EXPOSING THE ‘WICKED HARLOT’ OF PROTESTANT HERESY: ‘THE ASS CAN STRUT IN THE LION’S SKIN’
VINCENT OF LÉRINS.
The Waie home to Christ and Truth leadinge from Antichrist and Errour, made and set furth in the Latine Tongue … for the Comforte of all true Christian Men, against the most pernitious and detestable Crafte of Heretikes … And now the same Worke is englished, and by the Quenes Highnes authorised to be sette furthe for the reliefe of diuers Englishe Menne … [Colophon: London, Robert Caly, 22 October 1554].
[London, Robert Caly, 22 October 1554].
Small 8vo, pp. [228]; woodcut initials; first page dusty, wax stain at head affecting first two words of title, corners worn at extremities, intermittent small wormtrack to lower margin; else a good copy in nineteenth-century half calf and drab boards; a few pencil manicules and minor pen-trials; nineteenth-century booklabel (‘Bib. Sem.’ within an oval), shelfmarks of Stonyhurst College.
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The Waie home to Christ and Truth leadinge from Antichrist and Errour, made and set furth in the Latine Tongue … for the Comforte of all true Christian Men, against the most pernitious and detestable Crafte of Heretikes … And now the same Worke is englished, and by the Quenes Highnes authorised to be sette furthe for the reliefe of diuers Englishe Menne … [Colophon: London, Robert Caly, 22 October 1554].
First edition in English, very rare, of St Vincent’s Commonitorium pro catholicae fidei antiquitate, translated and with a long Prologue by John Proctor (1521–1558), and a dedication to Queen Mary, ‘a lady of heavenly simplicitie’ whom Proctor later praises as the restorer of the true church. This is one the very few examples of Counter-Reformation polemic published under Mary, who concentrated her limited interest in print on liturgical works.
The fifth-century Gallic monk St Vincent, of the monastery of Lérins (on what is now Île Saint-Honorat, off the coast near Cannes), wrote his Commonitorium as a simple guide to distinguish Catholic truth from heresy, and is most famous for his formulation, as translated here, that ‘in the catholyke churche, we ought seriously to regard and take hede, that we faythfully hold that, whiche is everywhere, alwaies, and of al generally received, observed, and belived: for that is properly catholyke’.
John Proctor was a fellow at All Souls from 1540 until he resigned in 1546, possibly out of a desire to marry. His opposition to the Reformation saw him lie low during the reign of Edward VI, but after the accession of Mary in 1553, he became the first master of Tonbridge School. In 1554 he published both the present work and his Historie of Wyates Rebellion (also printed by Caly), which he must have witnessed in person earlier that year. Proctor’s nearly visceral distaste for the country’s recent Protestant past, of which Wyatt’s Rebellion was a reminder, comes to the fore in his 46-page Prologue ‘to his countrymen’, in which he repeatedly decries the ‘fantasticall pelfrie & counterfaite trash, as latelye have been esteemed’, and the ‘carnall reasonyng’ that can only be found in the ‘whorish arms’ of Protestantism, ‘this divellische Synagoge’, this ‘wicked harlot and her hareheades … that hereticall churche and her chyckines’.
Drawing on St Vincent, Proctor emphasises the universality of Catholic doctrine, against the divisiveness and particularity of heresy, which he says is of one time and one place only. Luther, Bucer, Zwingli, and Wycliffe agree only in that ‘they al would have wyves, long berdes, and finally no olde trueth, or fashions: but all new knackes and fansies’. English Protestants are like fantastic camelopards; ‘Thus the Ape can ruffle in purple: thus the Asse can strowt in the Lyons skynne, thus the jarringe Jaye canne counterfeicte the pleasaunt note of the nightingale … These late preachers in their stoute countenau[n]ce, they seemed warriers: in their lighte apparel, courtiers: in their familiar talke, rybawdes: in their gesture, wantons; in their livinge, ryotous: in the pulpyt, lying preachers: in their bokes spiteful railers’. And the result is that England has never seen such unthrifty servants, unnatural children, and unruly subjects as it now has. They have gone from ‘papishe’ to merely ‘apishe’, having lost ‘but one letter of the name’; and they even eat pork and chicken on Fridays!
While the English printing trade in general shrank notably during the reign of Mary, Robert Caly was one of the few printers to buck the trend, coming out of exile (which he had spent partly in Rouen), and setting up, as he pointedly notes in his imprint, ‘within the precinct of the late dissolved house of the graye freers’, now Christ’s Hospital. He was the only major vehicle for Catholic polemic under Mary, and even he received limited government support and did not become free of the Stationers’ Company until 1558.
This is one of five copies only in ESTC, the others at Bodley, Cambridge, and Folger (two copies, one wanting colophon, one with it supplied).
ESTC S104650; STC 24754.
