BALE, JOHN. — English writer, b. at Cove (Suffolk) on 21 November 1495, d. at Canterbury (in whose cathedral he was buried) in November 1563. At the age of twelve he entered the Carmelite monastery of Norwich, and in 1529 received a degree in theology from Jesus College, Cambridge. There he came under the influence of Cranmer and Thomas Wentworth and became an ardent partisan of the reformers. He enjoyed the powerful protection of Thomas Cromwell, whose attention, it is said, he attracted with his sacred plays.
In these dramatic compositions (of which only five remain), B. displays neither scruple nor decorum in his polemical violence. Of these, Three Laws of Nature, Moses and Christ corrupted by the Sodomytes, Pharisees and Papystes most wicked probably dates from 1538; A Tragedy, or enterlude manifesting the chief Promises of God unto Man; The Temptacy of our Lorde; A brefe Comedy or Enterlude of Johan Baptystes preachynge in the Wylderneste all date from 1538. Their artistic value is slight. Of greater historical importance is the other dramatic work, Kyng Johan (c. 1548), which marks the transition from the old dramatic morality play to English historical drama.
At Cromwell’s fall, B. fled with his wife and children to Germany, returning upon the accession of Edward VI; in 1552 he was promoted to the bishopric of Ossory (Ireland), where he refused to be consecrated according to the Roman rite, despite a public protest by the dean of Dublin. In Ireland he promoted Protestant propaganda by every means, and, on the accession of Queen Mary, was barely able to escape to safety. He went to the Netherlands, thence to Frankfurt, and then to Basel. After Elizabeth’s accession, he returned to England and received (1560) a prebendal stall at Canterbury.
His most important work, of which the second edition is cited—almost entirely reworked in comparison with an earlier one (1548–1549), which contained five centuries of names—is Scriptorum illustrium maioris Britanniae... Catalogus (Basel 1557–59), composed of fourteen centuries. The material of the work, with frequent indications of its sources and without the personal interventions that impair the text published by B., was printed in 1902 under the editorship of R. Lane Poole and M. Bateson under the title Index Britanniae Scriptorum quos... collegit Joannes Balens (Anecdota Oxoniensia, part 9ᵃ).
John Pits (1569–1616), a Catholic exile, based his work on that of B. in compiling his Relationum historicarum de rebus Anglicis tamus primus (Paris 1619), in which he omits all the Protestant theologians recorded by B., but adds the lives of Catholic exiles residing at Douai and other French cities.