The Irish Reformation has traditionally been seen as an unmitigated failure. It has generally been assumed that the inability of Protestantism to take deep root in early modern Ireland was always a foregone conclusion, despite the repeated efforts of English reformers to spread their religion into this corner of the Tudor empire.Footnote ¹ This is perhaps symptomatic of the historiographical trend to isolate Ireland from England in studies of the period.Footnote ² Henry Jefferies has recently challenged these models by conceiving the sixteenth-century Irish Church as existing under the umbrella of the English Church.Footnote ³ By following Jefferies's lead, this article seeks to understand the Irish Reformation from a contemporary English perspective, namely the autobiographical account given by John Bale in The Vocacyon of Johan Bale to the bishoprick of Ossorie in Irelande his persecusions in y^e same & final delyueraunce (1553).Footnote ⁴ It will be argued that the appointment of English ministers to Irish bishoprics was consistent with efforts to expand the burgeoning Tudor ‘empire’ through an extension of the English state's religious policy.

The Vocacyon tells John Bale's story of being appointed to the bishopric of Ossory, County Kilkenny, by Edward VI; his struggle to make headway against a bloc of conservative clergy; his escape from murderous mobs upon the accession of Mary; and his high-sea adventures involving pirates en route to a safe refuge on the Continent.Footnote ⁵ Due to the specific dates given in the text, it is likely that Bale worked from a diary to compose the Vocacyon almost immediately after arriving on the Continent.Footnote ⁶ This ‘factual’ quality has led it to be described as one of the earliest examples of autobiography in the English language.Footnote ⁷

Bale's narrative, however, must be treated with caution. The Vocacyon is a carefully constructed piece of self-representation in which Bale offers his own theological interpretation of very recent events with a specific pastoral objective in mind. Written for a beleaguered community of English evangelicals in the nascent stages of their continental exile under Mary, it was a ‘homily to true believers’ designed to encourage them to persevere in the face of acute persecution.Footnote ⁸

This work has long attracted attention from literary scholars interested in early modern conceptions of nationality.Footnote ⁹ Likewise, historians have turned to the Vocacyon for insights into the prevailing religious conditions of mid-Tudor Ireland.Footnote ¹⁰ However, previous evaluations of the Vocacyon have too readily taken Bale at face value.Footnote ¹¹ There is another aspect that is often overlooked, even in Steven Ellis's important essay on Bale's episcopal career: many academics have failed to appreciate that Bale saw himself as an agent of the English crown.Footnote ¹² This article explores the extent to which Bale's self-conscious English identity affected his attitude to his episcopal office. His ministry as a bishop in Ireland will be contextualized within the wider English movement of religious reform during the reign of Edward VI (1547–53), in an attempt to throw new light on the imperial designs of the English government in this period, when the Edwardian Reformation was at its apogee.Footnote ¹³

Little is known about Bale's appointment to the vacant see of Ossory in August 1552 apart from the account that we are given in the Vocacyon. Thus it remains unclear why he was chosen to fill this role at this particular moment. Bale was well qualified as a known evangelical and author of the first full commentary in English on the book of Revelation, The Image of Bothe Churches (c.1545), which viewed history through an apocalyptic lens, and significantly shaped the way mid-Tudor reformers conceived their times as a spiritual contest between members of the true and false Churches.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet despite this, his own romanticized account of being ‘called in a manner from deathe to this office’ by the king during his royal progress through Winchester gives the impression that the establishment had previously overlooked Bale for ecclesiastical preferment.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, upon his return to England from a self-imposed exile during the 1540s in the wake of the fall of his former patron Thomas Cromwell and in reaction to the Act of Six Articles, Bale was only able to secure the rather minor post of rector of Bishopstoke, Hampshire, on 26 June 1551, before being promoted to vicar of Swaffham soon after, both thanks to his friend John Ponet, bishop of Winchester.Footnote ¹⁶

A possible reason for Bale's ministerial obscurity is that Sir William Paget, an influential member of the Privy Council, was ill disposed toward him. In 1547, Bale had criticized Paget for trying to force the Protestant martyr, Anne Askew, to recant before her execution and accused him of defending transubstantiation.Footnote ¹⁷ When Bale returned to England in 1548, Paget was still in a powerful political position, and was therefore ‘well placed to block Bale from advancement’.Footnote ¹⁸ It may be significant that Bale's appointment to Ossory occurred while Paget was disgraced and faced charges of corruption (he received a full pardon in December 1552, and was reinstated to the council the following February).

