Latimer, Hugh

Latimer, Hugh (c.1485–1555). Bishop. One of the ‘Oxford martyrs’, Latimer was also one of the most celebrated and effective preachers of the Tudor church in the early years of the Reformation. The son of a Leicestershire yeoman, he was educated at Cambridge, ordained priest, and in 1522 licensed as one of the university's preachers. Some time between then and 1525 he came under the influence of reforming ideas, reputedly through contact with Thomas Bilney. Inhibited from preaching by the bishop of Ely, Latimer regained his licence on appeal to Cardinal Wolsey. He briefly preached at court around 1530, then moved to a Wiltshire living, where his preaching was once again censured in 1532. In 1535, after the break with Rome, he was appointed bishop of Worcester. As bishop he demonstrated the concern for the poor and the skill in humorous invective for which he was later well known. He resigned his see in 1539 in protest against the Act of Six Articles and was twice imprisoned in the 1540s. On Edward VI's accession he was released, resuming his career of energetic and fashionable preaching. His sermon ‘Of the Plough’, preached at Paul's Cross in 1548, contains a classic combination of practical theology with social insights and concerns. On Mary I's accession he was summoned to London, declining opportunities to escape into exile. He confronted catholic spokesmen in the Oxford disputation of April 1554; after two examinations for heresy in 1555, in which he refused to submit to catholic teachings on the real presence and the sacrifice of the mass, he was burned at Oxford on 16 October 1555, alongside the former bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley. Less a theologian than a preacher and communicator, he did more than most to instil practical protestantism in the minds of those lay people who stood by it in the reign of Mary Tudor and thereafter.

Euan Cameron