicist and historian’ but Bale is so much more than this.  John Bale is a scholar, a bishop, a playwright, a matryrologist, a historian, a polemicist, a bibliophile, a collector of ancient manuscripts, and more.  Bale’s profile as formed by historians is shaped in large part through his own autobiographical accounts which makes our understanding of Bale immediately complicated by biased and fictional representations.  Thus the life and career of Bale is on the one hand detailed and rich and on the other difficult to categorise and distinguish truth from fiction.     

Bale was born to a humble life in the small village of Cove, near Dunwich in Suffolk to Henry and Margaret.  He was one of several children and as such was delivered to the Carmelite Friars early in life as was often done at the time.  As a Carmelite, Bale received scholarly training at Jesus College, Cambridge and travelled to Louvain and Toulouse to carry out research into the history of his order.  By 1530 he had graduated with a DTh (Diploma in Theology) and become prior in Maldon, Essex.  Three years later he was promoted to the convent at Ipswich, then a year later to Doncaster. 

It was around this time that Bale converted to a reformist position against the Church of Rome, broke his oath to the Carmelites and married a woman (possibly a widower with a child in tow) named Dorothy.  Later in life Bale attributed his conversion to Thomas, first Baron Wentworth of Nettlestead but the exact details and chronology is unknown.  We do know that Bale was arrested on suspicion of heresy several times, first in 1534 and then again in 1537.  On the second occasion it would seem that Bale was helped out by friends such as the antiquarian John Leland and the principal secretary Thomas Cromwell, whom Bale had begun to work for as chief playwright of evangelical plays.  In 1536 he finally left the Carmelites for good, taking the post of a stipendiary priest at Thorndon in Suffolk. 

In 1539 Bale was forced into exile due to the major shift in religious policy by Henry VIII but upon the succession of Edward VI, Bale was given the post of Bishop of Ossary in Ireland.  This post proved difficult for Bale and upon the succession of Mary he was forced to flee for his life and travel abroad for a second period of exile.  Upon the succession of Elizabeth I, Bale (now quite elderly) was appointed a canon at Canterbury Cathedral where he died in late 1563. 

Bales major contribution to the reformation can be found in his polemical plays (especially his adaptation of King Johan), in his evangelical appraisal and appropriation for an English audience the continental apocalyptic tradition which argued that human history had been predicted in scripture and that the rise and fall of the Roman Catholic Church had been prophesised (The Image of Bothe Churches), and in his detailed catalogues of English writers and texts.  The latter work, of which there are two editions, is named the Catalogus and contains the results of extensive research into England’s historical source material.  The Catalogus was also as much theological polemic as it was catalogue: containing a complex history of the papacy and its fall to the antichrist (later republished as the Acta Romanorum pontificum).

In addition Bale wrote several martyrological accounts (John Oldcastle and Anne Askew) which would later inform and influence his friend and colleague John Foxe, the author of the Acts and Monuments.  Indeed recent scholarship has unearthed a strong connection between the two men that suggests that Bale acted as mentor and encourager to Foxe’s project.  Bale also helped Matthew Parker, Queen Elizabeth’s first archbishop of Canterbury to find lost ancient manuscripts for his own evangelical “propaganda” campaign.  Finally, Bale wrote a polemical and autobiographical account of his time in Ireland (The Vocacyon of John Bale) which gives us a fascinating glimpse into Irish history and more particularly, English views of the Irish at this time. 

Historical research is increasingly finding John Bale to be an important and essential influence on English scholarship during the sixteenth-century whether through his own activities or through his publications and writings.  Bale helped to shape the English reformation on various levels but, also, helped to create the myth of protestant suffering and victory.  As in his own autobiographical accounts Bale’s works carry a certain mythological and fictive element to them.  Indeed, Lesley P. Fairfield, one of Bale’s many modern biographers called Bale ‘mythmaker for the English Reformation’.  Such a title for a biography at once gets to the crux of Bale and offers us a warning not to examine him and his work without a significant amount of caution.         

The Courtenay conspiracy

Kenneth R. Bartlett, ‘The English Exile Community in Italy and the Political Opposition to Queen Mary I’, Albion, 13:3 (1981), pp. 223-241.*



I’ve been meaning to read the 1981 article by Kenneth R. Bartlett for a while concerning the English exile community in Venice during the reign of Mary I.   I first discovered it during my PhD but laid it aside as it was not directly relevant to my studies at the time.  I’m glad that I’ve finally found a reason (and opportunity) to make amends in this regard.  Bartlett’s topic (which incidentally derives from his own PhD thesis) certainly makes for an interesting parallel to the thesis of Christina Garrett in her largely biographical investigation of the English exiles that ended up in various cities along the Rhine.  Bartlett certainly brings to my attention the fact that there was an exile community in Venice largely, but not entirely separate, from the exiles in Strasbourg, Frankfort and Basel.

