CHAPTER NINE

‘LORDS AND LABOURERS’: HUGH LATIMER’S HOMILETICAL HERMENEUTICS

Jason Zuidema

One month after the death of Henry VIII in late January 1547, Hugh Latimer was released from the Tower of London, apparently by the terms of the general pardon issued in the name of Edward VI on his coronation day.1 It is unclear what Latimer did following his release until the close of 1547 when we see his name among several prominent English reformers, John Knox, Matthew Parker, Edmund Grindal and others who had, since July, been re-licensed to preach under the ecclesiastical seal. Latimer had not preached in eight years, ever since renouncing his bishopric of Worchester in 1539 and spending several difficult years under house arrest and impris- onment, silenced by Henry VIII’s concern with the increasing diversity of doctrine in his realm.2 Though he had not ministered publicly for the bet- ter part of a decade, his presence in the pulpit was not diminished.3 Testifying to the importance of Latimer’s voice behind the new govern- ment and its reforming agenda, Latimer was one of the first to occupy the pulpit at Paul’s Cross. Indeed, in January 1548 (possibly late December 1547) Latimer was called on for as many as four Sunday sermons and four mid-week sermons.4 The four mid-week sermons compared agricultural

1 Allan G. Chester, Hugh Latimer: Apostle to the English (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), 162. See also the details provided in Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, 1555, ed. George E. Corrie for the Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), I.xii and II.xx–xxi. Cited hereafter LS. 2 Lucy Wooding, Henry VIII (London: Routledge, 2009), 250–57. Also see her ‘From Tudor Humanism to Reformation Preaching,’ in The Oxford Handbook of The Early Modern Sermon, ed. P. McCullough, H. Adlington and E. Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 341–44. 3 Latimer’s activities in this period are described in part in Susan Wabuda, ‘Shunamites and Nurses in the English Reformation: the Activities of Mary Glover, Niece of Hugh Latimer,’ in Women in the Church, Studies in Church History 27, ed. W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 335–344. 4 Chester, Hugh Latimer, 163. The 16th-century chronicler John Stow adds some detail of other sermons: ‘In the I. of January doctor Latimer preached at Paules crosse, which was

176 jason zuidema labour to the Church, the last of which, the only sermon from January 1548 extant, focused specifically on the image of the plougher. Latimer was already well known as a forceful, if not controversial preacher. His most recent stay in the Tower was not his first. In fact, he had run afoul of the more conservative clergy on a number of occasions since his first attraction to the ideas of reform in 1524.5 Under the influence of Cambridge scholars Thomas Bilney and George Stafford, both important catalysts for the renewal of the Church, Latimer’s perspectives began to shift—though perhaps not as radically as he would later remember.6 Though these men wished to ‘preach Christ’, as influenced by humanists like Erasmus, they began to argue points of doctrine and a practice that landed them into trouble.7

the first sermon by him preached in almost eight yeeres before, for at the making of the sixe articles, he being bishop of Worchester would not consent unto them, and therefore was commanded to silence, and gave up his bishoprike: he also preached at Pauls crosse on the 8. of January; where he affirmed, that whatsoever the cleargie commanded, ought to be obeyed, but he also declared that the cleargie are such as sit in Moyses chaire, and breake not their masters commission: adding nothing thereto, nor taking any thing there from: and such a cleargy must be obeied of all men, both high and lowe. He also preached at Paules on the 15. and on the 29. of January.’ John Stow, Annals of England (London: John Windet, 1603), 1002. Though he acknowledges that Chester and Stow list more, MacLure notes only five entries in his 1958 register of sermons at Paul’s Cross: Millar MacLure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1534–1642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 192. No addi- tional information is given in the updated register based on MacLure’s: Register of Sermons Preached at Paul’s Cross, 1534–1642, rev. ed. Peter Pauls and Jackson Campbell Boswell (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), 28–9. The ‘sermon on the plougher’ examined here is the fourth mid-week sermon preached by Latimer in January (see text history below). Since it was preached on January 18 in the third Wednesday of January 1548, it can be inferred that he preached at the Cross on the last Wednesday of December 1547. However, as cited above, Stow highlights that the 1 January sermon was his first. We have no additional infor- mation with which to solve this apparent discrepancy. 5 Latimer recounts his conversion while a student at Cambridge in a sermon before Katherine of Suffolk in 1552: ‘Master Bilney … was the instrument whereby God called me to knowledge, for I may thanke him, next to God, for that knowledge that I have in the word of God. For I was as obstinate a Papist as any was in England, insomuch that when I should be made Batcheler of divinity, my whole Oration went against Philip Melanchthon, and against his opinions…Then Bilney took me aside and taught me more than I had learned to that point…So from that time forward I beganne to smell the word of GOD, and forsooke the school doctors: and such fooleries.’ Hugh Latimer, Fruitfull Sermons (London: Thomas Cotes, 1635), 125r. 6 On the state of ideas for reform at Cambridge in this period see: Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 5. See also a 16th-century testimony in LS II. xxvii–xxxi. 7 Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 81 and Michael Pasquarello, ‘Evangelizing England: The Importance of the Book of Homilies for the Popular Preaching of Hugh Latimer & John Wesley,’ The Asbury Theological Journal (Oct, 2004), 154.