Nicholas Ridley went to the stake in a pair of slippers. When he saw Hugh Latimer coming after him, he ran to him, embraced him and kissed him. Both men had once preached before kings. By that morning, what they could still do for anyone had become very small.
On 16 October 1555, Ridley and Latimer were burned together at Oxford under the government of Mary I. Ridley had been Bishop of London and Latimer Bishop of Worcester, and between them they had helped make England a Protestant country. Now Ridley walked between the mayor and an alderman to a ditch on the north side of the town, opposite Balliol College. Their refusal to give up that religion was about to cost them their lives.
Ridley's authority had come from the Crown, and he had used it. Under Edward VI he held one of the greatest bishoprics in England and helped establish the worship the young king's government required. He took part in proceedings against the Catholic bishops Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner, and when Bonner was deprived, Ridley took his place in London. He knew what it meant for a religious settlement to remove a man from office. He had helped administer one.
Latimer had already learned how little protection a bishopric offered once the king's religion moved away from the man who held it. Under Henry VIII he resigned Worcester rather than accept the Six Articles, which reaffirmed the old doctrines, and he was imprisoned, released and imprisoned again. Edward's accession brought him freedom and a pulpit at court. He never took his bishopric back. He preached instead, to a king prepared to listen.
For a few years, the reformers spoke with the Crown behind them, and their opponents lost their places for refusing to follow. Neither Ridley nor Latimer was arguing that everyone should be left to worship as they pleased. They believed England had to be brought to the truth. The danger lay in who was allowed to decide what the truth was.
When Edward died in July 1553, Ridley supported the attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne. At St Paul's Cross he publicly challenged the legitimacy of Mary and Elizabeth, Henry VIII's daughters, and spoke against the prospect of Mary's Catholic rule. He had committed himself where people could hear him. Mary prevailed, Jane was deposed, and the bishop who had preached against the new queen's claim became her prisoner. Bonner was released and restored to London.
Latimer, too, was arrested. Early in 1554 the two men were put into a single chamber in the Tower with Thomas Cranmer and the preacher John Bradford, and they spent their time reading Scripture together. That spring they were sent on to Oxford. Their confinement there lasted well over a year, and for most of it they were kept apart, in separate lodgings in the keeping of the town's officials.
Beyond Oxford, the circle they had worked in was breaking up. In 1552 Latimer had preached a series of sermons on the Lord's Prayer in Lincolnshire before Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, a household where his teaching was welcomed. By 1555 she had left England for the Continent with her family, after planning the move rather than fleeing at a moment's notice. A duchess could carry her household into exile. The preacher stayed where he was.
The charge that brought the two men to the fire was heresy. At its centre was the Eucharist: whether the consecrated bread and wine became, in substance, the body and blood of Christ. Catholic teaching said they did. Ridley and Latimer denied it, and neither would accept the authority of the pope. Both sides believed salvation turned on the answer, which left little room for a convenient one.
They were required to recant. For men who had spent years in the pulpit, that meant standing up in public and unsaying what they had taught others to believe. Survival would require their own voices to be used against their life's work. They refused.
At the ditch, a sermon was preached against them. It lasted about a quarter of an hour. Ridley asked Latimer whether he would answer it or whether Ridley should begin, and Latimer told him to go first. When Ridley asked leave to speak, he was told he could do so only if he recanted. The former Bishop of London's right to address the people had narrowed to the words his judges were prepared to accept.
He would not give them those words.
There were other matters he still wanted heard. He appealed to Lord Williams of Thame, sent to oversee the burning, on behalf of his poor sister and of men to whom he had granted leases as bishop. The bishop who now held London, he said, would not honour those grants. That bishop was Bonner, back in the see Ridley had once taken from him. Ridley had petitioned the queen and now asked Williams to intercede.
He could no longer confirm a lease, protect an income or make an official listen. He could ask. The bishopric was gone, but the obligations attached to the years he had held it had not disappeared with his title.
His brother-in-law, Shipside, had stayed in Oxford at his own expense throughout the imprisonment, providing him with necessities. Ridley gave him his gown and tippet. Latimer had come in a worn frieze frock and a buttoned cap, and he let the keeper quietly strip him to the shroud he wore beneath.
Shipside also brought a bag of gunpowder to be tied about Ridley's neck. Ridley asked whether there was any for his brother, meaning Latimer, and told them to give it to him in good time, before it came too late. The care still possible between them had become very small, and very urgent.
Latimer died first, and quickly. The wood around Ridley had been piled so thickly that his fire burned low and slowly. Shipside, trying to end it for him, heaped on more, and only made it worse.
The two men had been kept apart for most of their time in Oxford. That morning Ridley had run to embrace Latimer as soon as he saw him. When the smith came with the iron chain, he fastened it around them both.
