St John Fisher

John Fisher was born at Beverley in 1469 and sent young to Cambridge, where ability and industry quickly brought him to prominence. He became fellow, priest, master of Michaelhouse, and vice-chancellor, but his career never hardened into mere scholarship. Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, trusted him as spiritual adviser, and through her generosity, guided by his judgment, Christ’s College and St John’s College were founded and strengthened. He also helped revive serious study at Cambridge, encouraged the recovery of Greek and Hebrew, and welcomed the kind of learning associated with Erasmus. In 1504 he became bishop of Rochester. He accepted unwillingly, because the office would burden an already busy life, yet once he accepted it he served with exceptional seriousness. He visited his diocese carefully, corrected his clergy, gave alms liberally, tended the sick poor with his own hands, and kept a strict personal discipline of prayer, fasting, study, and bodily mortification. Even in later life he took up Greek at forty-eight and Hebrew at fifty-one, as if a bishop should never stop learning how better to serve the truth.

That truth was put to its severest test in the crisis of Henry VIII’s divorce and royal supremacy. Fisher defended the validity of Catherine of Aragon’s marriage, resisted attacks on the Church’s freedom, and refused an oath that would have compromised the rights of the Holy See. He understood the cost. There had already been threats, imprisonment, and even an attempt to poison him. At last he was sent to the Tower, worn down by sickness, age, and confinement, and condemned in 1535 after the king’s anger was sharpened by Rome’s decision to name him cardinal. On the morning of his execution he opened the New Testament for comfort, found himself in Christ’s prayer before the Passion, and went calmly to the scaffold. Weak enough to be carried to the place, he nonetheless mounted it unassisted, declared that he died in the faith of Christ’s holy Catholic Church, and was beheaded. Fisher remains one of the clearest English examples of learning joined to pastoral zeal, reforming courage, and martyrdom of conscience.