Other records corroborate the view that Bale had been overlooked by the Edwardian regime. When Archbishop Cranmer wrote to William Cecil on 25 August 1552, he suggested four men for the primacy of Ireland, that is, as archbishop of Armagh; Bale was not on the list.Footnote ¹⁹ One of Cranmer's recommendations was Hugh Goodacre, who was to join Bale in Dublin for their joint consecration service the following March.Footnote ²⁰ Although Cranmer had not considered Bale to fill the important see of Armagh, it is certainly possible that John Ponet had had a hand in the promotions of both Bale and Goodacre: Bale was a prebendary at Winchester, and Goodacre was Ponet's chaplain. Ponet's signature topped the list of signatures on the letter that bestowed the bishopric of Ossory upon Bale, dated 26 August 1552.Footnote ²¹

Until this point, Bale's name had also been absent from any discussions regarding vacant sees emanating from Ireland. Ossory had been vacant since the death of Milo Baron in 1550, despite proposals of qualified candidates by two successive Lords Deputy of Ireland to the Privy Council in London. In October 1550, Sir Anthony St Leger recommended his own chaplain, Patrick Walsh, for the position.Footnote ²² Six months later, St Leger's newly arrived replacement, Sir James Croft, complained to William Cecil about the ‘neglicence of the Bysshopes and other spyrituall mynistres’, and called for ‘some lerned men’ to be sent over to reform the Irish Church.Footnote ²³ A short while after this, Croft wrote to John Dudley, the Lord President of the council, and suggested Thomas Leverous to fill one of the vacant sees – Armagh, Cassell or Ossory. According to Croft's commendation, Leverous was a highly suitable and qualified candidate since he was able to preach in both English and Irish.Footnote ²⁴ However, these requests fell on deaf ears. The dismissal – or ignoring – of the suggestions for episcopal promotion made by local authorities indicates that the Edwardian administration treated ecclesiastical reform in Ireland as a matter for the English authorities, and the Irish Church as part of the English establishment.

Other bishoprics in England had only been offered to trusted evangelicals.Footnote ²⁵ Ireland was no different. The council had made it clear to Croft that ‘the [financial] fruicts of the busshoprick’ are not meet for any man ‘but a good mynister and a preacher of the worde of God’.Footnote ²⁶ In other words, the administration would only appoint a trusted political ally who would also be willing and able to administer the type of reform that matched the evangelical mould being promoted elsewhere in the Tudor ‘empire’. Bale certainly fitted that bill. Having trained as a Carmelite friar, he converted in the early 1530s and soon made a name for himself as a political dramatist and a writer with a ‘brass-knuckled polemical style’.Footnote ²⁷ But as already noted, he had been overlooked for ecclesiastical promotion until this point in time.

Whatever the political reasons for Bale's appointment, he portrayed it as a providential act. Bale framed his ‘vocacion to the bishoprick of Ossorie in Ireland’ as a matter of divine ‘election’ facilitated by his earthly king.Footnote ²⁸ In doing so, he unashamedly associated himself with the apostle Paul.Footnote ²⁹ Just as Christ had appointed Paul apostle to the Gentiles, so Edward had appointed Bale as his ambassador and advocate to tame the ‘wild Irish’ through religious reform.Footnote ³⁰ The letter of appointment carried the king's authority, and Bale understood it as a directive to establish English order in Ireland.Footnote ³¹ Within days of his arrival to Ireland, Bale noted that ‘heathnysh behavers’ (i.e. traditional practices associated with the mass) went unchecked because ‘Christe had there no Bishop, neyther yet the Kynges Majestie of Englande any faithful officer of the mayer’.Footnote ³² Soon after, Bale's disgust was compounded when he discovered that it was considered ‘an honour in this lande to have a spirituall man as a bishop, an Abbot, a Monke, a Fryre, or a Prest’ as father. Thus he resolved ‘to refourme it [i.e. the Irish Church] … by our preachinges [so that] the popes superstitions wolde diminishe & true Christen religion increase’.Footnote ³³ There was little doubt in Bale's mind that he was being sent as a missionary bishop, ordained by God and commissioned by Edward to help establish the English Church in Ireland.

