Saint John Fisher (1469-1535)

Birth and family (c. 1469)

John Fisher was born at Beverley, in Yorkshire, around October 1469.^[5][6] His father, Robert Fisher, was a mercer (cloth merchant) of the small town; he died while John was still a child, and his mother Agnes remarried. From this modest trading background came, through both marriages, several children — including a half-sister, Elizabeth White, a Dominican nun of Dartford Priory, for whom Fisher would later write his spiritual treatises.^[7]

The date of birth is not absolutely certain: the old Catholic Encyclopedia still hesitated between 1459 and 1469, and some contemporary accounts give him 77 years at his death, which would imply 1459.^[8] Modern scholarship predominantly retains 1469 — so he would have died at 65. The discrepancy comes from the sources themselves and deserves to be stated rather than hidden.

Cambridge: from college to priesthood

Around 1482–1484, the young Fisher entered Michaelhouse, one of the colleges of Cambridge.^[9][10] He pursued a brilliant course of study there: Bachelor of Arts in 1487, Master of Arts in 1491, elected fellow of his college that same year. On 17 December 1491, he was ordained priest by Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, with a pontifical dispensation since he had not yet reached the required canonical age.^[11][12]

His university career then advanced rapidly: Master of Michaelhouse around 1494, Doctor of Divinity in 1501, then Vice-Chancellor of the university that same year.^[13] At thirty, Fisher was already one of the most respected men of Cambridge — not for his ambition, but for his learning and rigour of life.

Lady Margaret Beaufort and the foundation of the colleges

In 1497, Fisher became the confessor and spiritual counsellor of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, mother of King Henry VII.^[14][15] This meeting proved decisive for the history of Cambridge. Under Fisher's direction, the pious and wealthy countess devoted her fortune to the Church and to education: she founded the Lady Margaret chairs of divinity at Oxford and Cambridge — Fisher being the first holder of the Cambridge chair — and above all the two great colleges, Christ's College and St John's College.^[16][17]

At the deaths of Lady Margaret and Henry VII, both in 1509, Fisher preached their funeral sermons, which have come down to us: they rank among the finest examples of English Renaissance preaching.^[18] Elected Chancellor of the University of Cambridge as early as 1504, re-elected each year and then appointed Chancellor for life around 1514, he placed all his influence at the service of the renewal of learning.^[19][20]

Erasmus, Greek and Hebrew

Fisher was a Christian humanist in the most demanding sense: convinced that the reform of the Church lay in a return to the sources, he learned Greek and Hebrew late in life, to read Scripture and the Fathers in their original languages.^[21][22] He drew Erasmus of Rotterdam, the prince of humanists, to Cambridge, and protected him: tradition holds that it is "to Fisher's protection that the study of Greek was able to continue at Cambridge".^[23]

Erasmus, who was not lavish with praise, regarded Fisher as the most learned and holiest prelate of his country — an admiration confirmed by their correspondence.^[24] But unlike Erasmus, who remained all his life a man of the prudent pen, Fisher would stake his learning, and then his life, on the most perilous struggle of his age.

The poorest see in England

On 14 October 1504, at the insistence of Henry VII, Fisher was appointed Bishop of Rochester.^[25][26] In terms of prestige and income, it was the poorest diocese in England — about £300 of annual revenue, a pittance for a bishopric. Most ambitious prelates saw in it only a stepping stone to a richer see.

Fisher, for his part, remained there thirty-one years, until his death, refusing the more prestigious sees of Lincoln and Ely when they were offered to him.^[27][28] He liked to say that he would no more leave his humble diocese than a man abandons his wife:

"I would not forsake my poor old wife of Rochester for the richest widow in the land." — Saying attributed to Saint John Fisher, faithful to his diocese as to a marriage.^[29]

A resident bishop and pastor

At a time when many bishops were chiefly courtiers or absentee administrators, Fisher was a genuinely present pastor: he resided in his diocese, visited his parishes, held a synod in 1515, preached himself, and personally cared for the poor and the sick.^[30] His reputation as a preacher was immense — so much so that his word, more than his modest see, earned him moral authority throughout England.

This consistency between the doctrine he taught and the life he led explains the ascendancy he exercised, and the shock that seized the kingdom when he was seen — an old, poor bishop — standing alone against the all-powerful king.

The preacher of 1521 against Luther

When the Protestant Reformation spread, Fisher became the leading Catholic theologian of England against it. On 12 May 1521, at St Paul's Cross in London, on the day Luther's books were publicly burned, he preached a great sermon against Luther — one of the first English texts refuting the Reformation.^[31][32]

The great Latin works

Fisher then devoted all his theological learning to a series of Latin works that made him famous throughout learned Europe. The table below summarises his major polemical works and their precise targets:

The most important, the Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio (1523), is a systematic refutation of the articles condemned in Luther: in it he defends the authority of the Church, the value of the sacraments, and Tradition.^[33][34] Fisher also helped Henry VIII compose or defend the Assertio septem sacramentorum, the royal work against Luther which earned the king the pontifical title of "Defender of the Faith" (Fidei Defensor) — irony of history, that same king would later lead Fisher to the scaffold.

