LENT · 21 MARCH & TRINITY · 16 OCTOBER Archbishop & Bishops · The Oxford Martyrs
Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer & Nicholas Ridley
Archbishop & Bishops · The Oxford Martyrs · d. 1555 & 1556
Cranmer — KRAN-mer · Latimer — LAT-ih-mer · Ridley — RID-lee · Bocardo — boh-KAR-doh · Bucer — BYOO-ser · Gardiner — GAR-din-er · Coverdale — KUV-er-dale · Marian — MAIR-ee-an
O God, who by the labours of thy servants Thomas, Hugh, and Nicholas didst give to thy Church in England the gift of common prayer in the common tongue, and by their deaths didst seal that gift with their blood; Grant that we, who offer thee the prayers they shaped, may hold fast the faith for which they died; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Anglican tradition is founded on two gifts and one fire. The gifts are the Book of Common Prayer and the English Bible — the liturgy and the scripture, the prayer and the Word, given to the English-speaking Church in the sixteenth century in such a form that they have shaped the English soul’s conversation with God for five hundred years. The fire is the burning of the three men whose feast days open this series: Thomas Cranmer (KRAN-mer), Archbishop of Canterbury, burned at Oxford on 21 March 1556; Hugh Latimer (LAT-ih-mer), Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley (RID-lee), Bishop of London, burned together at the same stake in Oxford on 16 October 1555. Three bishops, three stake-fires, one city, one reign — the Marian (MAIR-ee-an) persecution that lasted five years and produced nearly three hundred Protestant martyrs in England, of whom these three are the most celebrated and the most significant. They gave the Anglican settlement its doctrinal identity, its liturgical genius, and its martyrological foundation. Without Cranmer there is no Book of Common Prayer; without Latimer there is no tradition of plain evangelical English preaching; without Ridley there is no episcopate in continuity with the reformed settlement. And without their deaths, the Anglican tradition would lack the thing that turns a church settlement into a living tradition: the blood of those who loved it enough to die for it.
Thomas Cranmer was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, presided over the English Reformation through the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and produced in the two Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 the most beautiful liturgical writing in the English language. The 1549 Book — moderate, carefully balanced, drawing heavily on the ancient Sarum Rite, the Eastern liturgies, and the work of Martin Bucer (BYOO-ser) — was the first attempt; the 1552 Book, more plainly Protestant, was the more thorough expression of his mature convictions. The Collects of the Prayer Book, which this archive uses throughout, are predominantly Cranmer’s work: translations and adaptations from the Latin, reshaped with an ear for the rhythm of English prose that has never been equalled. Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid — the Prayer of Humble Access, the General Confession, the Comfortable Words, the Absolution — these are Cranmer’s sentences, and they have been spoken by more English-speaking people in more circumstances over more centuries than any other prose except the King James Bible. When Queen Mary came to the throne in 1553, Cranmer recanted his Protestant convictions six times under pressure — a weakness he acknowledged and about which history has argued ever since — before retracting all his recantations at the stake and holding his right hand, the hand that had signed the recantations, into the fire first, saying this hand hath offended, so that it might burn before the rest of him. The man who spent his life shaping how the English Church spoke to God died speaking to God in the language of his own making.
Hugh Latimer had been Bishop of Worcester, had resigned in protest against the Act of the Six Articles in 1539, and had spent the years of Henry’s later conservatism and Mary’s reign in preaching, imprisonment, and finally martyrdom. He was the greatest popular preacher of the English Reformation — his sermons on the ploughboy, on the card, on the Lord’s Prayer, on the duties of magistrates are models of the plain, direct, image-filled English homily that the reformed tradition at its best has always excelled at. Where Cranmer was the liturgist and theologian, Latimer was the voice that reached the ordinary congregation, the man who could make doctrine live in the hearing of people who had never read a word of it. Nicholas Ridley had been Bishop of London and one of the architects of the doctrinal settlement of the Edwardian church. He and Latimer were burned together at the north side of the town ditch in Oxford, in sight of Balliol College, on 16 October 1555. They were held in the Bocardo (boh-KAR-doh), the city prison above the north gate of Oxford, and brought out to die together. Ridley took longer to die — the wood was green and the fire slow — and Latimer said to him across the flames the words that became the motto of the English Reformation: 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.
Cranmer’s feast falls on 21 March in Lent — the season of penitence and self-examination, precisely right for the man whose final act was the public penance of his right hand held in the fire. Latimer and Ridley share 16 October in Trinity, the long green season of ordinary faithfulness in which their kind of plain evangelical courage is most needed and most apt. Together they hold the two poles of the Anglican martyrological tradition: the liturgical genius who stumbled and recovered, and the preacher and bishop who did not stumble at all. The candle Latimer promised has not been put out. It burns in every Book of Common Prayer that has been opened since that October morning, and it burns in every collect that Cranmer shaped from the ancient words of the Church into the English tongue that his prayer book gave to the world. The 1928 Book which this archive uses is the direct heir of the books Cranmer made and the tradition Latimer and Ridley died for. Every time the collect is spoken, the martyrs of Oxford are present in it.
O Almighty God, who in the fire of thy servants’ deaths didst purify the faith of thy Church in England and set alight a candle that the darkness has never extinguished; Grant that we, who pray the prayers thy servant Thomas shaped and preach the Gospel thy servants Hugh and Nicholas sealed with their blood, may hold the faith as boldly and offer it as beautifully as they; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.