Hugh Latimer

Bishop of Worcester

Hugh Latimer (c. 1487 – ) is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.

Week 9: Arrange Your Face (Part 2)

Summer, 1531. Cranmer and Latimer, arm in arm in Cromwell’s garden at Austin Friars. The priests of Anne’s household discuss theology beneath Halley’s Comet. Cromwell thinks: “Give them a season’s respite from Thomas More, and they will fall to persecuting each other.”

Week 10: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 1)

“The mercy of God operates for Hugh. The Lord walks with him, and steps with him into a wherry, to disembark under the shadow of the Tower; this being so, there is no need for Thomas Cromwell.”

In these recent years, when Cromwell’s friends are being burned alive, Latimer seems untouchable. “We will turn Henry. We will turn him to the gospel.”

Week 14: Devil's Spit / A Painter’s Eye

Hugh Latimer sits in on the questioning of Elizabeth Barton. When Cromwell says he will see what can be arranged about getting her home to Kent, Latimer gives him a hard look, “as if he’s making false promises.”

Week 19: Crows (Part 1)

Hugh Latimer is consecrated as Bishop of Worcester.

Week 32: Salvage (Part 2/3)

At convocation, June 1536: Latimer says Richard Sampson has ‘so papist a flavour I think I am chewing the Bishop of Rome himself.’

On the late queen: ‘Anne was our good lady. So we thought. We were much misled.’

Latimer smells of burning too. The air sparks around him as he walks.

Week 36: Augmentation

We will break the shrines, Hugh Latimer says, and found schools. Turn out the monks and buy horn books, alphabet books for little hands. We will draw out the living God from his false depictions. God is not his gown, he is not his coat, he is not shreds of flesh or nails or thorns. He is not trapped in a jewelled monstrance or in a window’s glass. But dwells in the human heart. Even in the Duke of Norfolk’s.

Week 43: Nonsuch

Hugh Latimer gleefully organises the burning of idols. At John Forrest’s execution, he gives a long sermon. ‘Hugh talks for an hour but he might as well be pissing in the wind.’

Week 45: Corpus Christi (Part 2/2) / Inheritance

At Lambert’s hearing:

Hugh Latimer keeps leaping up and down, running to this one and that, tapping shoulders, whispering, passing notes. He says to Cranmer, ‘Has Hugh briefed the king?’

Week 47: Ascension Day (Part 2/2)

After the Six Articles pass, Latimer is forced to resign and ends up in the Tower. ‘His ill-wishers say Hugh Latimer will be hanged before Christmas.’