The Bishop Burned By Three Fires

John Hooper is remembered as one of the most tragic figures of the English Reformation — a bishop burned at the stake during the reign of “Bloody” Mary I, whose execution, according to the famous account of it, went so horrifically wrong that it became one of the most prolonged and agonising deaths in the entire grim catalogue of the Tudor religious burnings.

To understand it, you have to understand the savage religious seesaw of Tudor England. In the space of a single generation, England lurched violently between faiths. Henry VIII had broken with the Pope; his son Edward VI had pushed England toward a firmly Protestant settlement. But when the young Edward died and his Catholic half-sister Mary came to the throne in 1553, she was determined to drag England back to Rome — and to crush the Protestant faith by fire. Between 1555 and 1558, in the campaign that earned her the name “Bloody Mary,” nearly three hundred Protestants were burned alive at the stake for heresy, refusing to renounce their beliefs. John Hooper was among the most prominent of them all.

Hooper was a committed, austere, and deeply principled Protestant reformer — so strict in his beliefs that he had once even clashed with his own side over the wearing of traditional bishop’s vestments, which he considered too Catholic. Under Edward VI, he had risen to become the Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. But when Mary took the throne, a man of Hooper’s prominence and unbending conviction was a marked man. He was arrested, imprisoned for many months in harsh conditions, and put on trial for heresy. He refused, absolutely, to recant his faith and return to Catholicism. And so he was condemned to burn — and, in a deliberate act, it was ordered that he be sent back to be burned in Gloucester, the city where he had been bishop, so that his death would serve as a terrifying example to the people who had known him as their spiritual leader.

The Horror

On the morning of the 9th of February 1555, John Hooper was led to the stake, which had been set up in a public square in Gloucester, before an enormous crowd said to number several thousand, many of whom had loved him. According to the detailed account of his death, Hooper met his end with extraordinary calm and courage, spending his last moments in prayer, refusing a last-minute pardon that was offered on the condition he recant, reportedly saying that the cause for which he was about to die was worth far more than his life. He was fastened to the stake, and the wood was piled around him, and the fire was lit.

And then everything went wrong. The account records that the wood provided was green and damp — too wet to burn properly — and that a strong wind was blowing across the square, driving the flames away from Hooper’s body. The first fire that was lit flared up but then failed, barely reaching him, doing little more than scorching him. More wood, more faggots, had to be brought and the fire lit a second time. And that fire, too, was blown about and died down before it could do its work, burning his lower body while leaving him still alive and conscious above. A third fire had to be built, piled higher, and only this final blaze finally accomplished the killing. Throughout this appalling ordeal — three separate fires, the flames repeatedly failing and being renewed — Hooper is said to have remained in the fire, suffering, for around three-quarters of an hour, perhaps longer. The account describes his terrible endurance in unflinching detail: praying even as the flames consumed him, his lips still moving in prayer, striking his breast, until at last the fire did its work and he died. It was a death of almost unimaginable prolonged agony, and the horror of it moved even hardened onlookers, cementing Hooper’s place as one of the great martyrs of the Protestant cause.

The Modern Relic

The man who made sure the world would remember exactly how John Hooper died was the Protestant writer John Foxe. A few years after Mary’s reign ended, Foxe published his enormous “Acts and Monuments” — universally known as “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs” — a vast, vivid, and hugely influential chronicle of the Protestants who had died under Mary. Foxe’s harrowing account of Hooper’s drawn-out death by three fires is the primary source for the story, and it became one of the most famous and frequently reprinted passages in the entire book. Through Foxe, Hooper’s suffering was turned into a powerful piece of Protestant memory — proof, to generations of English Protestants, of both the cruelty of Catholic Mary and the superhuman faith of the martyrs. It shaped how the English remembered the Reformation for centuries.

The relic still stands today, in the very place he died. In the nineteenth century, the people of Gloucester raised a monument to their martyred bishop, and the Hooper Monument — a tall, striking memorial with a statue of the bishop — stands today in St Mary’s Square in Gloucester, close to the great cathedral where he had once presided, marking the spot where he was burned. You can go and stand beneath it now: a memorial to a man who refused to betray his faith, and who paid for that refusal with one of the most drawn-out and terrible deaths of the age — a fire that, three times over, seemed almost unwilling to kill him, and prolonged his agony for the better part of an hour before it finally let him go.

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