BALE, JOHN. - English writer, b. at Cove (Suffolk) on 21 Nov. 1495, d. at Canterbury (in whose cathedral he was buried) in Nov. 1563. At the age of 12 he entered the Carmelite monastery of 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 an ardent partisan of the reformers. He enjoyed the powerful protection of Thomas Cromwell, whose attention he is said to have drawn with his sacred plays.
In these dramatic compositions (of which only five survive), B. shows himself unscrupulous and without decorum in his polemical violence. Of them, Three Laws of Nature, Moses and Christ corrupted by the Sodomytes, Pharisees and Papystes most wicked is probably 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 are all from 1538. Their artistic value is minimal. Of greater historical importance is the other dramatic work Kyng Johan (around 1548), which marks the transition from the old dramatic morality play to English historical drama.
On Cromwell's fall, B. took refuge with his wife and children in Germany, returning thence with the accession to the throne of Edward VI, and in 1552 he was promoted bishop of Ossory (Ireland), where he refused to be consecrated with 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, he barely managed to save himself. He went to Holland, thence to Frankfurt, then to Basel. When Elizabeth ascended the throne, he returned to England and received (1560) a prebendal stall at Canterbury.
His most important work, of which the second edition is cited as almost entirely remade with respect to a first (1548-1549) that 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 the sources and without the personal interventions that harm the text published by B., was printed in 1902 under the editorship of R. Lane Poole and M. Bateson with the title Index Britanniae Scriptorum quos... collegit Joannes Balens (Anecdota Oxoniensia, part 9ᵃ).
John Pits (1569-1616), a Catholic exile, based his compilation of Relationum historicarum de rebus Anglicis tamus primus (Paris 1619) on B.'s work, in which he omits all the Protestant theologians recorded by B., but adds the lives of the Catholic exiles residing at Douai and other French cities.
Bibliography
Salvatore Rosati