English Reformer (c. 1500-1555) and one of the principal architects of the Edwardian Reformation. Born at Willimoteswick in Northumberland; trained at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (BA 1522, MA 1525); studied at the Sorbonne and at Louvain on a Cambridge fellowship; ordained Catholic priest; appointed Master of Pembroke Hall (1540). Ridley converted to Reformation views in the early 1540s through deep study of Bertram of Corbie's De Corpore et Sanguine Domini (a ninth-century treatise that argued against the bodily-presence view of the Lord's Supper); from that point Ridley became one of the most theologically substantive of the English Reformers, particularly on sacramentology. Under Edward VI, Ridley was consecrated Bishop of Rochester (1547) and then translated to London (1550, replacing the deprived Catholic bishop Edmund Bonner). Ridley was the principal theological architect of the second Book of Common Prayer (1552) alongside Cranmer; the revised Communion-service liturgy reflects Ridley's careful Reformed sacramentology against both Catholic transubstantiation and Lutheran consubstantiation. Upon Edward's death (1553), Ridley preached at Paul's Cross supporting Lady Jane Grey's succession (a fatal political miscalculation); arrested upon Mary I's accession; imprisoned at Oxford with Cranmer and Latimer; tried at Oxford 1554; condemned and burned at the stake October 16, 1555, in the ditch outside the Bocardo Gate at Oxford, alongside Hugh Latimer. Ridley's farewell letter to his diocese (written from prison) and his disputation papers from the Oxford trial preserve substantive Reformed sacramentology of the era.