Born at Thurcaston, Leicestershire, England—it is generally said in 1491, but Demaus thinks the date should be 1484 or 1485. He was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where he was chosen a fellow 1509; passed a bachelor 1510, and a master 1514; was cross-bearer to the university, and in 1516 became Greek professor; was ordained a priest at Lincoln; became interested in the principles of the Reformation through the labors of Bilney; was dismissed from the university as a heretic by Wolsey 1527; became chaplain to Henry VIII. 1530; became rector of West Kingston, Wilts, 1531; was excommunicated, but absolved on his submission, 1532; was chaplain to Anne Boleyn 1534; became Bishop of Worcester 1535; resigned his office 1539, not being able to accept the Six Articles (31 Hen. VIII. c. 14), and was imprisoned in the keeping of the Bishop of Chichester; was afterwards silenced by authority and shut up in the Tower 1546–47; declined his former bishopric 1548; was preacher to Edward VI. 1549–50; was imprisoned in the Tower by proclamation of Queen Mary 1553; transferred to the Bocardo of Oxford, with Ridley, 1554; tried and condemned by order of Cardinal Pole 1555; and burned at the stake with Ridley in the ditch near Baliol College, Oct. 16, 1555. Latimer was one of the most influential and fearless of the English Reformers, and his admirable “Sermons” (4 vols., London, 1845) are models of forcible and witty speech.

Personal

  Did there ever any one (I say not in England only, but among other nations) flourish since the time of the Apostles, who preached the gospel more sincerely, purely, and honestly, than Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester?

  The 7. of March, being Wednesday was a pulpit set up in the kings prime garden at Westminster, and there in doctor Latimer preached before the king, where he mought be heard of more than foure times so manie people as could have stod in the kings chappel: and this was the first sermon preached there.

  Moses, Ieremyas, Helias, did neuer declare ye true message of god vnto their rulers and people, wyth a more syncere spirite, faythful mynde and godly zeale, then godlye Latymer doth now in oure daies vnto our most noble kyng and vnto the whole realme.

  First cometh to my remembrance a man worthy to be loved and reverenced of all true-hearted Christian men, not only for the pureness of his life, which hath always before the world been innocent and blameless, but also for the sincerity and godliness of his evangelic doctrine, which since the beginning of his preaching hath in all points been so comfortable to the teaching of Christ and his apostles, that the very adversaries of God’s truth, with all their menacing words and cruel imprisonments could not withdraw him from it, but whatsoever he had once preached, he valiently defended the same before the world without fear of any mortal creature, although of never so great power and high authority, wishing and minding rather to suffer not only loss of worldly possessions, but also of life, than the glory of God, and the truth of Christ’s gospel should in any point be obscured or defaced through him.

  I cannot here omit old father Latimer’s habit at this his appearing before the commissioners, which was also his habit while he remained a prisoner in Oxford. He held his hat in his hand; he had a kerchief on his head, and upon it a nightcap or two, and a great cap such as townsmen used, with two broad flaps, to button under his chin: an old threadbare Bristow freez gown, girded to his body with a penny leather girdle, at which hanged, by a long string of leather, his testament, and his spectacles, without case, hanging about his neck upon his breast.

  Latimer, more than any other man, promoted the Reformation by his preaching. The straightforward honesty of his remarks, the liveliness of his illustrations, his homely wit, his racy manner, his manly freedom, the playfulness of his temper, the simplicity of his heart, the sincerity of his understanding, gave life and vigour to his sermons when they were delivered, and render them now the most amusing productions of that age, and to us, perhaps, the most valuable.

  Few men have deserved better of their fellows, in life and word, than he. He was a genuine Englishman, conscientious, courageous, a man of common sense and good upright practice, sprung from the labouring and independent class, with whom were the heart and thews of the nation…. Sick, liable to racking headaches, stomachaches, pleurisy, stone, he wrought a vast work, travelling, writing, preaching, delivering at the age of sixty-seven two sermons every Sunday, and generally rising at two in the morning, winter and summer, to study. Nothing can be simpler or more effective than his eloquence; and the reason is, that he never speaks for the sake of speaking, but of doing work.

  Perhaps no preacher has ever lived, not even excepting St. Paul, who has united in a more remarkable degree than Hugh Latimer the qualities of fearlessness and modesty, courage and gentleness, hardihood and tenderness, boldness and meekness, inflexible sincerity of conviction and tolerance rising to the pitch of magnanimity. Nor have there been any who were more uncompromising in the delivery of the message committed to them, or less respecters of persons when sin was to be exposed and wickedness rebuked. His audacity was sublime, and was without any trace of arrogance; his piety was fervent, but simple and free from extravagance; his courage was finely tempered by his humility; and his insight of the character of men and of the spirit of the times in which he lived was marvellously acute.

  Hugh Latimer, another of the same destructive gang, equally heretical, bitterly persecuting and much more violent in his words and predictions, because of his “seditious demeanour,” often so ostentatiously and abundantly made manifest, was very properly sent to the same place.

General

  Hugh Latymer is said by some to have very much assisted archbp. Cranmer in compiling the Homilies, which I veryly believe to be true, considering the learning and simplicity of the man, who however in this work used nothing ludicrous, as he thought proper to do sometimes in his sermons, as the occasion required, the better to expose vice and to please his auditors.

