Anglican Commemoration
Bishops & Martyrs
October 16 · d. 1555
Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were English bishops burned together at Oxford on October 16, 1555, for refusing to recant the Reformed faith under Queen Mary I. Latimer, the plain-spoken preacher who had once told a king to his face what he did not want to hear, and Ridley, the Cambridge scholar who had reasoned his way out of the doctrine of transubstantiation, died at the same stake for the same conviction. Latimer's words to his companion at the fire, "we shall this day light such a candle," became one of the most remembered sentences in English Christian history.
Hugh Latimer was a farmer's son from Leicestershire who became the most famous preacher in England. He had studied at Cambridge and was ordained a priest still devoted to the old religion, sharp enough that he once preached against a young reformer named Thomas Bilney. Bilney heard him out, then asked to make his confession to Latimer, and in that private conversation Bilney's own faith passed into Latimer so completely that he later said Bilney had taught him more of Christ than all his years of study. From that day Latimer preached with a bluntness that made him famous and made him enemies. Before King Edward VI he stood in the pulpit and told the boy king and his whole court that the ploughman does more honest work than the idle bishop, and that if the realm's teachers would not sow the seed of the gospel, the devil himself was diligent enough to sow his own. He was made Bishop of Worcester and gave up the office rather than enforce laws against his conscience.
Nicholas Ridley came from the Border country of Northumberland, a Cambridge scholar of real subtlety, trained also in Paris, who rose to master his own college and then to the office of bishop, first of Rochester and then of London. Ridley's road to the Reformed faith ran through a library rather than a pulpit. Reading a ninth-century argument between two monks of Corbie over what happens to the bread and wine at the altar, he became convinced that Christ's body is present to the faithful by grace and by the Spirit, not because the substance of the bread has been changed into flesh. It cost him something to reach that conclusion and more to hold it, for it was precisely the doctrine the old church punished as heresy.
When the young King Edward died and his Catholic sister Mary came to the throne, England swung back toward Rome, and both men were marked. They were arrested, examined, and in the spring of 1554 taken to Oxford, where churchmen sent from London put them through a formal disputation on the Mass and pressed them to recant. Neither would. Two events had to pass before England had the legal machinery to make that refusal fatal. First, the old laws against heresy, abolished under Edward, had to be brought back by Parliament; then a commission had to be sent from Rome itself with authority to try a bishop. Both came to pass. Latimer and Ridley waited more than a year in prison at Oxford before their formal trial was finally held that September, and this time the sentence carried the full weight of the law: death by fire.
On the morning of October 16, 1555, they were led out to a ditch by the city wall, opposite Balliol College, where the stake and the wood were waiting. Latimer, the older man by a generation, walked slowly in a worn gown; Ridley came dressed as a bishop still, and when he saw his old friend he ran to him, embraced him, and said quietly, "Be of good heart, brother, for God will either assuage the fury of the flame, or else strengthen us to abide it." They prayed together, spoke briefly to the crowd, and were bound to the same stake with a chain, a bag of gunpowder hung about each of their necks for a mercifully quick end. As the fire was lit beneath them, Latimer turned to Ridley and, in the words the church would remember for five hundred years, said:
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.
The two men did not die alike. Latimer, old and thin, put his face into the flame and was gone within minutes, seemingly with little pain. For Ridley the fire caught the wood at his feet before it reached the gunpowder, and he suffered a long agony, crying out that he could not burn and begging for more fire, until the flame at last reached the powder and he was still. It was a hard death for a gentle scholar. But the candle Latimer spoke of was not put out. Word of how the two bishops died at Oxford spread through England and beyond it, carried especially by the account John Foxe would soon set down and that generations of English Christians would read and reread, and the courage of that single morning did more to fix the Reformed faith in the English church than a hundred sermons could have done. The grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, and it does not remain alone; it bears much fruit (John 12:24). Two bishops went into the ground by the Oxford wall, and out of that ground grew a church that has never stopped telling their story.
The primary near-contemporary source for the deaths of Latimer and Ridley is John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, first published in 1563 and substantially expanded in later editions (1570, 1576, 1583), commonly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Foxe was a Protestant exile under Mary who returned to England after her death and set himself to compile a full martyrology of the Reformed cause; he drew on trial records, eyewitness letters, and the testimony of people who had known the martyrs personally, and his account of the Oxford burnings, written within a decade or two of the event, is the source nearly every later telling depends on. Historians are candid that Foxe wrote as an advocate, not a disinterested chronicler: his book was a work of Protestant polemic as much as history, compiled to make its subjects into models of faithful suffering for a Protestant readership, and its details grew across editions as Foxe gathered more material and, in places, more embellishment. That does not make the substance of the account false; the central facts of the trial, sentence, and execution are corroborated by other contemporary records. But it is why careful readers weigh Foxe's more vivid and more quotable lines with some caution about exactly how, and by whom, they were first recorded.
