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Chapter 2

John Fisher

John Fisher shares a feast day with his fellow martyr, Thomas More, with whom he was canonized in 1935, four hundred years after their glorious deaths. Like More, John Fisher was a champion of classical learning, seeing faith and reason as being inextricable allies. As Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, he championed the study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, inviting Erasmus, the great Renaissance humanist, to visit the university. Erasmus said of Fisher that he was “the one man at this time who is incomparable for uprightness of life, for learning and for greatness of soul.”⁶

Fisher was an ascetic, living an austere life, and was known to place a human skull on the altar at Mass and on the table at mealtimes as a memento mori, reminding himself and others not only of the death that they must one day face but of the Four Last Things to which mortality points: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. This austere aspect of Fisher’s character made him at home in Rochester in Kent which, at the time of his appointment as bishop in 1504, was the poorest diocese in the whole of England. He appeared to be entirely content in these less than opulent circumstances, remaining as bishop of Rochester for the remaining thirty-one years of his life and never apparently seeking preferment or desiring a more illustrious place in the hierarchical pecking order.

Imagining Fisher’s life of voluntary poverty in “that great ill-built house, the palace of Rochester,” on the eve of his arrest in April 1534, Bishop David Mathew painted a picture of the “bare untapestried walls of the sleeping chamber” and the “hard straw mattress of his night’s discomfort”: “Each detail of the room bore witness to a struggle for detachment from the things of sense and a determined following of the ancient ways. During thirty years, the bishop had looked out upon the view from these same windows, the flooding and unraveling of the tide banks, the gulls, the empty shore.”⁷ He had grown to love his humble flock, the boatmen who worked on the river, “the innkeepers and the other townsmen and the close gathered households of that Kentish country.”⁸

Yet a man of Fisher’s learning and multifarious gifts was in great demand in London, a mere thirty miles to the west. He had been tutor to the young Prince Henry, later to become Henry VIII, the king who would order his death, and earlier he had been chaplain and confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry’s grandmother. In 1509, he had preached at Lady Margaret’s funeral and also at the funeral of her son, King Henry VII, both of whom had died in that year. In 1526, ironically at the command of Henry VIII, he had preached a famous sermon against Martin Luther, comparing the proto-Protestant with the heretics of the early Church: “Such a cloud was Arias, who stirred so great a tempest that many years after it vexed the church of Christ. And after him came many other like clouds as Macedonius, Nestorius, Entices, Donatus, Iouinianus, Pelagius, and Johannes Widen…. And now such another cloud is raised aloft: one Martin, hither a monk, who has stirred a mighty storm and tempest in the church, and has shadowed the clear light of many scriptures of God.”

It would be Fisher’s defense of Catherine of Aragon, the queen whom Henry had abandoned in order to pursue his adulterous relationship with Anne Boleyn, which would cause his estrangement from the king. In a speech of almost shocking candor, Fisher had announced that, like John the Baptist, he was willing to die in defense of the indissolubility of marriage.⁹

As relations between King Henry and the pope deteriorated, the latter being unwilling to sanction Henry’s desire to divorce his wife, it was inevitable that his relations with John Fisher would deteriorate with it. The king and his allies in Parliament began a war of attrition against the Church, encroaching upon her rights and eyeing with increasing envy and avarice the land and wealth she possessed. In 1530, John Fisher, along with two other bishops, appealed to Rome against the English Parliament’s increasing usurpation of the rights of the Church. Henry responded with the issuing of an edict making all appeals to Rome illegal. Fisher and the other bishops were arrested but later released. When, in February 1531, the king sought to force the clergy of England to recognize him as “Supreme Head of the Church in England,” Fisher succeeded in having this modified by the addition of the words “so far as God’s law permits,” a get-out clause respecting the religious conscience of the clergy which Henry would not tolerate for long.

In June 1532, displaying a courage that was sadly lacking in the rest of England’s bishops, Fisher preached publicly against the king’s plans to divorce Catherine. A month earlier, Thomas More had resigned the chancellorship. In January of the following year, the king secretly went through a form of marriage with Anne Boleyn, who was now pregnant. Two months later, Thomas Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury. A week later, Fisher was arrested. It seems that the king and Cranmer wanted Fisher out of the way so that he could not speak out publicly against the granting of the king’s divorce, which Cranmer pronounced in May, or the coronation in early June of Anne Boleyn, who was now six months pregnant. Fisher was released two weeks after the coronation, with no charges being made against him at the time.

In a further example of the king’s and Cranmer’s ruthless despotism, Fisher was accused again in March 1534, along with Thomas More and others, of alleged complicity in the so-called treason of Elizabeth Barton, known as the Holy Maid of Kent, who had claimed to have had a vision of the place in hell reserved for Henry if he divorced Catherine and married Anne Boleyn. Dispensing with the formality of any trial, Parliament found Fisher and others guilty of the charge. Fisher’s punishment was the forfeiture of all his personal estate and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure. He was subsequently granted a pardon upon payment of a fine of £300. The poor, hapless “Holy Maid” was not so fortunate. In April, she was hanged for treason, along with five of her associates, four of whom were priests. Her head was then severed and placed on a spike on London Bridge as a warning to any others who might be tempted to question the actions of the king. A year later, the heads of John Fisher and Thomas More would suffer the same grisly fate.

In March 1534, Parliament passed the First Succession Act, a law which compelled all those called upon to do so to take an oath of succession, acknowledging any children from the marriage of Henry and Anne to be legitimate heirs to the throne. Failure to do so would be considered an act of treason, punishable by death.¹⁰ John Fisher refused the oath and was imprisoned in the Tower of London on April 26, 1534. It was on the eve of his arrest that Bishop David Mathew imagines him gazing at the familiar sites from his window in “that great ill-built house, the palace of Rochester,” seeing them for the last time.

There we shall leave him, for the time being, as we turn our attention to Thomas More.