Nicholas Ridley

Nicholas Ridley was the scholar of the three Oxford martyrs. Reading an old treatise by a ninth-century monk, he came to believe that Christ is received in the Lord's Supper by faith rather than by a change in the bread itself, and his careful arguments moved both Cranmer and Latimer toward the same position — which is why the Prayer Book of 1552 reads as it does.

Made Bishop of London under Edward VI, he preached at court on the city's beggars and pressed the young king until three royal buildings were handed over as hospitals and a workhouse for them. He also backed Lady Jane Grey's claim to the throne, which left him no hope when Mary I won. Tried at Oxford, he refused to recant and was chained to the stake beside Latimer in October 1555. His fire was badly built and burned slowly from below; accounts of his death, printed by Foxe, made him one of the most remembered names in English Protestantism.