Lawrence Saunders

Life and Ministry

Lawrence Saunders was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, ordained in the reformed English church under Edward VI in AD 1549, and appointed reader at Lichfield and then incumbent at All Hallows, Bread Street, in the City of London. He preached the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith and the supper of the Lord as a memorial, refused the Catholic Mass when it was reintroduced by Mary Tudor's first parliament in AD 1553, and was arrested at his Bread Street pulpit in October AD 1554 for a sermon explicating the warning of Saint Paul that no man should preach a different gospel.

Circumstances of Death

Examined before Bishop Bonner of London and Bishop Stephen Gardiner of Winchester (the Lord Chancellor), Saunders refused to recant his rejection of papal supremacy and transubstantiation. He was held in the Marshalsea for fifteen months, during which he wrote pastoral letters to his wife Joan and to his congregation — among the most-quoted prison letters of the English Reformation. Delivered to the secular arm and conveyed under guard to Coventry to be burned in his own diocese as a warning, he kissed the stake on 8 February AD 1555 and called out: Welcome the cross of Christ, welcome everlasting life. The fire was slow and the witnesses recorded that he died with the words of Psalm 31 — Into thy hands I commend my spirit — on his lips.

Legacy

Saunders was the second Protestant burned under Mary, between John Rogers (already in the corpus) and John Hooper. His letters from prison shaped the consolatory genre of English Reformed devotion for the next generation. His witness is that the cross is welcomed by the man who knows whose cross it is — not a punishment to be endured but a road to be walked toward the Lord who walked it first. The fire he kissed at Coventry was the same cross that Paul had glorified to the Galatians, and Saunders went to it singing.