Latimer's famous words to Ridley are the clearest case in point. The line "we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out" does not appear in Foxe's first edition of 1563; it enters the text only in the 1583 edition, twenty years after the burning and nearly thirty years after Foxe began collecting testimony. Whether Foxe received it late from a witness who had not yet come forward, or shaped it himself from an account he already had, cannot now be settled from the surviving evidence. Historians have also noted its resemblance to a much older Christian scene: the account of the martyrdom of the second-century bishop Polycarp, preserved by the historian Eusebius, a text Latimer is known to have read. Whatever its exact origin, it is what Foxe recorded, it is what has been read as Latimer's word for nearly four and a half centuries, and it belongs to the same category as much of the record around Latimer and Ridley: not something invented out of nothing, but a saying whose path into the text is less simple than a single eyewitness transcript.
April 1554: the Oxford disputation. In April 1554, more than a year before their deaths, Convocation sent Dr. Hugh Weston, prolocutor of the lower house, to preside over a formal academic disputation at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, examining Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer in turn on transubstantiation, the real presence, and the sacrifice of the Mass. On April 20, 1554, all three were declared to have been defeated in argument and were pressed to recant; none did. But this proceeding carried no sentence of death, because England's medieval heresy statutes had been repealed under Edward VI and there was, as yet, no legal mechanism to execute anyone for the offense. The three men were returned to Bocardo, the town prison at Oxford, to wait.
Latimer and Ridley are kept together on October 16, the day of their martyrdom, in the calendar of the Church of England, alongside Thomas Cranmer, whose commemoration on March 21 marks his own execution five months later. Together the three are remembered as the Oxford Martyrs, the most famous casualties of the Marian persecution and, in the memory of English Protestantism, its founding witnesses.
Their memory is fixed most visibly at Oxford itself. In 1841 the Reverend Charles Pourtales Golightly led a subscription, raised expressly as a Protestant answer to the rising Oxford Movement associated with John Henry Newman and John Keble, to build a permanent monument to the three bishops. Sir George Gilbert Scott designed it on the model of the medieval Eleanor Crosses, and the Martyrs' Memorial was completed in 1843 at the junction of St Giles', Magdalen Street, and Beaumont Street, near Balliol College (not to be confused with Magdalen College across the city, which the street name does not in fact mark). A smaller memorial, a small cross of colored cobblestones set into the roadway of Broad Street outside Balliol, marks the traditional site of the execution itself, though the exact spot is not established with archaeological certainty.
The account of their deaths in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments became, after the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, one of the most widely owned and read books in Protestant England, chained in many parish churches alongside the Bible itself, and it did more than any other single work to fix Latimer and Ridley, and the manner of their dying, in English memory. Latimer's exhortation at the stake in particular passed into the common language of English Protestantism as shorthand for a faith that could not be extinguished by force, quoted from pulpits and in print for centuries after. Latimer is remembered as the plain preacher of the English Reformation, a man who would tell a king an uncomfortable truth in a sermon; Ridley as its scholar, whose long study of the Fathers gave the Reformed English church its settled account of the Lord's Supper.
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The Sermon of the Plough(English, 18 January 1548)
Latimer's most famous sermon, preached in the Shrouds at Paul's Cross, comparing the faithful preacher to a ploughman and rebuking England's bishops for neglecting the true work of preaching.
Public domain: Anglican History (full text)
Sermons by Hugh Latimer(English, 1548-1553)
The fuller surviving corpus of Latimer's sermons, including his addresses before King Edward VI, in a complete public-domain scan.
Public domain: Internet Archive
A Brief Declaration of the Lord's Supper(English, c. 1554-1555)
Ridley's own settled statement of his eucharistic theology, written from prison before his trial, rejecting transubstantiation while affirming a true spiritual presence of Christ received by faith.
Public domain: New Whitchurch Press (full text)
Actes and Monuments (Book of Martyrs)(English, 1563, expanded through 1583)
The near-contemporary account of the Oxford disputation, trial, and burning of Latimer and Ridley, and the source of Latimer's words at the stake. The 1583 edition is the one in which the "candle" exhortation first appears.
