John Bale and Religious Conversion in Reformation England

Oliver Wort

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317319955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Focusing on the life and work of the evangelical reformer John Bale (1485–1563), Wort presents a study of conversion in the sixteenth century.

1
Constructing the Converted Self

Any study of Reformation conversion that aims to explore the process of change from the most fundamental level – the level of a specific individual – must first ask what that individual even understood by the single word ‘conversion’. So, inasmuch as it is even possible, definitions first. What was John Bale’s take on the crucial noun? As presented in his play Johan Baptystes Preachynge, a production about religious change that survives only in an edition from 1744, an axiom of Christian conversion is that the malicious man who rejects sin for God’s word, the Gospel, will become charitable. More, the wrathful hater will be changed into an earnest lover, the gluttonous will become temperate, the proud meek, the lecherous pure and the slothful diligent. Be converted to Christianity, Joannes Baptista begs:

[l]aye apart your wrathe, your covetousnesse and pryde,
Your lustes unlaufull, with your other synnes besyde.
Knowledge your trespace and cease from doynge yll;
Flee mennys tradycyons and Gods high lawes fulfyll.

Joannes Baptista’s lesson is simple, drawing attention to the transformative potential of faith in God: ‘[f]or Gods love, repent and turne ye to the lorde, | That by him ye maye to hys kyngedome be restorde’. It is also effective, for within the play his congregation is baptized in Christ’s name, each individual transformation occurring at such a pace, and with such ease, that it borders on the farcical. Turba Vulgaris, who represents ‘the commen people of Jewry’, genuflects and is blessed thus:

take my baptyme which is a preparacyon
Unto faythe in Christ wherin rest your salvacyon.
To Christes Gospell your conversacyon applye,
And lerne by thys sygne with hym to lyve and dye.

Publicanus and Miles Armatus follow suit – ‘[b]e baptysed then in token of repentaunce, | And take to ye faythe’, ‘[t]hys baptyme of myne to yow doth represent | Remyssyon in Christ’ – so that in turn all three are converted to God.¹

In the specific instance Christianity supplants Judaism, but Joannes Baptista’s repeated exhortations, ‘[l]aye apart your wrathe’ and ‘turne ye to the lorde’, reveal that in Bale’s play conversion is more than just the unique substitution of one creed for another. Instead, it involved a comprehensive process of change brought about by confession: ‘Common Crowd [Turba Vulgaris] is converted to God, and confesses his sins thus’; ‘[w]hen he has gone out, the Tax-collector [Publicanus] acknowledges his sin in God’s presence’; ‘[h]e leaves and the Armed Soldier [Miles Armatus] confesses his sins’.² In each case conversion is predicated on repentance – ‘[k]nowledge your trespace’, ‘[f]or Gods love, repent’ – following which supplicants could ‘take to ye faythe with a newe remembraunce’. The point was that aft er contrition a new life might replace the old and the subject could be reborn, as Baleus Prolocutor summarizes: ‘[f]orsake your olde lyfe and to the true fayth applye; | Washe away all fylth and folowe Christes Gospell’.³ Above all else, Johan Baptystes Preachynge dramatizes conversion-by-confession in accord with scripture, where the Baptist’s missive is ‘the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins’.⁴ The idea is that individual subjects would remember their former, sinful lives, in order that they could be obliterated and replaced by new ones.

Religious conversion was therefore both a specific event – a ‘preparacyon’ – that brought one life to an end, and an ongoing process – ‘folowe Christes Gospell’ – that saw another spawn, as Joannes Baptista seems to acknowledge when he distinguishes between ‘[t]he baptyme of me [which] is but a shaddow or type’ and Christ’s baptism ‘in the holy Ghost and fyre’.⁵ As differentiated, we move from the body to the spirit – in Jesus Christus’s estimation, ‘[i]n flesh to the sprete that the Gospell shuld ye brynge, | Belevynge by me to have the lyfe everlastynge’ – a shift the Baptist explained:

[s]och is thy baptyme as awaye all synne doth wype.
I geve but water; the sprete, Lorde, thu dost brynge.
Lowe is my baptyme; thyne is an heavenly thynge.

And in Jesus Christus’s lengthier formulation:

[t]he more nede is [the sinners] to have me for their gyde.
I wyll go afore, that they maye folowe me,
Whych shall be baptysed and thynke me for to be
Their mate or brother, havynge their lyverye token,
Whych is thy baptyme, as thy selfe here hath spoken.
Take water therefor and baptyse me thys houre,
That thy baptyme maye take strength of hyghar poure,
The People to marke unto my kyngedome heavenlye.