The Real Presence against Oecolampadius

In 1527, Fisher published De Veritate Corporis et Sanguinis Christi in Eucharistia, adversus Johannem Oecolampadium — against the reformer Oecolampadius, who denied the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.^[35][36][37] The work, of great patristic erudition, was regarded as one of the finest Catholic defences of the Eucharist of the entire sixteenth century. In it Fisher shows that faith in the Real Presence is that of the Church from the beginning, attested by the Greek and Latin Fathers.

This same bishop, acknowledged theologian of the Eucharist and of the Church, would soon be ordered to deny the authority of the Apostolic See. His resistance would be no sudden impulse, but the logical consequence of his entire work.

"The king's great matter"

From the late 1520s, England was shaken by what is called "the king's great matter": Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had given him no male heir, annulled, so as to marry Anne Boleyn. Pope Clement VII, under pressure from Emperor Charles V (Catherine's nephew), refused to declare the nullity.

Fisher became the principal defender of the queen and of the validity of her marriage.^[38][39] Before the legatine court of Blackfriars, in 1529, he spoke with a frankness that stunned those present: following the example of Saint John the Baptist, who died for defending the sanctity of marriage before a king, he declared himself ready to give his life for the indissolubility of the marriage bond.^[40][41]

"Like Saint John the Baptist, he was ready to die for the indissolubility of marriage." — Fisher's stand before the legates, in 1529, as reported by his biographers.^[42]

This comparison with the Forerunner — later taken up by Pius XI in his canonization homily — was no rhetorical figure: it foretold, almost word for word, Fisher's destiny.^[43]

The Holy Nun of Kent affair

Even before the oath, the king sought to break Fisher. In March 1534, the bishop was implicated in the affair of Elizabeth Barton, the "Holy Nun of Kent", a nun with alleged revelations hostile to the royal divorce. Singled out by a bill of attainder (parliamentary act of proscription), Fisher escaped condemnation only at the price of a heavy fine.^[44][45] The warning was clear, but he did not bend.

The only bishop in England to refuse

In 1534, Parliament passed the Act of Succession, then the Act of Supremacy, making the king "the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England". All subjects of standing had to take the oath. Almost the entire English episcopate, through fear or calculation, submitted. Fisher refused — he was, uniquely, the only bishop in England not to take the oath of supremacy.^[46][47]

The Tower of London

On 26 April 1534, Fisher was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London.^[48][49] He remained there fourteen months, in increasingly harsh conditions: old, ill, deprived of books and heating, he kept secretly writing treatises of spiritual consolation. A second attainder, in November 1534, condemned him for misprision of treason (concealment of treason) to the loss of his goods.^[50]

Paul III's hat

On 20 May 1535, hoping to move Henry VIII to soften the prisoner's lot, Pope Paul III created Fisher cardinal priest of San Vitale (Saint Vitalis).^[51][52][53] The calculation backfired tragically: far from placating the king, the Roman honour enraged him. Henry VIII saw in this appointment an interference by the pope and a provocation.

Henry VIII's retort

The king's reaction has remained famous. According to Richard Hall, Fisher's sixteenth-century biographer, Henry VIII is said to have declared:

"Well, let the Pope send him a hat when he will; but I will so provide that, whensoever it cometh, he shall wear it on his shoulders, for head he shall have none to set it on." — Henry VIII, according to the biographer Richard Hall.^[54]

The imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys reports a similar variant: the king "would send the head afterwards to Rome for the cardinal's hat".^[55] Both versions, from two distinct sixteenth-century witnesses, say the same thing: Fisher's cardinalatial purple had just sealed his death warrant.

The trial of 17 June 1535 — Richard Rich's perjury

Fisher was tried for high treason on 17 June 1535 at Westminster Hall, for denying that the king was supreme head of the Church of England.^[56][57] The sole evidence admitted was the testimony of Richard Rich, the Solicitor General, who had come to the Tower on the pretext of gathering the prisoner's personal opinion "in confidence". Rich reported that Fisher had told him the king "was not, nor could be, by the Law of God, Supreme Head in earth of the Church of England".^[58] The same Richard Rich would serve, thirteen days later, to condemn Thomas More by a similar perjury.

