Martyrs' Memorial, Oxford

It also commemorates the former archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, who was similarly executed (after having watched his colleagues' painful deaths while imprisoned in a nearby tower and the Vatican having permitted his degradation from holy orders in February) on 21 March 1556.

Golightly and his colleagues were alarmed at the Anglo-Catholic realignment the movement was bringing into the Church of England, and wanted the memorial to reflect the university's Protestant profession and anti-Catholic tradition.

[4] The inscription on the base of the Martyrs' Memorial reads: To the Glory of God, and in grateful commemoration of His servants, Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates of the Church of England, who near this spot yielded their bodies to be burned, bearing witness to the sacred truths which they had affirmed and maintained against the errors of the Church of Rome, and rejoicing that to them it was given not only to believe in Christ, but also to suffer for His sake; this monument was erected by public subscription in the year of our Lord God, MDCCCXLI [1841].Cuthbert Bede (in his novel The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green) wrote about the setting of the Martyrs' Memorial thus in 1853: He who enters the city, as Mr Green did, from the Woodstock Road, and rolls down the shady avenue of St Giles', between St John's College and the Taylor Buildings, and past the graceful Martyrs' Memorial, will receive impressions such as probably no other city in the world could convey.The actual execution site is close by in Broad Street, just outside the line of the old city walls.

The Oxford Preservation Trust opened a public fundraising campaign in April 2001,[6] and subsequently cleaned the memorial, repainted the heraldic shields, and reshaped and replaced the incomplete and missing statues.

Popular rumour is that in the past students have misled foreign tourists about the nature of the Memorial and convinced them it was the spire of an underground church, which could be toured for a modest fee.