Nicholas Ridley

Bishop of London and Martyr, c. 1500–1555

Nicholas Ridley was the scholar among the English martyrs. He was Master of Pembroke Hall, Bishop of London, and Cranmer’s closest theological ally, whose study of the Lord’s Supper helped to move the archbishop. Foxe called him and Latimer “two other special & singular Captains, & principal pillars of Christ’s Church.”1 Of his learning, even his enemies spoke well; of his patience in the fire, few in Oxford could speak without tears.

Pembroke Hall

He was born about 1500, the second son of Christopher Ridley, near Willimoteswick in Northumberland. He learned his grammar at Newcastle and went up to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, about 1518, took his master’s degree in 1526, and studied also at the Sorbonne and at Louvain.2 He became a proctor of the university and in 1540 Master of his college.3 When he bade Pembroke farewell from prison, he remembered its orchard:

In thy Orchard (the walls, buts and trees, if they could speak, would bear me witness) I learned without book almost all Paul’s epistles, yea, and I ween all the Canonical epistles, save only the Apocalypse. Of which study, although in time a great part did depart from me, yet the sweet smell thereof I trust I shall carry with me into heaven.4 Nicholas RidleyFarewell to Pembroke Hall, 1555

The Lord’s Supper

Cranmer made him his chaplain in 1537 and vicar of Herne in Kent the next year.5 It was at Herne, Samuel Clarke says, that “it pleased God to reveal to him the true doctrine concerning the Lord’s Supper.”6 Foxe says the first occasion of his conversion was the reading of Bertram’s book on the Sacrament, the ninth-century work of Ratramnus of Corbie, and that conversations with Cranmer and Peter Martyr confirmed him.7 He in turn influenced Cranmer, and before Henry VIII died, Ridley had renounced transubstantiation.8

Bishop of London

Edward VI made him Bishop of Rochester, and on February 24, 1550, he was declared Bishop of London and Westminster in place of the deprived Edmund Bonner.9 He helped compile the first Prayer Book, and in his diocese he had the stone altars taken down and replaced by communion tables, beginning with St. Paul’s, so that the Supper would no longer be taken for a propitiatory sacrifice.10 Foxe describes his household: half an hour of prayer on his knees each morning, study until ten, common prayer with the family, and study again until eleven at night. At his manor of Fulham he read a daily lecture to his household through Acts and Paul’s epistles, gave a New Testament to every one who could read, and paid his servants to learn chapters by heart.11 He was kind even to his enemy’s family. Bonner’s aged mother lived next door to Fulham, and Ridley had her to dinner and supper and kept the head of the table for her, saying, “by your Lordships savor, this place of right and custom is for my mother Boner.” When Bonner was restored under Mary, he stripped Ridley’s own sister and her husband of everything they had.12

Prisoner and Martyr

On Edward’s death Ridley preached at Paul’s Cross on July 9, 1553, against Mary’s succession and supported Lady Jane Grey. When that cause failed he went to Mary to ask for mercy, and received none.13 He was sent to the Tower, where for a time Cranmer, Latimer, John Bradford, and he shared a single room, and then to Oxford, where he disputed before the university in April 1554.14 From prison he wrote to Latimer, as a younger soldier to an older one:

For surely except the Lord assist me with his gracious aid, in the time of his service, I know I shall play but the part of a white liuered knight. But truly my trust is in him, that in mine infirmity he should try himself strong, and that he can make the Coward in his cause to fight like a man.15 Nicholas Ridleyto Hugh Latimer, in prison

In his farewell to his kinsfolk he wrote, “I think it the most honor that ever I was called unto in all my life.”16 On the night before his death he invited his hostess to his “marriage” the next day, and when she wept he comforted her: “though my breakfast shall be somewhat sharp and painful, yet I am sure, my supper shall be more pleasant and sweet.” He refused his brother’s offer to sit up with him: “I mind (God willing) to go to bed, and to sleep as quietly to night, as ever I did in my life.”17

