Or some other trifle to busy their heads withal,
Playing at quoits or nine-holes, or shooting at butts:
There let them be, a God's name.

Or here again is a bold declaration from New Custom, the Reformation
minister:

I said that the mass, and such trumpery as that,
Popery, purgatory, pardons, were flat
Against God's word and primitive constitution,
Crept in through covetousness and superstition
Of late years, through blindness, and men of no knowledge,
Even such as have been in every age.

It is with some surprise certainly that we find King John of England
glorified, for purposes of Protestant propaganda, as a sincere and godly
'protestant'. So it is, however. In his play, _King John_ (about 1548),
Bishop Bale depicts that monarch as an inspired hater of papistical
tyranny and an ardent lover of his country, in whose cause he suffered
death by poisoning at the hands of a monk. Stephen Langton, the Pope and
Cardinal Pandulph figure as Sedition, Usurped Power and Private Wealth.
A summary of the play, provided by an Interpreter, supplies us with the
following explanation of John's quarrel with Rome.

This noble King John, as a faithful Moses,
Withstood proud Pharaoh for his poor Israel,
Minding to bring it out of the land of darkness;
But the Egyptians did against him so rebel,
That his poor people did still in the desert dwell,
Till that duke Joshua, which was our late King Henry,