John Bale’s 'The Image of Both Churches'

In 1551, John Bale published a three-part work entitled The Image of Both Churches. This work, which was the first English commentary on the book of Revelation, was the fruit of Bale’s years in exile, for he had fled to the continent in 1540 following the fall of his patron Thomas Cromwell. Bale had returned to England in 1547 when Edward VI was crowned, hoping for preferment. His previous writings as a Protestant (he had converted from Roman Catholicism in the 1530s) included numerous stage plays and anti-Catholic pamphlets. During his exile, Bale developed an interest in martyrs and in the Apocalypse that continued throughout the rest of his life. The Image reflects Bale’s contention that “The very complete sum and whole knitting up is this heavenly book [Revelation] of the universal verities of the bible.” Bale sees the story of two radically opposed communities, exemplified by the cities of Jerusalem and Babylon, as the key to all history. He finds support for this view of history not just in the Bible, but in the fathers of the church. Bale states confidently on the second page of the Image: “And after the true opinion of St Austin, either we are citizens in the new Jerusalem with Jesus Christ, or else in the old superstitious Babylon with antichrist the vicar of Satan” (252). 

John Bale’s early life gave no hint that he would become in his forties an arch-Protestant propagandist and historian of the English Reformation. His later notoriety as the anti-papal “Bilious Bale” may tempt one to forget that he spent nearly thirty years as a Carmelite friar. Before the early 1530s, in fact, Bale’s piety and values were wholly typical of late medieval religious life in England. Other Englishmen of his generation may have been feeling a restless dissatisfaction with the faith and worship of Catholic England, and may have been finding in Erasmian or Lutheran ideas a new outlook upon life. Not so Friar Bale. Anticlerical, humanist, and Lutheran currents of thought left him untouched until well after his thirty-fifth year.