Throughout his ministry, Bale applied the concept of empire to describe his work, seeking to exploit England's imperial prerogative and impose evangelical doctrine and practice upon his diocese by constantly invoking the royal supremacy.Footnote ³⁴ Reflecting on his time as bishop of Ossory, Bale claimed to have ‘mayntened the politicall ordre by [preaching evangelical] doctrine, & [thus] moved the commens always to obeye their magistrates’.Footnote ³⁵ Despite fleeing Henry's regime in the 1540s, Bale referred to Henry in the Vocacyon as ‘that noble prince’ who completed ‘that wonderfull wurke of God … an overthrowe [of] the great Golias of Rome’.Footnote ³⁶ The royal supremacy continued to affect modes of thinking within the fledgling communities of exiled evangelicals even as Henry VIII's elder daughter sought to dismantle it. Other Marian exiles would soon challenge this view: most prominently, Bale's close friend and mentor, John Ponet, would go on to write the first defence of regicide in his treatise, Politike Power (1556).Footnote ³⁷ Bale never followed Ponet's lead in this regard, however.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, the picture Bale gives of his time in Ireland is quite the opposite. He had, in his view, leveraged the political hegemony of the English Church afforded by the Tudor empire to pursue his goal of reforming his remote diocese in south-eastern Ireland. Although Bale crossed the Irish Sea, he understood his ministry as falling under English legal jurisdiction, both civil and ecclesiastical.

Bale's view was not out of step with the prevailing culture of obedience throughout the Tudor century.Footnote ³⁹ Nor was it a novel way of conceiving the reach and influence of the English crown in Ireland. The various acts of parliament that established the royal supremacy refashioned Henry VIII's position and title as combined ruler over Church and state with imperial terminology. According to the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533), ‘this Realme of Englond’ was ‘an Impire’, and Henry was declared the ‘Supreme heede and King having the Dignitie and Roiall Estate of the Imperiall Crown’ over ‘a Body politike compacte of all sortes and degrees of people’, including those living in areas outside England, such as the Irish Pale and Calais.Footnote ⁴⁰

This imperial concept was reinforced with ecclesiastical overtones during Edward's reign. The royal proclamation of July 1547 that ordered the Book of Homilies to be read out in every parish referred to the ecclesiastical institution as ‘this Church of England and Ireland’. Edward VI was called the ‘supreme head immediately under God of the spirituality and temporality of the same church’.Footnote ⁴¹ By the end of the reign, Edward was being hailed as ‘king of England, France and Irelande defendoure of the faith: and of the church of Englande and also of Ireland in earthe the Supreme head’ in the official catechism.Footnote ⁴² Thus in both a civic and ecclesiastical sense, mid-Tudor reformers saw Ireland and its Church as falling under the dominion of the English crown. In theory, then, the Edwardian Church, as an institution of the Tudor empire, extended beyond the geographic borders of England and incorporated the dioceses of Ireland. On this basis, the ecclesiastical institution could be used as a political instrument to enhance the colonial reach of the Tudor crown.

From an ecclesiastical perspective, the diocese of Dublin (if not the entire Irish Church) had long been seen as the handmaid of the English Church.Footnote ⁴³ Edward's reign saw a continuation of this relationship. In 1547 George Browne, archbishop of Dublin (1536–54), proposed a scheme for the endowment of a university in his diocese to advance ‘the unspeakeable reformacōn of that realme … [and to increase] the obedience of [the king's] Lawes’ there.Footnote ⁴⁴ This was not mere lip service to the new evangelical king. Under Henry VIII, Browne had shown an inclination to support the Reformation in his diocese. In a letter written to Henry's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, in 1538, the archbishop of Dublin made a particular point of mentioning his personal involvement in deleting ‘out of the canon of the masse or other bookes the name of the Busshop of rome’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Under Edward, Browne also promoted the ministry of Walter Palatyne, a Scotsman who preached in Dublin against the pope, ‘the masse and other ceremonies’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1548 Christopher Bodkin, archbishop of Tuam (1536–72), wrote from beyond the Pale in County Galway to render his ‘diligent service’ to Edward Bellingham, the Lord Deputy at the time. Bodkin had noted that due to a ‘lack of regemen & Justice’, his county ‘nydyth reformacōn more than eūr’.Footnote ⁴⁷ These examples demonstrate that well before Bale was considered for the see of Ossory, existing bishops were making some attempt to reform their Irish sees in accordance with the new ecclesiastical outlook of the Edwardian regime.Footnote ⁴⁸ Political weight was added to this movement with the 1549 Act of Uniformity, which Bellingham actively enforced.Footnote ⁴⁹ Moreover, as Jefferies argues, although the act did not explicitly mention Ireland, it was imposed upon the anglophone parishes of the Pale ‘with the acquiescence of the local secular elite’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such moves emphasized to the local population the extension of England's political, and thereby ecclesiastical, authority over Ireland.

