Hugh Latimer

Preacher and Martyr, c. 1485–1555

Hugh Latimer was the preacher of the English Reformation. He was no systematic theologian and left no great treatise, but for nearly thirty years he preached Christ in plain English to scholars, countrymen, and kings, and he died at the stake in Oxford with words that England has never forgotten. Foxe called him “the worthy champion, and old practiced soldier of Christ.”1

A Yeoman’s Son at Cambridge

He was born about 1485 at Thurcaston in Leicestershire,2 the only son, with six sisters, of “a housebandman of right good estimation,” and at fourteen he was sent to Cambridge.3 Preaching before King Edward VI many years later, he remembered his father’s farm:

I can remember, that I buckled his harness, when he went unto Black heathe field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the kings majesty now.4 Hugh LatimerSermon before King Edward VI, 1549

At Cambridge he became a priest and a zealous defender of the old religion, so scrupulous, Foxe says, that he feared he had never mixed enough water with his massing wine. When he took his degree of Bachelor of Divinity, his oration was an attack on Philip Melanchthon.5

Converted by a Confession

Thomas Bilney heard that oration and resolved to win him. He went to Latimer’s study and asked the young priest to hear his confession. Latimer told the story himself in 1552:

Bilney was the instrumente whereby God called me to knowledge, for I may thank him, next to god, for that knowledge that I have in the word of GOD. … Bilney heard me at that time, and perceived that I was zealous without knowlage, and he came to me afterward in my study, and desired me for God’s sake to hear his confession, I did so. And to say the truth, by his confession I learned more than afore in many years. So from that time forward I began to smell the word of god, and forsook the school doctors.6 Hugh LatimerSermon on the Lord’s Prayer, 1552

The two men became inseparable. They visited the prisoners in the Cambridge tower together, and the hill where they walked in the fields was long afterward called “the Heretics hill.”7 At Christmas about 1529 Latimer preached his famous sermons “on the card,” dealing out “Christ’s cards” from the Sermon on the Mount with the heart as the trump, and he wished the Scriptures to be in English. When the Dominican prior Buckenham warned that a plowman reading “No man that layeth his hand on the plough, and looketh back” would stop ploughing, Latimer answered in the same pulpit before the whole university, and turned the argument into a rout.8

The Bishop of Worcester

From 1531 he was rector of West Kington in Wiltshire, and his preaching soon brought him before the bishops in London, who examined him three times a week and pressed him to sign a list of articles defending purgatory, pilgrimages, and images.9 He later described one of those examinations:

I pray you M. Latimer said one, speak out, I am very thick of hearing, and here be many that sit far of. I marvelled at this, that I was bidden speak out, and began to misdeme, and gave an ear to the chimney: and syr, there I heard a pen walking in the chimney behind the cloth.10 Hugh Latimer

The king protected him. Through the influence of Dr. Butts and “good Cromwell,” Foxe says, Henry made him Bishop of Worcester, in 1535.11 In June 1536 he preached to the Convocation of the clergy before the opening of Parliament.12 When the Six Articles of 1539 forced him to choose between his conscience and his see, he resigned, and Shaxton of Salisbury with him. Foxe says that when Latimer took off his rochet among his friends, “suddenly he gave a skip in the floor for joy, feeling his shoulders so light.” He was later injured by a falling tree, came to London for treatment, and was thrown into the Tower, where he stayed until Edward VI came to the throne.13

Preacher to King Edward

Under Edward, “the golden mouth of this preacher, long shut up before, was now opened again.” Past sixty-seven and still sore from his fall, he preached “for the most part every Sunday twice,” and was at his books every morning by two o’clock.14 In his sermon at Paul’s on January 18, 1548, he asked who was the most diligent prelate in England:

There is one that passeth all the other, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you. It is the devil. … Where the Deuyl is resydent and hath his plough going: there away with books, and up with candelles, away with Bybles and up with beads, away with the light of the gospel, and up with the light of candelles, yea at noon days.15 Hugh LatimerSermon of the Plough, 1548

