Robert Glover

Life and Ministry

Robert Glover was a gentleman of Mancetter in Warwickshire, educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, a younger son of a recusant family who had been one of the earliest Cambridge converts to the Lutheran reading of justification in the AD 1530s. He held no ecclesiastical office and exercised no public ministry; he was a country squire who had been catechized by the new doctrine and who would not now leave it. In Cambridge his lay theology had given him a reputation for forceful argument, and Hugh Latimer is recorded as saying that he knew of no layman in England who could state the case for justification by faith more cleanly.

Circumstances of Death

Arrested at his Mancetter manor in the summer of AD 1555 by a search ordered by the Bishop of Coventry, Glover refused to abjure his Protestant position and was condemned on the standard formula of heresy concerning the Mass. He was burned at Coventry on 20 September AD 1555. Foxe records that on the morning of his death he was in a long state of dryness and despair, fearing he might fail at the stake, until at the moment of the fire he was overtaken by an unexpected sweetness of consolation that left him visibly transfigured. He turned to his companion Augustine Bernher and said: He is come, he is come, and gave himself to the fire singing.

Legacy

Glover became, in the Foxe tradition, the model of the layman who suffers the dark night before the fire — the Christian who knows he is going to die and cannot find the consolation he had taught others to expect, until the moment the flame takes him. His witness is that assurance is not a feeling kept in stock for the hour of need but a gift given at the hour of need, and that the Christ who comes to the believer at the stake is the same Christ who has been promised but not always felt. He is come, said Glover at the last; and the saying has been the prayer of Protestant deathbeds since.