Thomas Wilson's Apocalyptic Rhetoric Ryan J. Stark The Reformation provides the religious framework for Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1553). From the Reformation, he inherits some disturbing ideas, including the notion of an impending apocalypse. 1 The world's twilight looms in the Rhetorique. The end is near, though one does not get this impression while reading Peter Mack and jennifer Richards. They treat the book largely as a guide to political self-fashioning, paying little attention to Wilson's religious mentality and even less attention to the tradition of evangelical polemics in which he writes. 2 Wayne Rebhorn also describes the Rhetorique as a primer for courtly intrigue, associating it with Baldesar Castiglione's The Courtier (1528) and assigning to it a Machiavellian aura. 3 But Wilson's persistent Protestant sermonizing suggests otherwise, to the point that we should reimagine his motives for publishing the text. While the practical agenda of training courtiers undoubtedly exists, it is made secondary by a deeper spiritual purpose: salvation. Wilson teaches English rhetoric primarily so that students might defend themselves against the Devil's (and Rome's) eloquence before the world ends—for the sake of [End Page 341] their own redemption as well as England's. His overriding concern is profoundly theological rather than narrowly political, making the instructional manual more catechistic than courtly in mood. The Rhetorique is at bottom a religious argument, in other words, an attempt to advance the idiom and the cause of English Protestantism in light of an apocalyptic situation. A broader implication follows. Scholars require a neglected theological category—apocalypse—in order to discuss with sufficient care the rise of modern English rhetoric. Several critics, of course, have connected rhetorical developments in sixteenth-century England to theological debates, but no one has attended to the significance of eschatology as a major aspect of these developments. 4 This is an oversight. Fears of the apocalypse are precisely what gave urgency to the formation of an effective Protestant idiom in the first place, one that worked against Catholic rhetoric, or the Antichrist's tropes, by the standards of most Reformers. That is, an apocalyptic anxiety shaped the origins of modern English eloquence, and Wilson's Rhetorique played an important role in this event. Eschatological Angst Wilson lived in a period full of doomsday arguments. The idea of an impending apocalypse pervaded early Reformation culture, beginning with Martin Luther's identification of the Pope as Antichrist and intensifying with Lucas Cranach and Philip Melanchthon's Passional Christi und Antichristi (1521). The notion carried over finally into the works of foundational English reformers such as Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and john Cheke. It would be difficult to make the case that Wilson and other Protestants of the era were not deeply concerned about the day of reckoning. As Bryan Ball shows, the belief in an imminent apocalypse was "nearly universal" among Renaissance reformers: "At no other time in England's history has the doctrine of the second advent been so widely or so readily accepted." 5 Stuart Clark makes a similar argument: [End Page 342] "The advent of the Antichrist was taken as the surest of many signs that the English Reformation was a part of that decisive battle between good and evil as described in Revelation." 6 In the sixteenth century, the premise that the world might end at any moment operated as an uncontroversial presupposition in most discourses. It was assumed. And while this fact alone does not establish Wilson's anxiety of apocalypse, neither should we disconnect him from his eschatological milieu. 7 A few examples of apocalyptic arguments will help to illustrate the era's pitch and pattern of anxiety. Bishop Cranmer—Wilson's forerunner and the chief architect of Henry VIII's split from Catholicism—preaches sermons at St. Paul's Cross against "the Pope," the "true Antichrist," which he means in the most literal sense. 8 Later, in Cathechismus (1548), he directly warns of the world's end: "The devyll in this lattre tyme doeth dayly more and more rage against the true churche and people of God, for … he perceyvethe, that hys kyngdome draweth to an ende, and a shorte tyme...