John Hooper

Life and Ministry

John Hooper was born about AD 1495 in Somerset, educated at Oxford, ordained, and exiled to Zurich in the AD 1540s where he absorbed the Swiss-Reformed theology of Bullinger and became Bullinger's intimate friend. He returned to England under Edward VI, preached the Lenten sermons before the king in AD 1550 with such effect that he was offered the see of Gloucester, refused at first because he could not in conscience swear the oath using the saints or vest in the Catholic episcopal habit, accepted after the oath was modified, and was consecrated in AD 1551. He governed Gloucester (and from AD 1552 also Worcester) as a vigorous reforming bishop, catechizing his clergy, reforming the cathedral chapter, and disciplining the country parish ministers found illiterate in scripture.

Circumstances of Death

Hooper was deprived of his sees in the first month of Mary's reign and confined to the Fleet for nearly eighteen months, during which he wrote a body of consolatory treatises and disputed with the bishops sent to him. Condemned at the close of the formal heresy proceedings in January AD 1555, he was sent under guard to Gloucester to be burned in his own cathedral city as a public warning. The execution was botched — the fire was lit with green wood and went out twice, and Hooper took close to forty-five minutes to die. Foxe's account, drawn from eyewitnesses, records that he prayed visibly for almost the whole time, raising his hands until the strings of his fingers were burned away, and called out as he died: Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.

Legacy

Hooper became, with Latimer and Ridley, one of the iconic Marian bishop-martyrs of the English Reformed tradition. His refusal of the popish episcopal habits at his consecration anticipated by a generation the issues that would divide Puritan from conformist in Elizabeth's settlement. His witness in the long fire at Gloucester was the witness of patience under suffering: the man whose death was botched died praying the same prayer that Stephen had prayed at Jerusalem, and was answered the same way. The slowness of the dying did not extinguish the spirit — it gave it forty minutes more of audible prayer.