Such a Candle

When Mary came to the throne, a pursuivant was sent to summon him. Warned six hours ahead, Latimer made no attempt to flee and was ready for the journey when the officer arrived: “My friend, you be a welcome Messenger to me.” Riding through Smithfield on the way to London, he remarked that Smithfield “had long groaned for him.” In the Tower, kept without fire in the frost, he told the lieutenant that unless he had some fire he was likely to “deceive your expectation, for I am like here to starve for cold.”16 In 1554 he was taken to Oxford with Cranmer and Ridley. There the two bishops wrote to each other in prison, and when Ridley asked the old man for help, Latimer replied, “you use me as Bilney did once when he converted me? pretending as though he would be taught of me, he sought ways and means to teach me.”17

On October 16, 1555 the two were led to the ditch over against Balliol College. Latimer came in an old frieze frock, and when he was stripped to his shroud, “he now stood bolt upright, as comely a father as one might lightly behold.” As the lighted faggot was laid at Ridley’s feet, Latimer spoke:

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.18 Hugh LatimerOxford, October 16, 1555

He cried, “Oh Father of Heaven, receive my soul,” received the flame “as it were embrasing of it,” and “soon died (as it appeared) with very little pain or none.”19

Cautions

Latimer was not always so steadfast. Foxe admits that when he was first called before Cardinal Wolsey he “was content to subscribe” the articles put to him. Of the bishops’ articles in 1532, Foxe writes, “whether he did subscribe or no, it is uncertain,” though Bishop Tunstall’s register suggests that he did. Reformation Heroes states plainly that he submitted, and calls it the low point of his life.20 The popular sources contain errors as well. Stephen Nichols calls Latimer “an Oxford man” who was made Bishop of Worcester under Edward; he was a Cambridge man, and Henry made him bishop. Reformation Heroes says he was held in the Tower “for six years until King Henry’s death,” yet elsewhere dates his imprisonments to 1539 and 1546. Hagstotz dates the martyrdom October 15; Foxe gives October 16.21

Other Reformers   Nicholas Ridley

Notes

  1. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 4th ed. (London: John Day, 1583), vol. 2, “Here beginneth the life, acts, and doings of master Hugh Latimer.” ↩
  2. Diana Kleyn with Joel R. Beeke, Reformation Heroes, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), chap. 14, “Hugh Latimer & Nicholas Ridley.” ↩
  3. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Hugh Latimer.” ↩
  4. Hugh Latimer, first sermon before King Edward VI, March 8, 1549, in 27 Sermons Preached by the Right Reverend Father in God and Constant Martyr of Jesus Christ, Master Hugh Latimer (London: John Day, 1562). ↩
  5. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Hugh Latimer.” ↩
  6. Latimer, sermon on the Lord’s Prayer before Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, 1552, in 27 Sermons. ↩
  7. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Hugh Latimer.” See Thomas Bilney. ↩
  8. Ibid. ↩
  9. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 14; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Articles devised by the Bishops, for M. Latimer to subscribe unto.” ↩
  10. Latimer, quoted in Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Hugh Latimer.” ↩
  11. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Hugh Latimer”; Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 14. See Thomas Cromwell. ↩
  12. Hugh Latimer, The Sermon That the Reverend Father in Christ, Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, Made to the Clergy, in the Convocation, before the Parliament Began, the 9. Day of June (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1537). ↩
  13. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Hugh Latimer.” ↩
  14. Ibid. ↩
  15. Latimer, “A notable sermon … preached in the Shroudes at Poules church in London, on the xviii. day of January. Anno. 1548,” in 27 Sermons. ↩
  16. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Hugh Latimer.” ↩
  17. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1718–19, “A conference had betwixt Mayster Ridley, and Mayster Latimer in prison”; first printed in Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, Certen Godly, Learned, and Comfortable Conferences (1556). See Nicholas Ridley. ↩
  18. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1769–70, “The behavior of D. Ridley and M. Latimer, at the time of their death.” ↩
  19. Ibid. ↩
  20. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “Hugh Latimer”; Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 14. ↩
  21. Stephen J. Nichols, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), chap. 6; Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 14; Hilda Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, chapter “Nicholas Ridley: Martyr for His Faith”; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1769–70. ↩