Changes to public worship furthered the Edwardian regime's process of annexing the Irish Church to itself. In 1551, the 1549 edition of the Book of Common Prayer became the first book printed in Ireland. Royal instructions to the Lord Deputy made it clear that the new English liturgy was to become the standard form of public worship in Ireland.Footnote ⁵¹ Church services were to be conducted ‘in the englishe tongue in all places’. The only exception allowed was where a majority did not understand English, in which case the liturgy was to be ‘translated truly into the Irish tongue, unto such tyme as the people maye be brought to understand the englishe’.Footnote ⁵² This was, as Cummings comments, ‘an exemplary moment of colonization’.Footnote ⁵³ A population that had showed no previous signs of welcoming reform was now impelled to pray for deliverance from ‘the tyranny of the bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities’ in English.Footnote ⁵⁴ Initially, however, the Edwardian Reformation in Ireland was in practice aimed at, and intended for, those who understood English. An abridged Irish-Gaelic translation of the 1559 Prayer Book was not produced until 1608, while the complete liturgy only appeared in 1712.Footnote ⁵⁵ As a point of comparison, Thomas Gualtier made a French translation of the 1552 Prayer Book for use in the Channel Islands and the French Stranger Church in December 1552, although no translation of any edition of the Prayer Book into Manx was made until 1610, nor published until 1765.Footnote ⁵⁶ At the same time, William Salesbury was translating sections of the 1549 Prayer Book into Welsh, although this was not published until 1567.Footnote ⁵⁷ No Latin version of the 1552 Prayer Book was ever produced, nor did the 1559 edition appear in French.Footnote ⁵⁸

Forcing the Irish Church to adopt English as its official language of prayer and worship was a powerful means of enveloping it into the English Reformation. As Felicity Heal has demonstrated, ‘authority … was clearly on the side of the dominant tongue’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although Cranmer encouraged reformers in Ireland to learn Irish Gaelic in order to be better equipped to reach local communities, there is no evidence to suggest that Bale ever entertained this possibility.Footnote ⁶⁰ This limited Bale's reach to those within the Pale. His inability to engage with the Gaelic population was also partly a function of the politico-cultural divisions within sixteenth-century Ireland. As Ellis points out, imposing religious reform upon the Gaelic communities required a ‘political conquest’ via military means.Footnote ⁶¹ Bale was surely not ignorant of these circumstances. He delineated the population between native-born Irish and those of English birth.Footnote ⁶² Yet Bale's decision to conduct his ministry according to the doctrines and rites established by English law reflected his political and religious allegiance to the Edwardian establishment, and mirrored the official relationship of Church and state between England and Ireland.

The most obvious example of this in the Vocacyon is Bale's description of his consecration. The service became a flashpoint because the dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, Thomas Lockwood, or, as Bale calls him, ‘Blockhead’, tried to prevent the use of the revised Ordinal of 1552 in consecrating the bishops elect, Bale and Goodacre.Footnote ⁶³ Although the 1549 Prayer Book had been printed in Ireland in 1551, it did not contain the reformed Ordinal of 1550, which was subsequently revised and incorporated into the 1552 Prayer Book.Footnote ⁶⁴ This variation of Prayer Book editions between England and Ireland highlights the differing pace of official reform across the Tudor empire, from its centre in London to the farthest outposts in the English Pale of Ireland. While the English Church accelerated its reform programme under the protectorship of John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, the Irish Church lagged behind.Footnote ⁶⁵ Lockwood understood this. Thus

This standoff between Bale and Lockwood was not just about which edition of the Prayer Book was to be used in Ireland, nor was it about retaining traditional forms of ceremonial as embodied in the 1549 Prayer Book. At a deeper level, it was a disagreement over which parliament had authority in Ireland, and by implication, the freedom which the Irish Church had from the English Church in matters of doctrine and worship.

Ironically, had Bale been familiar with the Irish Prayer Book of 1551, he could have invoked it to counter Lockwood's argument. The ‘Prayer for the Lord Deputy’ was an additional prayer for the Irish edition that for obvious reasons was not in the English equivalent of 1549. By using it, Irish congregations besought God to ‘lighten the herte of thy seruaunt [i.e. the Lord Deputy], now gou-ernour ouer this realme under our most dread and soueraigne Lord, Edward the sixt’, so that he might set the example of living in ‘due obedience to their kyng’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This prayer reveals one way that liturgy was used to establish a clear political hierarchy of England over Ireland. The implication was that every Irish resident who prayed it was an English subject.