Public domain: exclassics.com full transcription
Masters of the English Reformation(English, 1954)
Recommended: Marcus Loane (Banner of Truth)
Written to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Latimer and Ridley's martyrdom, telling both men's lives (with Bilney, Tyndale, and Cranmer) in a single accessible volume by a churchman writing from within their own Reformed conviction; the natural first book for a reader who wants the whole story told with reverence.
Primary sources. Latimer's own sermons survive in several sixteenth-century printings; the Sermon of the Plough, preached at Paul's Cross in London on January 18, 1548, and his sermons before King Edward VI are the most often read, and both are freely available online. Ridley's own defense of his eucharistic position is set out in A Brief Declaration of the Lord's Supper, written in prison shortly before his death.
Principal hagiography. John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563, greatly expanded 1570-1583), universally known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, is the near-contemporary account of the trial, sentence, and burning of both men, and the source of Latimer's words at the stake. It is freely available online in full.
Recommended modern biography. Marcus Loane's Masters of the English Reformation (Banner of Truth), first written in 1954 to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Latimer and Ridley's martyrdom and still in print, tells the lives of both men, alongside Bilney, Tyndale, and Cranmer, in a single accessible volume by a churchman writing from within the same Reformed conviction the martyrs died for. It is the natural first book to put in a reader's hand.
Further reading. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Thomas Cranmer: A Life (Yale University Press, 1996) is the definitive modern scholarly biography of the third Oxford Martyr and carries the fullest critical treatment of the 1554 disputation and 1555 trial as a single episode; MacCulloch writes as a historian rather than from within the tradition he studies, so it is recommended here for the reader who wants the deepest scholarly account, not as the first book to reach for. The Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography carry full scholarly entries on both men; J. F. Mozley's older study of Foxe himself is useful for readers who want to understand how the Book of Martyrs was compiled and why its editions differ.
Online resources. Foxe's Actes and Monuments is freely searchable online (see Works below); Latimer's Sermon of the Plough and his sermons before Edward VI are likewise freely available; the Martyrs' Memorial and Oxford's own local history pages document the 1841 memorial and its Tractarian-controversy origin.
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The machinery of persecution assembled. What changed in the interval was not the men's guilt in the eyes of the regime but the law. Cardinal Reginald Pole arrived in England as papal legate in November 1554, and by the end of that month the realm was formally reconciled to Rome. Parliament then revived the old heresy statutes, receiving royal assent in January 1555. Only with that law restored could a proper ecclesiastical trial, empowered to hand a convicted heretic to the civil authority for burning, take place.
September and October 1555: the trial and sentence. A papal sub-commission headed by James Brooks, Bishop of Gloucester, opened Cranmer's formal heresy trial on September 12, 1555, at St Mary the Virgin, on a ten-foot scaffold erected before the high altar; Ridley and Latimer were examined in a related proceeding at the end of that month. Ridley and Latimer were condemned on October 15 and burned the following day, October 16, 1555, at the ditch by the city wall opposite Balliol College. Thomas Cranmer, as an archbishop, could not simply be tried and sentenced by an English commission; his case had to be referred to Rome, where Pope Paul IV formally deprived him of his see on December 4, 1555. Cranmer was executed some five months after his companions, on March 21, 1556, having first signed recantations under great pressure and then, at the stake, publicly renounced them and thrust the hand that had signed them first into the fire.
The theological dispute. At issue in both the 1554 disputation and the 1555 trial was the doctrine of the Eucharist: whether the bread and wine are changed in substance into the body and blood of Christ (transubstantiation), and whether the Mass is itself a propitiatory sacrifice offered again for the living and the dead. Ridley had reached his settled position some years earlier, reading the ninth-century eucharistic controversy between the monks Radbertus and Ratramnus of the abbey of Corbie; Ratramnus's argument that Christ is present to faith and by the working of the Spirit, not by a change in the natural substance of the elements, persuaded Ridley to abandon transubstantiation for what he and later English formularies would call a true, spiritual, and sacramental presence. He set the case out most fully in his own treatise on the subject, commonly known as A Brief Declaration of the Lord's Supper, written from prison in the months before his death. Both men were pressed hardest, and would not yield, on this single point, and it was on this point, not on any question of the royal supremacy or church order, that the sentence of heresy and death was finally passed.
Almighty God, you gave your servants Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12