John Hooper

Bishop of Gloucester and Martyr, c. 1495–1555

John Hooper was born in Somerset about 1495 and took his B.A. at Oxford in 1518. Tradition places him next among the Cistercians. Hooper himself wrote to Heinrich Bullinger that, while living a courtier’s life, he came upon writings of Zwingli and Bullinger’s commentaries on Paul, and to these books he owed his deliverance from the papacy and the conversion of his soul.1 The Six Articles drove him from Oxford in 1539, and he spent some nine years in exile at Strasbourg, Basel, and Zurich, where he married Anna de Tzerclas and became the close friend of Bullinger. When he left for England he told his Zurich friends that the last news of him would be that he had been “burnt to ashes.”2

Back in London in May 1549, he preached often twice a day to crowded churches and was named Bishop of Gloucester in 1550. He refused the old oath and the episcopal vestments as remnants of popery; the dispute with Cranmer and Ridley put him briefly in the Fleet prison before a compromise, and he was consecrated on March 8, 1551.3 His visitation found that of 311 clergy in his diocese, 168 could not repeat the Ten Commandments. He preached three or four times a day, set his clergy fifty articles of doctrine, and fed the poor at his own table after examining them in the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Commandments. Hagstotz notes that he has been called “the father of the Puritans.”4

Under Mary he refused to flee (“now … I am thoroughly persuaded to tarry, and to live and die with my sheep”) and was sent to the Fleet on September 1, 1553. After seventeen months he was condemned and sent to Gloucester to be burned in his own cathedral city. The night before, Sir Anthony Kingston, whom Hooper had once disciplined for adultery and who owed his conversion to him, begged him to recant:

“Consider,” he said, “that life is sweet, and death is bitter.” … “The life to come is more sweet, and the death to come is more bitter.”5 Sir Anthony Kingston and John HooperGloucester, February 1555

On February 9, 1555, the green wood and the wind made his death slow: the fire had to be kindled three times, and he suffered for three quarters of an hour, praying, “Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me! Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!”6

Other Reformers   Nicholas Ridley

Notes

  1. J. C. Ryle, Light from Old Times (London: Chas. J. Thynne, 1890), “John Hooper: Bishop and Martyr”; Hilda Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, chapter “John Hooper: Fighter against Papal Errors.” ↩
  2. Ryle, Light from Old Times, “John Hooper.” See Heinrich Bullinger. ↩
  3. Ryle, Light from Old Times, “John Hooper.” See Nicholas Ridley. ↩
  4. Ryle, Light from Old Times, “John Hooper”; Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “John Hooper.” ↩
  5. Foxe, quoted in Ryle, Light from Old Times, “John Hooper.” ↩
  6. Ryle, Light from Old Times, “John Hooper,” quoting Foxe; Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “John Hooper,” which also dates his appointment to Worcester “1522,” an evident misprint for 1552. ↩