Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley

Life and Ministry

Hugh Latimer was born around 1485 to a Leicestershire yeoman family, educated at Cambridge, and converted to Reformed convictions in his thirties through conversations with Thomas Bilney. He served as bishop of Worcester under Henry VIII, resigned the see in protest of the Six Articles in 1539, and emerged again as the great popular preacher of the Edwardian Reformation, his sermons at Paul's Cross in London the most widely heard of any reformer of his generation. Nicholas Ridley was born around 1500 in Northumberland, took two degrees at Cambridge, served as chaplain to Cranmer, and became bishop first of Rochester and then of London under Edward VI, where he was the architect of much of the second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552. Both men were arrested within months of Mary I's accession in 1553.

Circumstances of Death

Latimer and Ridley, with Cranmer, were transferred to Oxford in early 1554 to be examined by a panel of theologians on the doctrine of the Real Presence. Both refused to recant. They were held for over a year while the queen's advisors prepared the legal grounds for execution. On the morning of October 16, 1555, they were brought to the ditch outside the north wall of the city — the modern Broad Street — and tied back to back to a single stake. As the pyre was lit Latimer, who was seventy and frail, called across the wood to Ridley, who was younger and would suffer longer: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." Latimer died quickly. Ridley's pyre had been laid badly and his lower body was burned to charcoal before the flames reached his upper body; he suffered for some forty-five minutes before he died.

Legacy

Latimer's last words are the most quoted sentence in the Foxean tradition and one of the most quoted in the English Reformation as a whole. The Martyrs' Memorial on St Giles' in Oxford, raised in 1841 in response to the Oxford Movement's revival of Catholic liturgy, commemorates Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer at the spot. The Book of Common Prayer that Ridley had labored over became, in successive recensions, the central liturgical document of the entire Anglican Communion. Foxe's Acts and Monuments, which devoted unprecedented space to the Marian martyrs, was placed by royal injunction in every English cathedral after Elizabeth's accession four years later.