"pestilent." YourDictionary, n.d. Web. 10 April 2019. <https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/pestilent>.
Then he was liable to be seized and put to death as a pestilent heretic. There only remained to draft and publish the edict containing the ban.
Erasmus only ventures to say in his friend's defence " that while he was chancellor no man was put to death for these pestilent opinions, while so many suffered death in France and the Low Countries."
Among them, too, were these passages: "Success will give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that it has received since its birth"; "we have here a mighty work upon our hands, no less than the conversion of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the utter subduing of a pestilent heresy, which has so long domineered over great part of the northern world."
As he characterized his opponents in general as the "pestilent herd of libertine scribblers with which the island is overrun," it is no matter of surprise that the book made him many bitter enemies.