suffered in common, are to be traced back beyond doubt in the case of all of them, to this period of remarkable excitement in Cambridge. They are the three chief names of the English Reformation, so far as we are able to contemplate it distinctly as a religious movement. They did more than any others to advance it, and in their lives and in their deaths they reflect its character, and constitute its tragedy and glory.

Of the three it may be a question which is most entitled singly to represent it. Cranmer is historically the most prominent; he stood most in the light of the great public events of his time, and was the official leader, we may say, of the movement, upon which he impressed somewhat of his own hesitating and timid, but practical and modest character. He was not a lofty nor far-seeing man, and by no means a hero; but his difficulties were peculiar and his instincts honest, and by his very weakness he accomplished what perhaps another's strength could not have done. Ridley presents a more pure, elevated, and consistent character" wise of counsel, deep of wit, benevolent in spirit."* His gentleness wins us, while his scholarly and calm intrepidity fills us with admiration. Latimer

is in many respects the most remarkable of the three. Less prominent than Cranmer, less learned than Ridley, his life possessed a broader interest, while his labours excited a more general enthusiasm than theirs. He connected far more than either of them the religious spirit moving the lower and the citizen ranks of society, with the spirit at work in the universities. Academic in education, he was in heart and mind a man of the people;

* FOXE, V.

to some extent leading in the ranks of the Episcopate, he of all the bishops most influenced and led the popular feeling. We have selected him, therefore, to stand as the representative hero of the English Reformation. His claims to this position, indeed, are very different from those which place Luther and Calvin and Knox at the head of their respective movements; and with such names it may seem somewhat out of place to associate that of Latimer. But no single name in England possesses the glory of a primary and paramount leadership in the religious movement of the age. We do not find, as in Germany and Switzerland and Scotland, any single figure towering above all the others in mental and moral greatness, but groups of figures such as we have noticed, each with their own claims to distinction and notice; and as we must make a selection, Latimer appears, upon the whole, the most typical in combined display of character, and of popular activity, and in the real influence which he exercised upon the course of the Reformation.

*

The life of Latimer remains unwritten, and there are probably no longer materials for any adequate biography. We shall endeavour, however, in the light of such facts as exist in Foxe's Acts, and Strype's Memorials, and particularly in the light of the vivid picture-work of his own sermons, to furnish as complete a sketch as we can of his career and labours. There are in these many graphic and not a few gro

* The reader will find Foxe's narrative of Latimer's Life and Acts in vol. vii. of Townsend's edit., beginning at p. 437. Our references are not in all cases given to the page.

tesque etchings, giving us the very life of the man; but it is difficult to catch throughout a clear view and any continuous thread of narrative, tracing the whole and binding it in order.

Latimer was born at Thurcaston in Leicestershire in the year 1490, some say 1491. His father was an honest yeoman, and it is his own hand, in the first sermon which he preached before King Edward VI., that has drawn for us the paternal character and homestead. "My father," he says, "was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able and did

himself and his horse,

find the king in harness, with while he came to the place that he should receive the king's wages. .. He kept me to school, else I had not been able to preach before the king's majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds or twenty nobles a-piece; so that he brought them up in godliness and fear of the Lord. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor. All this he did of the said farm"*-evidently a worthy, solid, and able man, fit to do his work in this world, and leave the memory of his worth, if not much more, to his children.

Latimer grew up in this old English household a vigorous, pure, and happy boy; health and manly life and a joyous feeling of home breathe in all the hints he

Sermons, Camb. edit., p. 101.

has given us of his youth. When only six or seven years old, he tells us that he helped to buckle on his father's armour when he went to the field of Blackheath, where the king's forces were encamped against the Cornish rebels. It was a time of stir. Henry VII. had been at this period about ten years upon the throne, but the embers of a century's internecine strife were still only dying out. Latimer's father was stanch in his devotion to the new government, as this event shows; he had all a yeoman's devotion to fighting, and to the grand old art of cross-shooting-"God's gift to the English nation above all other nations, and the instrument whereby He had given them many victories against their enemies."* He was careful to train his children in the love of the same soldierly arts; and the reformer afterwards recalled these exercises of his youth with pride, in contrast with the degenerate and vicious recreations of his own age. "My father," he says, "was as diligent to teach me to shoot as to learn any other thing; he taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow, and not to draw with strength of arms as other nations do, but with strength of the body. I had my bows bought me according to my age and strength: as I increased in them, so my bows were made bigger and bigger; for," he adds, in a quaint didactic vein not uncommon with him, as to the affairs of the present life as well as of that to come, "men shall never shoot well except they be brought up in it: it is a goodly art, a wholesome kind of exercise, and much commended in physic."

So Latimer grew up, hardily trained in body as well

Sermons, p. 197.

+Ibid., p. 197.

as in mind. An atmosphere of reality surrounded his boyhood; he looked at life and nature in the fresh and rough yet beautiful forms in which they surrounded him in the old Leicestershire farmhouse, and the impressions then gathered never left him, and long afterwards helped to deliver him from the falsehoods of his scholastic training, when the higher quickening came to stir the true heart in him.

About fourteen years of age he was sent to Cambridge; and D'Aubigné has noticed that the year 1505, when he entered the university, was the same year in which Luther entered the Augustine convent at Erfurt. He is said to have been a very diligent and industrious student. In 1509, whilst yet an under-graduate, he was chosen Fellow of Clare Hall. In the following January he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts, and proceeded to that of Master of Arts in July 1514. Up to this period, when he had attained his twenty-fourth year, we do not learn anything of his religious viewsfor the best of all reasons, probably, that there was nothing to learn. He fell into the habits of the place in this as in other things, and probably had as yet few serious thoughts about the matter. He seems to have carried into his college life the heartiness and cheerfulness of the yeoman's son; for it is to this earlier period, most likely, that the following description and story apply: "There was a merry monk in Cambridge in the college that I was in, and it chanced a great company of us to be together, intending to make good cheer and to be merry, as scholars will be merry when they are disposed. One of the company brought out this sentence- Nil melius quam latari et facere bene'