John Foxe is the author of Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous days {sic} in 1563. (It is better known as Foxes' The Book of Martyrs).
He was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, England in 1516. Sixteen years later he entered Oxford, five years more he was a professor, and completed his masters at twenty-seven.
It was while a Reformation deacon for the Church of England that he began his authoring tracts and a book on Christian martyrdom, but was forced to Strasbourg, France in 1553 by "Bloody" Mary, Queen of Scots.
Moving to Frankfurt, Germany, and then as a John Knox Calvinist, he went to Basel, Switzerland to finish his manuscript supplemented by reports from England concerning more persecutions there.
After Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne, he brought the completed book's translation to London. This book not only was instilled in English churches and homes, it became required reading for Puritan's (even on Sir Francis Drake's voyages) for a hundred years. He begged Queen Elizabeth not to execute Anabaptists in 1575, and, ironically, Catholic Jesuits in 1581. Besides being an author and a preacher, refusing Anglican ordination to remain a Puritan, he helped minister to Plague of 1563 victims.
He died at nice old age for the sixteenth century: seventy-one, and he left behind a wife and five children before being buried at St Giles Church Cripplegate, London.