Rev K M Watkins
Hooper’s zealous labours as Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester were not to last for long. Had they done so, great blessing could have ensued to steer England’s Reformation in a more scriptural direction. But on 6 July 1553, a little over two years since Hooper was made Bishop, King Edward VI died, at the young age of 15. The Protestant reign of England’s re-forming King was over. John Calvin was not overstating the case when he wrote to William Farel in August: “Indeed, I consider that by the death of one youth,
1This article is expanded from the sixth part of a paper given at the Theological Conference in 2016.
the whole nation has been bereaved of the best of fathers”.2 To Henry Bullinger in Zurich, Calvin wrote the next day of “mourning over the fate of the Church, which has met with an incalculable loss in the person of a single individual”.3 England has never again had a monarch like Edward, with a zeal for the scriptural reform of the Church.
An attempt to install the young and godly Lady Jane Grey on the throne failed after only nine days, and Edward’s half-sister Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and bigoted Romanist, became Queen. Although Christ’s cause and Hooper’s personal interests would have benefited from Lady Jane being Queen, he viewed Mary as the rightful heir according to English law, and therefore had no choice but to support her. There was no place in Hooper’s conscience for playing politics. Our Reformation Puritan was not for doing evil, that good may result. He did what he thought was right, and left the consequences with the Lord.
The consequences were not good. Calvin’s foreboding was well-founded when he wrote to Bullinger in September regarding Mary: “As I have always heard that she is a very haughty animal who now succeeds to the crown, and cruel withal, there sometimes steals over me a prophetic conjecture, that her audacity will carry her all lengths. . . . The Church of God will be . . . buffeted by manifold tempests.”4
Hooper was “renowned all over England as one of the boldest champions of the Reformation, and most thorough opponents of Popery”;5 so he was in danger immediately. A number of Protestant leaders fled to the continent of Europe, including all five men who were made Bishops under the same 1549 Ordinal as Hooper. Hooper himself had fled before, during Henry’s reign, but this time he thought it his duty to remain. Things were different now – he was a pastor of souls. Responding to friends urging his escape, he said, “Once I did flee, and take me to my feet; but now, because I am called to this place and vocation, I am thoroughly persuaded to tarry, and to live and die with my sheep”.6
Despite Hooper’s publicly declared support for Mary, he was soon arrested, purportedly for owing her money. He was brought before the Queen’s Council on 29 August 1553. Hooper’s old enemies, Edmund Bonner and Stephen
2Letter of John Calvin to William Farel, dated 7 August 1553, Gleanings of a few scattered ears during the period of the Reformation in England, ed George C Gorham, London, 1857, p 300.
3Letter of Calvin to Henry Bullinger, dated 8 August 1553, Gleanings, p 299.
4Letter of Calvin to Bullinger, dated 7 September 1553, Gleanings, p 302.
5J C Ryle, Five English Reformers, Banner of Truth reprint, 1994, p 54.
6The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed S R Cattley, London, 1838, vol 6, p 645.
Gardiner, had been released from prison and restored to their former positions – Bonner as Bishop of London in place of Nicolas Ridley, and Gardiner as Bishop of Winchester. It was Gardiner who headed up the Council, attacking Hooper for his religious views. However, the law of the land was not yet on Gardiner’s side, so Hooper was committed to prison on the trumped-up debt charge, while Mary negotiated the return of England to the Pope’s jurisdiction and put in place the legal machinery for persecution. Mary’s reign was thus a “throne of iniquity . . . which frameth mischief by a law” (Ps 94:20).
So Hooper found himself in the notorious Fleet prison again, as a “prisoner of Jesus Christ” (Eph 3:1) – that is, a man imprisoned because of his attachment to Jesus Christ. Only his execution almost a year and a half later would effect his release from incarceration. Nearer the end, on 7 January 1555, he would write of the cruelties he underwent: “I have continued a long time, having nothing appointed to me for my bed but a little pad of straw, a rotten covering, with a tick and a few feathers therein, the chamber being vile and stinking, until by God’s means good people sent me bedding to lie in. On the one side of which prison is the sink and filth of all the house, and on the other side the town-ditch; so that the stench of the house hath infected me with sundry diseases. During which time I have been sick; and the doors, bars, hasps, and chains being all closed and made fast upon me, I have mourned, called, and cried for help. But the warden, when he hath known me many times ready to die, and when the poor men of the wards have called to help me, hath commanded the doors to be kept fast, and charged that none of his men should come at me, saying, ‘Let him alone; it were a good riddance of him’.”