The impasse over Bale's consecration was eventually broken by his forceful will and obstinate obedience to English law. He was adamant that the more conspicuously evangelical Prayer Book of 1552 was to be used in all of Edward's domains: ‘If Englande and Ireland be under one kinge they are both bounde to the obedience of one lawe under him’. Clearly Bale saw Ossory as a diocese of the wider Edwardian Church, not as a separate entity. Furthermore, the soon-to-be consecrated bishop asserted that once he set foot in Ossory ‘I wolde execute nothinge for my part there but accordinge to the rules of that lattre boke [i.e. the 1552 Prayer Book]’.Footnote ⁶⁸ This was more than a matter of political principle; it was an issue of godliness. Bale argued that ‘true obedience to Gods most holy wurde’ involved obeying ‘the commaundement of your christen Kynge’. Hence Bale ‘requyred [all prebendaries and priests in Kilkenny] to observe and folowe that only boke of commen prayer whych the kynge & hys counsel that yeare put fourth by acte of parlement’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus the Prayer Book became a signal of Tudor imperial domination in the diocese of Ossory at least. The liturgical reform enforced by Bale throughout his diocese serves to highlight again that the Edwardian Reformation was advanced in Ireland on the back of political might. Paradoxically, it would be political forces that undid Bale's Irish mission too.

The abrupt change in monarchs in July 1553, from the evangelical Edward to the Roman Catholic Mary, drastically altered the ecclesiastical circumstances throughout the Tudor empire. The local Irish clergy acted quickly to restore traditional religion.Footnote ⁷⁰ Bale was hounded from his episcopal see by mutinous clergy who looked to the new monarch for religious leadership, and he fled Ossory in search of a safe refuge on the Continent.Footnote ⁷¹ The Marian exile reminds us that, for many mid-Tudor evangelicals, the Edwardian Reformation remained unfinished business. That was how Bale felt about his time in Ireland.

When Bale was writing the Vocacyon, the outcome of the Reformation in Ireland was far from a foregone conclusion.Footnote ⁷² According to Bale, a ‘great nombre’ of people had been won over to his brand of Protestantism. This did not stop a band of ‘cruell murtherers’ from killing five of Bale's household servants in August 1553, however. In response, the local mayor, Robert Shea, deployed a retinue of a hundred horsemen and three hundred foot soldiers to deliver Bale from the imminent threat to his life. The many ‘yonge men’ in this coterie carried their bishop to safety that night while ‘syngynge psalms and other godly songes’.Footnote ⁷³ Bale recorded that they were welcomed to Kilkenny by the townsfolk lining the streets with ‘candels lyght in their hādes [and] shoughting out prayses to God for deliuerynge me’.Footnote ⁷⁴ These positive remarks suggest that Bale believed (or wished to believe) that he had made some inroads into the hearts and minds of his Irish flock. Beyond the Vocacyon, however, there is little evidence to suggest that the doctrinal aspects of the Edwardian Reformation had developed any deep roots within the Irish population by the end of 1553.Footnote ⁷⁵ Both Ellis and Jefferies point to the lack of evangelical preachers as a key reason for the shallow acceptance of reform in sixteenth-century Ireland.Footnote ⁷⁶ Walsh points the finger directly at Bale, arguing that his ‘insensitivity … and lack of pragmatism guaranteed that he was doomed to failure’.Footnote ⁷⁷ From Bale's perspective, his attempt to import the Reformation into Ireland did not fail on account of inadequate strategy. Rather, it was explained as God's providential punishment of the Tudor ‘empire’ for not having embraced ‘the heavenly doctryne’ of justification by grace through faith in Christ alone.Footnote ⁷⁸

Bale may have lost his Irish battle, but he was confident of God's ultimate victory in the spiritual war in which the mid-Tudor ‘empire’ was embroiled. This was the broader point of the Vocacyon. Bale manipulated his personal experience in Ireland to provide an example for other exile congregations to mimic. Continued use of the Prayer Book would give these new congregations ‘the face of an English churche’ as it had done for Bale in Ossory.Footnote ⁷⁹ This proved to be tendentious for some exiles, as the unsavoury affair of the so-called ‘Troubles at Frankfurt’ (1554–5) demonstrated.Footnote ⁸⁰ But as an initial response to the Marian restoration, the Vocacyon must be read as an attempt to conceive the fellowship of believers associated with the Edwardian Reformation as belonging to a unified Church of the Tudor ‘empire’. This applied as much to evangelicals in England as it did to those in Ireland and those exiled on the Continent.

Bale's Irish mission stands as an instructive episode within the wider story of the evangelical movement of the sixteenth-century English Church. His episcopal career was an expression of the overlapping interests of Church and state in the Tudor ‘empire’ under Edward VI. Ecclesiastical reform in Ireland was complemented by political subjugation, and vice versa. While Bale sought to conform the doctrine and practice of the Irish Church to its English counterpart, the political dominance of England was reinforced through the use of the English liturgy. In this way, Bale was simultaneously his king's ambassador and the mouthpiece of his sovereign Lord.