The apogee of personal transformation was not just the adoption of Christianity’s ‘lyverye’, which followed water baptism. Far from it; conversion was a vocation with Christ at its centre as ‘gyde’, and this more exhaustive concept of change, a process of amendment and refashioning in the life of Christ that took place continuously, was particularly important to Bale and other converts who, during the Reformation, rejected Catholicism for an alternative form of Christianity.⁶

As an infant Bale was baptized as a Christian, as a Carmelite friar he devoted his life to Christianity, and as a reformer he continued in his dedication to Christ. Consequently, it was his sense of a renewed vocation, and not the unrepeatable act of baptism, that distinguished between his various creeds. We see this when Bale rejects Bonner’s accusation that converts were being rebaptized into a reformed faith. In part the reformer was concerned to defend against the charge that he was of the ‘Anabaptistical faction’, so in his 1561 A Declaration of Edmonde Bonners Articles he argued that even though the baptismal rite may have changed with successive religious settlements, baptism in Christ transcended ritual divides.⁷ Additionally, he declared that a man’s faith was revealed in his actions and not in the specific doctrinal formula of his baptism. In his autobiography of 1557, Bale placed a similar emphasis on the convert’s new way of life:

[b]y my parents, then weighed down with numerous offspring, then deceived by the pseudo-prophets’ illusions, I was thrust, a boy of twelve, into the Carmelite monkish hell-pit in the city of Norwich, that I might withdraw myself at leisure to the mountain of contemplation and thereaft er be a hunter aft er the mountains. There and at Cambridge I wandered through every backwardness of education and mental blindness with no tutor or Maecenas, until with the shining of God’s word the churches began to be recalled to the purest founts of true theology. In that splendour of the newly arisen Jerusalem, called neither by monk nor sacrificial priest but by the illustrious Lord Wentworth, I too saw and acknowledged my deformity, to the very highest degree. And straightaway I was borne by God’s goodness from the dry mountain into the florid and fecund valley of the Gospel, where all foundations are laid not upon sand but on solid rock. From that point onwards I eradicated the stamp of the most accursed Antichrist and hurled all his chains far from me so that I might be given to the strength and freedom of the children of God.⁸

Bale’s narrative pleaded guilty to a sinful heritage, his spiritual habitation of ‘the dry mountain’ as a friar, even as it looked forward to an exemplary future, his industry in ‘the florid and fecund valley’. Enlightenment retrospectively cast the historical self in the role of degenerate (‘mental blindness’, ‘my deformity’), an anathema that the present self felt compelled to overthrow and eradicate, and this understanding of conversion – a comprehensive shift in person and vocation – is repeated elsewhere in the convert’s works. For example, take his A Tragedye or Enterlude Manyfestyng the Chefe Promyses of God unto Man, where Esaias Propheta exhorts Pater Coelestis to ‘[c]onverte [the unfaithfuls’] hartes, lorde, and geve them thy true lyght | That they maye perceive their customable folye’.⁹ As Arthur Darby Nock would have it, ‘[b]y conversion we mean the reorientation of the soul of an individual & a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old is wrong and the new is right’.¹⁰ Or, in Bale’s words, though in the ventriloquized voice of his youngest son and namesake: ‘I am ordayned of God to this ende. First to acknowlege my selfe a wycked synner, than to aryse from it through true repentaunce, and so to leade a newe lyfe aft er the gospell’.¹¹

Broadly speaking, this is the sense of ‘conversion’ (OED definitions 9 and 11a) that informs this study, so it is worth bearing in mind. And conceived of thus, the process of change was not without its consequences. The variously repeated imperatives ‘[f]orsake your olde lyfe’ and ‘leade a newe lyfe’ functioned with one rhetorical intent, which was to urge an estrangement from the past.¹² As Bale made clear, the subject who gazed into the glass of the sinful soul was supposed to apprehend a monstrous likeness, or wicked distortion, at odds with his or her virtuous self:

[w]hen thu hast & in y^e law as in a clere myrrour beholden thy manyfolde mysheues [sic] & considered the depe daungers of them, thu shalt of necessite be moved to seke unto Christe as unto an onlye relese, health, comfort, peace, attonement, grace, righteousnesse, wysedome & redempcion.¹³

