On this day 454 years ago, John Hooper, the Bishop of Gloucester, was burned at the stake. Born around 1500AD, Hooper became an evangelical Christian after reading some commentaries by the Swiss protestants Zwingli and Bullinger on the New Testament letters of Paul. Hooper lived during the time of the Reformation, when the safety of holding particular religious convictions depended on the convictions of the monarch at the time.
Henry VIII was the king from 1509 to 1547, and in 1534 the Church of England separated from the Roman Catholic Church. From 1547 to 1553 Edward VI, who adopted a pro-protestant approach, was king, but the strongly Roman Catholic Mary I, also known as “Bloody Mary” because some 300 people were burnt at the stake during her reign for their religious beliefs, was queen from 1553 to 1558. Hooper, who had been made a bishop in 1551, was imprisoned and subsequently executed. On 21 January 1555, some three weeks before his execution, Hooper wrote a letter to some friends:
“But now is the time of trial, to see whether we fear God or man… Imprisonment is painful; but yet liberty upon evil conditions is more painful. The prisons stink, but yet not so much as sweet houses where the fear and true honour of God lacketh… I shall die by the hands of the cruel man: he is blessed that loseth this life, full of mortal miseries, and findeth the life full of eternal joys. It is pain and grief to depart from goods and friends; but yet not so much as to depart from grace and heaven itself.”