  I never read any sermons so much like Whitefield’s manner of preaching as Latimer’s. You see a simple mind uttering all its feelings, and putting forth everything as it comes, without reference to books or men, with a naïveté seldom equalled.

  It is, however, impossible not to feel, and to acknowledge, in the Sermons of Latimer, a familiarity, and yet force of style, upon which Swift, if not Sterne, in after days, but with occasionally greater coarseness of expression, might have formed their own. There is, throughout Latimer, a purity, ease, and perfection of English idiom—to say nothing of the curious personal and historical anecdotes with which they are mixed up, and which render his discourses invaluable to the lexicographer and philologist. At the same time there is, frequently, a good deal of what may be called gossipping—in the sermons of this worthy old Bishop: for he not only seems to have spoken, more than any other divine with whom I am acquainted, from the impulses excited by the evidence of the outward senses, but he also seems to have always spoken the truth, even in its most unpalateable form,—although the Court, with the King at its head, were frequently his auditors.

  Brave, sincere, honest, inflexible, not distinguished as a writer or a scholar, but exercising his power over men’s minds by a fervid eloquence flowing from the deep conviction which animated his plain, pithy, and free-spoken sermons.

  No English treatise on a theological subject, published before the end of 1550, seems to deserve notice in the general literature of Europe, though some may be reckoned interesting in the history of our Reformation. The sermons of Latimer, however, published in 1548, are read for their honest zeal and lively delineation of manners. They are probably the best specimens of a style then prevalent in the pulpit, and which is still not lost in Italy, nor among some of our own sectaries; a style that came at once home to the vulgar; animated and affective, picturesque and intelligible, but too unsparing both of ludicrous associations and commonplace invective.

  Latimer, by his naïveté and simplicity, his wit, honesty, and piety, has, more than the other Reformers, retained his popularity. He will furnish many hints for useful addresses to the people…. His sermons are fine specimens of godly intrepidity, simplicity, and piety.

  He was the Cobbett of the Reformation, with more honesty than Cobbett, and more courage; but very like him in the character of his understanding.

  Latimer’s discourses are rather quaint and curious than either learned or eloquent in any lofty sense of that term. Latimer is stated to have been one of the first English students of the Greek language; but this could hardly be guessed from his Sermons, which, except a few scraps of Latin, show scarcely a trace of scholarship or literature of any kind. In addressing the people from the pulpit, this honest, simple-minded bishop, feeling no exaltation either from his position or his subject, expounded the most sublime doctrines of religion in the same familiar and homely language in which the humblest or most rustic of his hearers were accustomed to chaffer with one another in the market-place about the price of a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes. Nor, indeed, was he more fastidious as to matter than as to manner: all the preachers of that age were accustomed to take a wide range over things in general; but Latimer went beyond everybody else in the miscellaneous assortment of topics he used to bring together from every region of heaven and earth,—of the affairs of the world that now is as well as of that which is to come.

  His discourses have not come down to us, but we may be sure they showed the same fearless honesty as made the Londoners cheer him in after years, and struggle to touch his gown, as he walked down the Strand to preach at Whitehall. Instinct with the fire of genius, and yet simple, the plain talk of a plain man, who sprang from the body of the people; who sympathized strongly with their wants and feelings, and uttered their opinions with an earnestness that knew no fear, they spread far and wide a contagious enthusiasm for opinions thus nobly advanced.

  Latimer was no sour ascetic: he loved a racy anecdote or a humorous saying, and was ready to make use of them even when dealing with the most serious subject. A true Englishman, somewhat of the “John Bull” type, frank, manly, honest, courageous, he exerted a wonderful influence over the minds of his contemporaries, and his sermons, though their diction is occasionally rather startling, are still well worth reading as the utterances of a brave, thoroughly sincere man.

  Speaking from his pulpit—“The Shrouds at Paul’s Church,” or elsewhere—he has often the aspect of some primitive dramatist on his cart, acting his own tragedy. The character that Latimer represents is his own; and, as was to be expected in that city and nation and time, along with the tragedy there is a good deal of comedy intermingled. It is his own life and experience that he puts before his audience; not elevated and elaborated with classical rhetoric, but he declared frankly in his natural language.

  Holds a very important and somewhat peculiar position, ranking with Bunyan, Cobbett, and in a lesser degree Defoe, as the chief practitioner of a perfectly homely and vernacular style. Such a style naturally connects itself with an intense egotism; and Latimer is as egotistic, though not as arrogant, as Cobbett himself. He was a thoroughly honest and a thoroughly practical man, no partisan in the bad sense (that is to say, in the way of winking at practices by friends which he would have stormed against in foes), with all the taste of the common people for vivid homely illustration, and sometimes, as in the universally known description of the paternal household, capable of extraordinarily graphic presentment of fact. Beyond the range of personal description and shrewd, unadorned argument or denunciation his literary gifts would probably not have extended in any case very far. But as a popular sermon-writer in his own days, or as a popular journalist in these, he had in the one case, and could have had in the other, but very few rivals and no superiors.