JOHN BALE. - English writer, b. at Cove (Suffolk) on 21 Nov. 1495, d. at Canterbury (where he was buried in the cathedral) in Nov. 1563. At the age of 12 he entered the Carmelite monastery at Norwich, and in 1529 he took his degree in theology at Jesus College, Cambridge. Here he came under the influence of Cranmer and Thomas Wentworth and became a zealous partisan of the reformers. He enjoyed the powerful protection of Thomas Cromwell, by whom, it is said, he was brought to notice through his sacred plays.
In these dramatic compositions (only five of which remain), Bale shows himself unscrupulous and lacking in decorum in his polemical violence. Among them, *Three Laws of Nature*, *Moses and Christ corrupted by the Sodomites*, *Pharisees and Papystes most cock’d* was probably written in 1538; *A Tragedy, or Enterlude manifesting the chieffe Promyses of God unto Man*; *The Temptation of our Lorde*; *A brefe Comedy or Enterlude of Johan Baptystes preachynge in the Wyldernesse* are all dated 1538. Their artistic value is minimal. Of greater historical importance is his other dramatic work *Kyng Johan* (c. 1548), which marks the transition from the old morality play to the English historical drama.
At the fall of Cromwell, Bale fled with his wife and children to Germany, returning on the accession of Edward VI, and in 1552 he was promoted to the see of Ossory (Ireland), where he refused to be consecrated according to the Roman rite, despite a public protest from the dean of Dublin. In Ireland he promoted the Protestant cause by every means, and on the accession of Queen Mary he barely escaped with his life. He went to Holland, thence to Frankfurt, and then to Basel. With the accession of Elizabeth, he returned to England and in 1560 obtained a prebendal stall at Canterbury.
His most important work, of which a second edition is cited as almost entirely rewritten from a first (1548–49), which contained five centuries of names, is *Scriptorum illustrium maioris Britanniae... Catalogus* (Basel 1557–59), consisting of fourteen centuries. The material for this work, with frequent indications of sources and without the personal interpolations that marred the text published by Bale, was printed in 1902 by R. Lane Poole and M. Bateson under the title *Index Britanniae Scriptorum quos... collegit Joannes Baleus* (*Anecdota Oxoniensia*, part 9).
Bale’s work was used by John Pits (1569–1616), a Catholic exile, in compiling his *Relationum historicarum de rebus Anglicis Ioannis primus* (Paris 1619), in which he omits all the Protestant theologians recorded by Bale but adds the lives of Catholic exiles resident in Douai and other French cities.