Bishops Latimer and Ridley and the sources of Anglicanism

On this day in 1555, Bishops Latimer and Ridley were martyred.  The witness of the Reformation martyrs is often a cause of some embarrassment for many contemporary Anglicans.  The cause of the embarrassment, of course, is that Latimer and Ridley were - to state the obvious - Protestants.  Or, to be more precise, the cause of embarrassment is that many contemporary Anglicans maintain the historical fiction that they themselves are not Protestants.

This contrasts with the Laudian conviction that the marytrdom of Latimer and Ridley was one of the glories of the Church of England.  In his Ecclesia restaurata, Laudian polemicist Peter Heyln notes his approval of Foxe's Acts and Monuments while praising Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley:

Being resolved to wave the writing of a Martyrlogy, which is done already to my hand in the 'Acts and Monuments', I shall insist only upon three of most rank, that is to say, Archbishop Cranmer, Bishop Latimer, and Bishop Ridley, men of renown, never to be forgotten in the Church of England.

For John Cosin, the martyrs of the English Reformation witnessed to the kinship between the ecclesia Anglicana and the Reformed Churches on the continent:

These men, (whose predecessors were burned up and and, martyred, as ours have been,) being in such times of persecution received and harboured in our Churches, gave us the like relief in theirs, both in Germany and France.

Preaching at the re-establishment of the Irish episcopate in January 1661, Jeremy Taylor invoked the martyred bishops:

The Reformation of Religion in England was principally by the Preachings and the disputings, the writings and the Martyrdom of Bishops.

Taylor here reflected a well-established Conformist narrative in which the witness of Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer was presented as an integral part of the Conformist cause.  Bancroft in his famous 1588 sermon described the martyred bishops as those "who have most notably sealed unto us the very grounds and substance of religion with their blood".  He went on to declare that this called for conformity:

Or is it likely that that Church which was able to discern betwixt truth and falsehood in so great points of doctrine being wrapped through continuance of time in so deep an obscurity; should be unable to judge of ceremonies, forms of prayer, decency, order, edification, and such like circumstances of no greater weight? You would not, I think, take it in good part, that men should now begin to sift and quarrel at the articles of religion, set out and approved in the year 1562. and yet I see no reason why they may not as well do it, as to carp and control at such orders, as were then likewise established for order and government.

The Laudian Heylyn likewise used the witness of the martyred bishops to challenge those who disturbed the peace and unity of the Church of England:

They reject the whole frame and fabric of the Reformation made in England, conformed themselves wholly to the fashions of the Church of Geneva, and therewith entertain also the Calvinian Doctrines, to the discredit of the state of the Church of England in King Edward's time, the great grief of the Martyrs and other godly men in the reign of Queen Mary.

Rather than being an embarrassing episode which can be conveniently ignored by contemporary Anglicans, the martyrdom of Latimer and Ridley - as Conformist and Laudian apologists realized - went to the heart of defining features of the ecclesia Anglicana: a national Church, a Reformed confession restoring the faith and practices of "the ancient Fathers", the rites and ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer, episcopal order. These would also be the fundamentals of the Restoration Settlement, the '1662 Anglicanism' which continues to define the essentials of the Anglican experience.  It was for these essentials that Latimer and Ridley contended even unto death.  To pretend that their witness was not crucially formative for Anglicanism is to create an artificial and ahistorical ecclesial identity, cut off from the very sources which bestowed to us a Church Reformed.