Still more degrading are the opprobrious and insulting figures of which he makes use in 1522 in his furious reply “Against King Henry of England,” who had attacked and pilloried his teaching.[391] In his tract it is his aim not only to “lay bare the shame of the Roman prostitute before the whole world, to her eternal disgrace,” but also, as he says further down, to reveal the “shameless audacity” of the King of England, who is a defender of “the scarlet woman of Rome, the tipsy mother of unchastity”; the King, “that fool,” “lies and gibbers like the filthiest of prostitutes,” and that, merely to defend the Pope and his Church, “who are after all nothing more than pimp and procuress, and the devil’s own dwelling.” All this abuse is crammed into a few pages. To conclude, the King, according to Luther’s dictum and description, has been fitly consigned to “the dungheap with the Thomists, Papists and other such-like excrements.” Side by side with all this we find his grand assurances of his, Luther’s, position as the messenger of God. “Christ through me has begun His revelations of the abomination in the Holy Place”;[392] “I am convinced that my doctrines have come down to me from Heaven,”[393] etc. The King he politely describes as a crowned donkey, an infamous knave, an impudent royal windbag, the excrement of hogs and asses. The King, according to him, is more foolish than a fool; His Majesty ought to be pelted with mud; he deserves nothing better, this stupid donkey, this Thomistic hog, this lying rascal and carnival clown, who sports the title of king. He is a nit which has not yet turned into a louse, a brat whose father was a bug, a donkey who wants to read the Psalter but is only fit for carrying sacks, a sacrilegious murderer. He is a chosen tool of the devil, a papistical sea-serpent, a blockhead and as bad as the worst rogues whom indeed he outrivals; an abortion of a fool, a limb of Satan whose God is the devil--and so forth. One of the unfortunate effects of his public struggle on Luther was, that he entangled himself more and more in a kind of polemics in which his invective was only rivalled by his misrepresentation of his opponents’ standpoint and arguments. Preachers of the new faith frequently complained of his insulting and unjust behaviour.