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Chapter 4

The Passion of Fisher and More

“As he moved on towards prison,” Bishop David Mathew wrote of John Fisher, “the new court life was present to him, that magnificence, high coloured, rather vulgar, which the late Cardinal Wolsey loved.”²⁹ There was indeed a world of difference between the ascetic Bishop Fisher of Rochester and the worldly Wolsey, who had preceded Thomas More as Henry’s Chancellor. Unlike Wolsey, Fisher and More had no time for the “gilded butterflies” of Henry’s court, which is why, as Mathew tells us, “Bishop Fisher passed on slowly to the calm peace of the Tower…. Thirty years of a tranquil episcopate and the slow maturing of religious experience, absorbed since childhood, had gradually prepared the bishop for his time of trial.”³⁰

Fisher was probably greeted upon his arrival at the Tower by Sir Edmund Walsingham, who, as Lieutenant of the Tower, was Henry VIII’s chief torturer, responsible for racking prisoners to extract “confessions” from them. Walsingham would be well rewarded for his services. Five years later he would be given no fewer than nine houses in London, all of which had been abbeys which Henry had claimed as his own following the dissolution of the monasteries. One way in which Henry bought the loyalty of the lords of the realm, and one reason why these lords turned a blind eye to Henry’s pillaging of the Church, was that he proved to be generous in granting them the land and property that had once belonged to the numerous abbeys, monasteries, and religious houses that had graced the English landscape.

When Walsingham had apologized to Thomas More for the frugality and meanness of the Tower’s hospitality, More was able to respond with the humor for which he was justly celebrated. “Mr. Lieutenant,” he quipped, “I verily believe as you say and heartily thank you; and assure yourself I do not mislike my cheer; but, whensoever I so do, then thrust me out of your doors.”³¹