Be of good comfort, Master Ridley
Latimer's words as the fire is lit
The fire catches slowly on Ridley's side. His legs burn but the upper body is slow to catch and the dying is prolonged and terrible. Latimer, on the other side of the stake, dies more quickly — the gunpowder at his neck does its work.
Ridley endures longer. He calls out: Lord, I cannot burn. Lord, have mercy on me. Let the fire come to me. His brother-in-law, watching, tries to add more wood to speed the dying and is beaten away by the guards.
Eventually the fire reaches Ridley. He dies.
The eyewitness accounts — preserved in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, published in 1563 — circulate across Protestant England and beyond. The Book of Martyrs becomes, after the Bible, the most widely owned and most widely read book in Elizabethan England. Every church is required to have a copy.
Foxe is aware of the power of the stories he is collecting. He is not merely documenting — he is building a narrative of the English Protestant identity, a story in which the martyrs of Mary's reign are the foundation stones of the true church in England.
Whether Foxe's theological interpretation is entirely correct, the stories he preserves are real. Real people, real fires, real last words, real deaths.
Ridley's cry from the slow fire — Lord, I cannot burn — is one of the most honest prayers in the history of Christian martyrdom. Not the triumphant serenity of the composed saint. The desperate cry of a man in agony who has not lost his faith but has absolutely lost his composure.
God does not require composure. He requires faithfulness.
“Lord, I cannot burn. Lord, have mercy on me.”
— Nicholas Ridley, at the stake, October 16, 1555 AD
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? My God, I cry in the daytime, but you don't answer; In the night season, and am not silent.”
Lord, I cannot burn.
Ridley does not have Polycarp's serene gratitude or Latimer's rhetorical composure. He is in agony and he says so, directly to God, in the middle of the dying.
This is not failure. This is the Psalms — the raw cry of someone who is suffering and has not lost the conviction that God is the one to cry to.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. Jesus said it from the cross. Ridley said it from the stake. The cry of desolation addressed to God is not the abandonment of faith. It is faith at its most honest — the refusal to pretend, in the worst moment, that the worst moment is not happening.
You do not have to have composure to have faith. You have to have someone to cry to.
Do you? And when the worst moment comes, will you cry out or go silent?