'Playing the Man'

Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and the Global Reach of England’s 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 shall never be put out.

— Hugh Latimer to Nicholas Ridley —

On October 16 the churches of the Anglican tradition remember Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley—bishops, reformers, and martyrs burned at Oxford in 1555. Their lives trace the drama of England’s mid-Tudor Reformation: conscience and prudence, courage and compromise, political tightropes and theological conviction. Far from being merely local figures, Latimer and Ridley helped set patterns—in preaching, worship, and ecclesial conscience—that continue to shape Christian life across the world.

Latimer’s career shows the uneasy dance between reforming zeal and royal politics under Henry VIII. Originally a conservative opponent of the “new learning,” he underwent a change of mind and became one of the era’s most compelling English-language preachers. His Sermon of the Plough (1548), a scorching call for gospel proclamation and pastoral diligence, survives in full and remains a touchstone for the Reformation’s pastoral ethos. Latimer had already felt the cost of dissent: in 1531–32 he faced heresy proceedings and—under duress—signed articles affirming purgatory and the invocation of saints, a reminder that even courageous reformers sometimes calculated that temporary compliance might preserve them for future service. Later he would preach boldly before king and court, but these early trials display a pastor navigating real peril. (Anglican History)

Ridley’s path displays a different calculus. A Cambridge humanist and trusted colleague of Thomas Cranmer, he proved a deft ecclesiastical statesman under Edward VI, serving as bishop first of Rochester and then London. He took part in the commissions around the 1549 and 1552 Books of Common Prayer and defended Reformed eucharistic teaching in public disputations—moments when cooperation with the crown’s reforming program furthered a theological vision he believed authentic. His cooperation was principled: he could work with power when it advanced the gospel, and he would resist it when it did not. (Church Society)