Bonner's detractors, beginning with his Protestant contemporaries John Foxe and John Bale and continuing through most English historiography of the period, paint a different picture. Bonner, they point out, was one of those who brought it to pass that the condemnation of heretics to the fire should be part of his ordinary official duties, and he was represented as hounding men and women to death with merciless vindictiveness. Bale, formerly a friar and ex-Bishop of Ossory, published from his place of exile at Basle in 1554 an attack on the bishop, in which he speaks of him as among other things, "the bloody sheep-bite of London" and "bloody Bonner".