On October 16, 1555 he ran to embrace Latimer at the stake and said, “be of good heart brother, for GOD will either asswage the fury of the flame, or else strengthen us to abide it.” When he asked to answer the sermon preached against them, the officers stopped his mouth and offered him his life if he would recant:

So long as the breath is in my body, I will never deny my Lord Christ, and his known truth: God’s will be done in me. … Well, then I commit our cause to almighty God, which shall indifferently judge all.18 Nicholas RidleyOxford, October 16, 1555

His last earthly concern was for the poor tenants of the see of London, whose leases Bonner refused to honor, and for his sister and her fatherless children; he begged Lord Williams to plead their cause with the queen. The faggots were piled too high about him, and the fire burned below while his upper body was untouched. He cried again and again, “Lord have mercy upon me … let the fire come unto me, I cannot burn,” until a bystander pulled the faggots away and the flame reached the gunpowder. Foxe writes that “it moved hundredes to tears, in beholding the horrible sight.”19

Cautions

Ridley shared the convictions of his age about heresy. With Cranmer and others he passed sentence on Joan Bocher, knowing she would be burned; Hagstotz rightly says that the custom of the age is “neither a justification of, nor an acquiescence in, such acts.”20 In the vestments controversy he led the bishops who insisted that John Hooper wear the episcopal habits, holding that “the thing was indifferent, and therefore the law ought to be obeyed”; Neal traces the later division between Conformists and Nonconformists to that dispute. His support for Lady Jane Grey was a political act as well as a religious one.21

The sources disagree on several details. Foxe and Clarke say Henry VIII made him Bishop of Rochester, and Hagstotz places it in Henry’s last year; Nichols rightly assigns it to Edward VI. Reformation Heroes says Edward made him Bishop of London in 1547, three years too early, and that the prisoners were moved to Oxford on September 30, 1555, which was in fact the date of the final proceedings against them; they had been in Oxford since 1554. Hagstotz dates the burning October 15 and says Cranmer watched it from his window, but Foxe gives October 16 and says that Cranmer was then busy disputing with Friar Soto, so that Ridley, looking up toward his prison, could not see him.22

Other Reformers   Thomas Cranmer

Notes

  1. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 4th ed. (London: John Day, 1583), vol. 2, 1717, “Doctor Nicholas Ridley and M. Hugh Latimer, both Bishops, Preachers, and Martyrs of Christ.” ↩
  2. Hilda Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, chapter “Nicholas Ridley: Martyr for His Faith”; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1717. ↩
  3. Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley.” ↩
  4. Nicholas Ridley, last farewell, in Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1770–74; also printed as A Friendly Farewell (London: John Day, 1559). ↩
  5. Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley.” ↩
  6. Samuel Clarke, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History (London: printed for T. V., 1654), “The Life of Nicolas Ridley.” ↩
  7. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1717; Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley.” ↩
  8. Diana Kleyn with Joel R. Beeke, Reformation Heroes, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), chap. 14, “Hugh Latimer & Nicholas Ridley”; Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley.” See Transubstantiation. ↩
  9. Stephen J. Nichols, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), chap. 6; Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans, vol. 1, chap. 2, which gives the date as “24th of February 1549–50.” ↩
  10. Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley”; Neal, History of the Puritans, 1: chap. 2. ↩
  11. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1717. ↩
  12. Ibid. ↩
  13. Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley.” ↩
  14. Ridley to Edmund Grindal, quoted in Clarke, Marrow of Ecclesiastical History, “Nicolas Ridley”; Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley.” ↩
  15. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1718; first printed in Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, Certen Godly, Learned, and Comfortable Conferences (1556). See Hugh Latimer. ↩
  16. Ridley, A Friendly Farewell (1559). ↩
  17. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1769, “The behavior of D. Ridley at his supper, the night before his suffering.” ↩
  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. Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley.” ↩
  21. Neal, History of the Puritans, 1: chap. 2; Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley.” ↩
  22. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, 1717, 1769; Clarke, Marrow of Ecclesiastical History, “Nicolas Ridley”; Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “Nicholas Ridley”; Nichols, The Reformation, chap. 6; Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 14. ↩