There was something that afflicted Hooper more than his own most trying circumstances, and that was the state of Christ’s cause. He was of the same spirit as an earlier prisoner of Jesus Christ, even the Apostle Paul, who made a long list of his personal sufferings, and then added as the greatest burden of all, “that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches” (2 Cor 11:28). Hooper could do the same.
Two days after he was imprisoned, he wrote to Bullinger in Zurich, bemoaning what tore his Puritan heart so sorely: “The altars are again set up throughout the kingdom; private masses are frequently celebrated in many quarters; the true worship of God, true invocation, the right use of the sacraments, are all done away with; divine things are trodden underfoot, and human things have the pre-eminence. . . . All godly preachers are . . . forbidden to preach by public authority. The enemies of the gospel are appointed in their
7 Later Writings of John Hooper, ed Charles Nevinson, The Parker Society, Cambridge, 1852, p 620.
places, and proclaim to the people from the pulpit human doctrines instead of divine truths.”8 The same day he wrote to Calvin in similar terms, “A miserable crowd of calamities have followed [the King’s] death. . . . All the services in the churches are performed in Latin. Pious men are in fear for themselves.”9
Two months later, he wrote to his Puritan friend John à Lasco, “The present condition of the Church . . . is indeed a wretched and miserable one”.10 As Romanism increasingly reasserted its grip on the country, he would later write, “We poor Englishmen be in captivity in our own land, and under our own countrymen, that make us commit more vile idolatry than ever did the Israelites in Egypt”.11
In March 1554, Hooper was brought a second time before Gardiner and other commissioners of the Queen. Two matters were levelled against him. The first was his continuing in the married state, contrary to the Romanist dogma that clergy must be celibate. Hooper insisted, in full agreement with the Word of God, that he would “not be unmarried until death unmarry”12 him. When his examiners referred to Christ’s words about those “which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” (Mt 19:12), Hooper pointed to the preceding verse, which explains that not all men have the gift of living unmarried, but his adversaries became so heated that the text could not be discussed further.
The second matter raised was Hooper’s denial of transubstantiation, one of the cardinal heresies underpinning the edifice of Romanism. Hooper denied that, in the mass, the bread and wine really and physically become the very body and blood of Christ. As to any bodily presence of Christ in the mass, “Hooper said plainly that there was none such, neither did he believe any such thing”.13 He referred to Acts 3:20,21, “Jesus Christ . . . whom the heaven must receive until the time of the restitution of all things”. Again, any discussion became impossible for the railing of the Romanists.
A neutral person present at that hearing, observing the different spirit with which Hooper and his adversaries conducted themselves, wrote, “Whereas I stood in . . . doubt, which of these two religions to have credited, either that set forth by the King’s majesty that is dead [Protestantism], or else that now
8Letter to Bullinger, written from the Fleet prison on 3 September 1553, Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, vol 1, The Parker Society, ed Hastings Robinson, Cambridge, 1846, p 100.
9Letter to John Calvin, written from the Fleet on 3 September 1553, Gleanings, p 301.
10Letter to à Lasco, written from the Fleet on 25 November 1553, Original Letters, vol 1, p 101.
11Later Writings, p 380.
12Foxe, vol 6, p 646.
13Foxe, vol 6, p 647.
maintained by the Queen’s majesty [Romanism]; their unreverend behaviour towards Master Hooper doth move me the rather to credit his doctrine, than that which they, with railing and cruel words, defended; considering that Christ was so handled before”.14 Hooper’s manner of defence spoke as loudly – if not more loudly, given the circumstances – than what he actually said.
Unsurprisingly, Hooper was judged worthy to be deprived of his bishopric, and a replacement Bishop of Gloucester was appointed a week later. Hooper was returned to prison and not until January 1555, ten months later, was he summoned again.
Although the pulpit was denied him, “Hooper continued steadfastly as a crusader for the Protestant cause”15 throughout his imprisonment, writing an unknown number of letters and even some treatises, to defend and advance Reformed truth. The volume entitled Later Writings contains 168 pages of Latin works from Hooper’s pen during this period.16 Much of this had to be done “by stealth”, without his jailors’ knowledge, for otherwise he would have been stopped.
