ABSTRACT
The famed martyrologist, John Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments, related a poignant episode on the eve of John Hooper’s execution for heresy on 9 February 1555. Hooper, the evangelical bishop of Gloucester and Worcester was lodged in the home of the Gloucester couple Robert and Agnes Ingram the night before he was scheduled to die. While there, he was visited by Sir Anthony Kingston, a member of the local gentry who had a reputation for fearlessness and a violent temperament. Just three years earlier, Kingston had been fined £500 for striking the newly arrived bishop after Hooper had rebuked him for adultery. His mood now, however, was much changed. As Foxe told it, the Catholic Queen Mary had appointed Kingston to be one of the commissioners put in charge of seeing that the execution was carried out. (It was not unusual for the queen to make those who may have sympathized with heretics take part in their deaths.) Upon being admitted to Hooper’s room, Kingston found him in prayer and immediately burst into tears, asking the bishop if he recognized his “olde frend.” In the conversation that followed, the knight wanted Hooper to recant in order that he “for life hereafter may do good.” Hooper replied that, while “life is swete,” he feared not his death because God had strengthened him “to passe through the tormentes and extremityes of the fyre, now prepared for me, rather then to deny the truth of his word.” Accepting the wisdom in this, Kingston departed, but not without commending the bishop for the role he had played in Kingston’s own recent reformation:
While Foxe must have known of Kingston’s earlier indiscretions and may have used some literary license in recounting this touching exchange between bishop and knight, there is other evidence of Kingston’s having turned over a new leaf, from being simply a supporter of the royal supremacy to an avowed Protestant. What could have brought about such a transformation?
