In Foxe's presentation, Ferrar's sufferings under Mary are almost an anticlimax to what he endured in the reign of Edward VI. This emphasis is already apparent in the Rerum, where Foxe blames Ferrar's troubles solely on the malice of George Constantine and on the duke of Northumberland, who, Foxe maintained, hated Ferrar because he was favoured by the duke of Somerset. (These charges against Northumberland would not be repeated in any of the editions of the Acts and Monuments. This is undoubtedly due to the power and influence of Northumberland's two sons Ambrose and Robert, in Elizabeth's reign). According to Foxe, Ferrar was stripped of his bishopric and imprisoned in the Fleet until the beginning of Mary's reign. (This is demonstably inaccurate; see Brown, pp. 216-18). He remained in prison under Mary until the end of January 1555, when he was sentenced to death. He was taken to Carmarthen and burned, dying a slow death because the wood for the fire was taken from a bog and was wet. The account ends with an interesting physical description of Ferrar, describing him as short, stout and swarthy (Rerum, pp. 423-25). Unlike many detailed accounts in the Rerum, there are no documents. All of this information seems to have come from a person familiar with St David's (the burning suggests an eyewitness account) and sympathetic to Ferrar.

It is reasonable to suppose that this person was responsible for the flood of information about Ferrar that washed over Foxe before the 1563 edition was printed. Except for the detail of Ferrar being burned with wet wood, nothing from the Rerum account was reprinted in 1563. The reason for this was that Foxe had an enormous cache of papers pertaining to Ferrar's case to work from. Someone had copied these papers (probably from Ferrar's records) and sent them to Foxe, presumably in an effort to vindicate the bishop. (BL, Harley 420 consists largely of the papers in this collection which Foxe did not print. They all are written in a single hand, indicating that they were copied and sent to Foxe). Foxe constructed his narrative of Ferrar in Edward VI's reign entirely from these documents. The same individual was probably also responsible for sending Foxe copies of the official documents on which Foxe based his account of Ferrar's examinations in Wales in 1555 and his degradation there. An eyewitness seems to have supplied Foxe with his account of Ferrar's examination by Gardiner.

Whoever Foxe's sources for the Rerum and 1563 accounts were, they succeeded in making Foxe an ardent champion of Ferrar. Foxe's printing of thedocuments in Ferrar's case is not only detailed, but it is very partisan. Foxe printed the basic complaint which Ferrar's opponents made to the privy council, but he did not even mention a further complaint (BL, Harley 420, fol. 90r-v charging Ferrar with sedition) and an affadavit supporting it (BL, Harley 420, fol. 92r), as well as Ferrar's denial of the charge (BL, Harley 420, fol. 93r). Nor did Foxe print many of the depositions against Ferrar (BL, Harley 420, fos. 80r-89v and 95r-104v) or the depositions of 124 witnesses testifying against Ferrar (BL, Harley 420, fos. 111r-178r). Even more striking is the fact that he printed this detailed pro-Ferrar account at all; he could have simply omitted this unsavoury feud and focused on Ferrar's martyrdom under Mary. One of Ferrar's opponents was Thomas Young, the first Elizabethan archbishop of York, and this could only have increased the pressure on Foxe for silence. (One of Foxe's friends wrote to the martyrologist begging him not to discuss this aspect of Ferrar's history; the best that Foxe would do was not name Young while the archbishop was alive). Foxe seems to have been genuinely outraged at Ferrar's treatment by his canons; perhaps Foxe's friendship with John Parkhurst - Elizabeth's first bishop of Norwich and another prelate circled by sharks - influenced him. (Foxe would know about Parkhurst's troubles; he lived at Parkhurst's palace in Norwich from 1560 to 1562 and his family resided there until 1563).

Except for details about Ferrar's death, all the information which Foxe would ever print on Ferrar was in the 1563 edition. In the 1570 edition all the documents pertaining to Ferrar's Edwardian ordeals were omitted except for two letters which Foxe moved to the end of his account of Ferrar. (In this edition, Foxe also erroneously declared that Bishop Goodrich of Ely was the recipient of these letters). Foxe replaced the deleted documents with a brief narrative of Ferrar's troubles under Edward VI. He also replaced the account of Ferrar's execution with a new version, obviously drawn from an eyewitness, which gave the precise date of Ferrar's death and the story that, in a demonstration of stoicism, the martyr did not move in the flames. The 1570 account of Ferrar was reprinted in the 1576 edition without change.

But in the 1583 edition, Foxe restored all of the documents that had appeared in 1563 and were deleted afterwards. This appears to have been done without much care since the two letters Ferrar purportedly wrote to Goodrich were restored along with the other documents from the first edition but also printed at the end of the account, as they were in the 1570 edition. As result the letters are printed twice in 1583 (on pp. 1552-53 and 1555-56).

The date is incorrectly given as 22 February in 1563.