Hugh Latimer was the most powerful preacher of the English Reformation — plain-spoken, fearless before kings, and famous for sermons that named the sins of the powerful as readily as the poor. Appointed Bishop of Worcester under Henry VIII, he resigned the see rather than affirm the conservative Six Articles, and under the young Edward VI he became the moral voice of the reforming court. His preaching, unlike much theology of the age, was vivid, homely, and addressed to ordinary people.
When the Catholic Mary I came to the throne in 1553, the leading Protestant churchmen were arrested. Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer were tried at Oxford and condemned for denying transubstantiation and the authority of Rome. On October 16, 1555, Latimer and Ridley were burned back-to-back at a stake outside Balliol College. Foxe records Latimer's words to his fellow sufferer as the fire was lit — among the most quoted sentences in English church history: '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.'
These are martyrs of a contested age. The Reformation produced witnesses on both sides — Catholics died under Protestant regimes and Protestants under Catholic ones, and the Church remembers that the same century that gave the English Reformation its martyrs also gave the recusant Catholics theirs. Theologos names Latimer here not to relitigate the quarrel but because his death was a confession of faith borne with extraordinary courage, and the words he spoke in the fire have outlived the politics that lit it.