Edward Courtenay (1526-1556)

The Venice exiles whilst made up largely of protestant reformers, were nevertheless not primarily religious in their exile from Mary’s England, but political.  Many had been involved in Northumberland’s failed plot to supersede Princess Mary to the throne through the use of Lady Jane.  Indeed, Bartlett argues that their aspirations continued through a conspiracy led primarily by Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon and through allegiance to the Venetian Republic whom had strong reasons to block and then disrupt the marriage of Mary to Philip of Spain.  The conspiracy against Mary was therefore three-pronged in nature: from the perspective of the English political exiles in Venice it was about establishing an independent and Protestant monarchy in England.  For the Venetian Republic it was a directed policy against Imperial Hapsburg power becoming ‘permanently established in England’.  Then thirdly the conspiracy related to political manoeuvring in England’s Parliament and from the Dudley faction in France. 

So what does all this have to do with scholarly activity in the sixteenth century?  Well it actually has a potentially important role to play, albeit in a round-about way.  Bartlett claims that the Venetian exile community ‘was to have the greatest influence on the political complexion of the next reign’ – that being the protestant reign of Elizabeth I.  Bartlett stresses that 24 of the 42 former exiles that returned to Parliament between 1559 and 1593 had spent at least part of their time in exile in Italy.  These were the movers and shakers of Elizabeth’s government and thus a significant influence on the scholarly activities that were allowed, encouraged and produced during the early period of Elizabeth’s reign.  Also of particular importance was the connection of William Cecil who would of course go on to become Elizabeth’s principal secretary.  During the reign of Mary, Cecil maintained relations with the exile communities both in Germany and Italy/France and only narrowly escaped punishment for suspicion that he had been involved in the Dudley conspiracy.         

* Link is to the article held on JSTOR which is only available via subscription.

PhD Thesis: Rectifying the ‘ignoraunce of history’: John Foxe and the Collaborative Reformation of England’s Past

Front Page from the first edition of the
Acts and Monuments (1563) taken
from The Acts and Monuments Online

My intention today is not so-much to promote my own work, but to state where I am coming from in terms of my own academic background.  The most important element of this is my doctoral thesis which focused on the research and writing by John Foxe and his colleagues to re-appropriate English history in a protestant mould.  John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is the largest evangelical text produced during the sixteenth century reformation in England.  Its main purpose was to promote the reformist agenda at court and to the English population at large. 

Although (from its inception) the Acts and Monuments has been best regarded as a martyrology and memorial for those protestants who were burnt at the stake during the reign of Mary I, it is in actuality an ecclesiastical history which traces the Christian church from its foundations to Foxe’s present day.  It is this element that I studied at the University of Sheffield between 2005 and 2009. 

My thesis focused on Foxe’s attempts to rectifying the ‘ignoraunce of history’ (his words) held by the English people.  In particular, it looked at Foxe’s writing of medieval history from the arrival of the Anglo Saxons through to the thirteenth century.  I attempted (where possible) to track down Foxes’ sources which were sometimes manuscript or printed copies of medieval chronicles, recent publications such as histories, polemics, catalogues, or treatises, or occasionally based upon official documents searched out in archives.  I also tried to trace Foxes’ contacts: names such as John Bale, Matthew Parker, John Day, Edmund Grindal and many more came up time and again and to varying degrees. 

The context in which Foxe wrote brought my attention to the wider international reformation with connections found between Foxe and the Magdeburg Centuriators of Germany (another gigantic ecclesiastical history project from this period) and various continental scholars.  However, the main basis for my work was the identification of source material that Foxe used and the way that he used it – not to tell lies or falsify as some have claimed in the past, but to tell a specific version of the past based upon what is said in his sources (and what Foxe believed was not said in his sources). 

So that is where I am coming from.  A study of how Foxe and others compiled the medieval portion of the Acts and Monuments.  My studies are now shifting towards a wider investigation of sixteenth century scholars and historians but also towards that moment of transformation which occurred during the reign of Mary I.  Exile not only radicalised many scholars from England in the 1550s but it also set English scholarship on a slightly different path – one that showed itself quite clearly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.