Latimer was a man of more humble birth than the two former, being a small farmer’s son at Thurcaston, in Leicestershire, a condition in life which qualified him, perhaps, so eminently for spreading the doctrines of the Reformation amongst the people, whose tastes and phraseology, as well as their failings and faults, he, of all the leading Reformers, seems to have best understood; and he was accordingly honoured by the title of the Apostle of England. Fastidious hearers would indeed find much to shock them in the homely speech and extravagant jokes of Latimer, though probably in this he did but follow an example which the friars had set him; but the earnest sincerity of the man overcame all obstacles, and recommended him to the court, as well as to the country, for an engine of the Reformation powerful beyond most others. The see of Worcester, to which he was elected by Henry, he took the first opportunity of resigning; an opportunity given him by the Act of the Six Articles, and when he might have resumed it he held back, living with Cranmer at Lambeth, as a private individual, accessible to suitors, whose cases he forwarded to the primate; greeted by the people still with the title of Lord, for they rejoiced to pay him honour; and the favourite even of the boys in the streets, who cheered him as he approached his ever popular pulpit with some hearty word of encouragement to say on. Still there was something in Latimer (even in those times, when it was not much the practice of the preacher to go bridle in hand,) which seems to have stamped him as a humourist amongst his unrefined contemporaries; and a few words of advice which Cranmer gives him in a letter written when he was about to make his first essay as a preacher at court--a situation to which the archbishop had himself introduced him--indicate that he looked upon the experiment not without some little apprehension for the result. “Overpass or omit,” says the discreet adviser, “all manner of speech either apertly or suspiciously sounding against any _special_ man’s facts, manners, or sayings, to the intent your audience have none occasion thereby, namely, to slander your adversaries, which would seem to many that you were void of charity, and so much the more unworthy to occupy that room. Nevertheless, if such occasion be given by the word of God, let none offence or suspicion be unreprehended, especially if it be _generally_ spoken, without affection. Furthermore, I would that you should so study to comprehend your matter, that in any condition you stand no longer in the pulpit than an _hour or an hour and half_ at the most, for by long expense of time, the King and the Queen (Anne Bullen) shall peradventure wax so weary at the beginning that they shall have small delight to continue throughout with you to the end.”[447]