Because Christ’s enemies were in the pulpits, some of the godly had begun to meet together informally, for mutual edification. Hooper encouraged these “certain godly persons” in a letter, giving them this advice: “Many times . . . [gather] assemblies together of such men and women as be of your religion in Christ, and there . . . talk and review among yourselves the truth of your religion, to see what ye be by the Word of God, and to remember what ye were before ye came to the knowledge thereof . . . and by such talk and familiar resorting together, ye shall the better find out all their lies, that now go about to deceive you, and also both know and love the truth that God hath opened to us. It is much requisite that the members of Christ comfort one another, make prayers together, confer one with another: so shall ye be the stronger, and God’s Spirit shall not be absent from you, but in the midst of you to teach you, to comfort you, to make you wise in all godly things, patient in adversity and strong in persecution.”17
When a company of 30 men and women were arrested as they met for prayer in a house in the churchyard at Bow, and imprisoned, Hooper was not slow to write for their consolation. “Oh, glad may ye be that ever ye were born, to be apprehended whilst ye were so virtuously occupied. Blessed be they that suffer for righteousness sake. . . . Doubtless it is a singular favour
14Foxe, vol 6, p 646.
15David G Newcombe, John Hooper: Tudor Bishop and Martyr, Davenant Press, 2009, p 220.
16Later Writings, pp 381-548.
17The Letters of the Martyrs: Collected and Published in 1564, ed Edward Bickersteth, London, 1837, p 86. All the remaining quotes in this article come from this book.
of God, and a special love of Him towards you, to give you this . . . pre-eminence, and a sign that He trusteth you before others of His people. Wherefore (dear brethren and sisters), continually fight this fight of the Lord” (p 91).
No doubt he was comforting them with the comfort wherewith he himself was comforted by God, when he wrote: “Read the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel, and there ye shall see how the shepherds . . . as soon as they heard that Christ was born at Bethlehem . . . went to see Him. They did not reason nor debate with themselves, who should keep the wolf from the sheep in the meantime, but did as they were commanded, and committed their sheep unto Him whose pleasure they obeyed. So let us do now, when we be called, and commit all other things unto Him that calleth us. He will take heed that all things shall be well: He will help the husband, He will comfort the wife, He will guide the servants, He will keep the house, He will preserve the goods; yea, rather than it should be undone, He will wash the dishes and rock the cradle. Cast therefore all your care upon God, for He careth for you” (p 92).
When he heard that some professing Protestants were attending the mass, but excusing themselves on the ground of their heart opposition to it, he sent an open letter “to the Christian congregation” to refute this specious line of reasoning. He wrote, “I know there be many evasions made by men, that judge a man may with safeguard of conscience be at the mass” (p 124). But along with Calvin, Bullinger and others, Hooper rejected it all: “It is not enough for a Christian man to say, I know the mass is nought; but to obey civil laws and orders I will do outwardly as other men do, yet in my heart abhor it, and never think it to be good. Doubtless these two minds, the spirit to think well, and the body to do evil, in this respect be both naught, and God will spue the whole man out of His mouth, as He did the minister of the congregation of Laodicea” (p 122).
Hooper, a prisoner for his loyalty to Christ, could not abide such unworthy compromises. He would have condemned outright the stance that led to the formation of the Associated Presbyterian Churches in 1989, more than four centuries later. He would never have accepted the argument that one may attend the mass out of respect to a deceased colleague without being involved in the abominable idolatry of that most injurious parody of the Lord’s Supper. Our Reformation Puritan understood that “liberty of conscience” does not excuse sinning against the sacrifice of Christ, which mass attendance unavoidably involves.
Even in a letter to his “dearly beloved wife”, written in October 1553, Hooper had the whole Church in view, foreseeing that his letter would come to wider notice. In this long letter, we hear the voice of a preacher rather than that of a husband, as he seeks to sustain and comfort the persecuted
people of God. “Is it then any marvel, if such Christians as God delighteth in be so mangled and defaced in this world, which is the kitchen and mill to boil and grind the flesh of God’s people in, till they achieve their perfection in the world to come? And as man looketh for the nutriment of his meat when it is full digested, and not before; so must he look for his salvation when he hath passed this troublous world, and not before. Raw flesh is not meat wholesome for man: and unmortified men and women be no creatures meet for God. Therefore Christ saith, that His people must be broken and . . . torn in the mill of this world, and so shall they be most fine meal unto the heavenly Father” (p 118).
John Hooper, this prisoner of Jesus Christ, was truly a pastor of souls. Like the Apostle Paul before him, who kept on writing from prison, he did not let imprisonment hamper his endeavours. That was all the more necessary, for his remaining time on earth was to be short.