Accordingly, the convert’s protestation ‘I am not what I once was’ forged a divide between the iniquitous past and the righteous present. One character dissipated as another formed – that is, the pre-convert made way for the convert – and so a fragmentary identity was asserted in place of the coherent personality. And yet, such is the paradox of conversion that even in describing the process of change, both personalities were brought into ‘a linear, narrative temporality of “before” and “aft er”’.¹⁴ The dividing impulse actually preserved separate identities in a continuous narrative of the self, and it should be obvious that the ‘I’ of the pre-convert – in this case John Bale the friar – and the ‘I’ of the convert – John Bale the reformer – were both aspects of the single name – John Bale – appended to his autobiographies. The point that I bring out over the course of this study, what should be a mere commonplace, is that whatever the claims to the contrary, the analogical relationship between the past and the present never disintegrates entirely. As such, across the process of change we can expect both continuities and discontinuities, which itself raises problems. How are we to decide when an individual was sufficiently transformed, or whether a new vocation truly distinguished the new from the old? Was it simply a matter of becoming a minister in a different church? Was it the moment an individual began to worry about Catholic views of the Eucharist, or soteriology? Or was it the instant such concerns were institutionalized, when a new belief became a sure and settled conviction? And how can we decide if that happened, actually? Did certain points of dogma only follow at different times as a result of processes of reading, or ambient changes in orthodoxy? If so, should we expect to find just one moment of change? Or in the sixteenth century were new creeds periodically renewed, or even replaced, following every further reform in the church, or every further development in anti-Catholic public rhetoric? The list of questions is potentially endless, so in search of a beginning, having at least set out the terms of the debate, it is worth considering again Bale’s conversion narrative of 1557. At least there we can address in some detail Bale’s claimed experience of the process of change.

As Honor McCusker maintains, the ‘details of John Bale’s life, as far as we have them, are obtainable chiefly from his own accounts and scattered comments, rather than from any secondary accounts. It is something to be grateful for that in a period when biographical material oft en rests on hearsay or inference, we have Bale’s authentic record’.¹⁵ This ‘authentic record’, one that has formed the basis of biographical sketches of Bale since its first inception, is the narrative of 1557 already cited. Here I quote most of the remainder of that text:

John Bale, of the county of Suffolk, born in the village of Cove three miles from Southwold, five from Dunwich, to parents Henry and Margaret: I contrive the present work on British authors through from the division of the islands by the sons of Japheth and their posterity up to this year, 1557 A.D., covering 3618 years. [By my parents & the children of God.] And lest thereaft er I might be any such execrable creature of the beast I took a faithful wife, Dorothy, heeding this heavenly advice: ‘He who cannot constrain himself, let him marry’ [1 Corinthians 7:9]. Thenceforth I followed the Cross without delay, which even unto then had not forsaken me. My luck running out, I was soon hauled from the pulpit before tribunals, at York first under Lee, aft erwards at London under Stokesley; but pious Cromwell, a friend to King Henry, always acquitted me in the name of high comedy. Aft er his death I remained in Lower Germany for eight years, an exile through the bishops’ tyranny, where I wrote many English opuscules. Recalled at last by the most holy King Edward VI and made Bishop of Ossory in Ireland I proclaimed Christ crucified now glorified in heaven (not that transubstantiating idol exhibited in the mass) as their sole means of salvation. But when death removed that holy King (whose reign was to England like that half-hour’s silence in Revelation 8, and day 1335, in Daniel 12) from among the ready poisons of papists, their darts, javelins, blades, swords and hundred other dangers, slaying even their kin, most faithful God mercifully freed me from renewed captivity, mockery and eventually my sale by pirates; and by his sole hand he led me into Germany, safest haven of Christian virtue, along with my wife. So this couplet of Baptista Mantuanus truly applies to me: ‘For every time affairs entangle me, God upholds me wiThextraordinary tenderness’.¹⁶

This account, supplemented by the researches of numerous scholars, has determined the essentials of Bale’s life.¹⁷ Born in 1495, he became a Carmelite in 1507 and went up to Cambridge in 1514 (but not to Jesus College, as some have claimed).¹⁸ Two years later he was ordained to the diaconate at Ely, and in 1529 he was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Divinity. Before this, Bale spent time on the continent, visiting the Low Countries in 1522 or 1523 and France and Italy between 1526 and 1527.¹⁹ In 1530 or t...