The sentence — hanging, disembowelling and quartering at Tyburn — was commuted by the king to simple beheading, to be carried out before 23 June, the eve of the feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist — that same Forerunner whose martyrdom Fisher had said he wished to imitate.^[59]

At death's door: "This is eternal life"

On the morning of his execution, led out of the Tower, Fisher opened his New Testament at random. His eyes fell on these words of the Gospel of Saint John:

"Now this is eternal life: that they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." — Gospel according to Saint John, 17:3, read by Fisher at death's door.^[60]

He closed the book, saying: "Here is even learning enough for me to my life's end."^[61][62] For his last day, he put on clean white garments rather than his customary hair shirt, saying that this was his wedding day.^[63]

The scaffold (22 June 1535)

On 22 June 1535, John Fisher was led to the scaffold on Tower Hill. An old man, emaciated by illness and prison, he went to his death with a serenity that struck all witnesses. Addressing the crowd, he declared:

"Christian people, I am come hither to die for the faith of Christ's holy catholic church. […] I beseech Almighty God of his infinite goodness to save the king and this realm." — Saint John Fisher, on the scaffold, 22 June 1535.^[64]

He recited the Te Deum of thanksgiving and the psalm In te, Domine, speravi ("In thee, O Lord, have I hoped"), then offered his head to the executioner.^[65][66] The Catholic Encyclopedia sums up: "He met death with a calm dignified courage which profoundly impressed all present."^[67]

The fate of the body

Vindictiveness continued after death. Fisher's body, stripped, lay exposed on the scaffold until evening, then was thrown naked into a pit in the churchyard of All Hallows Barking, without coffin or rite.^[68][69] A fortnight later, it was moved beside Thomas More in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, inside the Tower. His head, exposed on a pike on London Bridge, remained there a fortnight before being thrown into the Thames to make room for More's.^[70][71]

Hidden austerity

Beneath the celebrated theologian and public bishop hid an ascetic. Fisher mortified his frail body with fasts, disciplines (scourgings) and the habitual wearing of the hair shirt.^[72][73] To keep the memory of death before him, he reportedly kept a human skull placed on the altar while he celebrated Mass, and on his table during his meals.^[74] This familiarity with death had nothing morbid about it: day after day, it prepared the bishop for the sacrifice he sensed approaching.

In his canonization homily, Pius XI summed up this hidden life:

"He was wont to afflict his delicate body with fastings, scourges, and hair cloth; nothing was dearer to him than to be able to visit the poor." — Pius XI, canonization homily for Saint John Fisher, 19 May 1935.^[75]

The spiritual writings

Fisher did not only fight: he nourished souls. Around 1508, he published a treatise on the seven Penitential Psalms (Treatise on the Penitential Psalms), a collection of ten sermons preached before Lady Margaret Beaufort. It was the first collection of sermons in English ever printed, reprinted several times in his lifetime.^[76][77]

During his fourteen months of captivity in the Tower, the bishop wrote for his half-sister Elizabeth White, a Dominican nun, two small masterpieces of spirituality: A Spiritual Consolation and The Ways to Perfect Religion.^[78][79] In them we hear the voice of a man preparing to die, seeking to help a soul love God to the end:

"Love maketh every work appear easy and pleasant, though it be right displeasant of itself." — Saint John Fisher, The Ways to Perfect Religion.^[80]

"The life of man here is only for a while; it will shortly perish and be at an end. No space, no void of time, no leisure can be had, but always it draws to an end." — Saint John Fisher, Commentary on the Penitential Psalms.^[81]

Beatification by Leo XIII (1886)

Fisher's cause advanced slowly, together with that of the English martyrs of the Reformation. On 29 December 1886, Pope Leo XIII beatified him, among a large group of martyrs of England.^[82][83] Significantly, in the decree, the very first place of all was given to Fisher — recognition of his rank as bishop and martyr theologian.

Canonization by Pius XI (1935)

Nearly half a century later, for the fourth centenary of his martyrdom, Pope Pius XI canonized John Fisher on 19 May 1935, together with Thomas More.^[84][85] In his homily, Pius XI praised the bishop's learning and holiness, presenting his death as a twofold witness: to the indissolubility of Christian marriage — "a bond indissoluble for all, even for those who wear the royal diadem" — and to the primacy of the Roman Pontiff.^[86]

Liturgical feast and memory

The feast of Saint John Fisher is set on 22 June, which he shares with Saint Thomas More.^[87][88] He is honoured as patron of the Diocese of Rochester and invoked for courage and by those persecuted for their faith.^[89] His figure — a poor, learned and faithful bishop — remains, in Catholic England, the symbol of what the episcopate should be.

Saint John Fisher holds together what is so often pulled apart: the highest learning and the humblest poverty, the theologian's pen and the martyr's blood, a bishop's authority and a believer's obedience. He was the scholar whom all Europe admired, and the bishop who stayed thirty-one years in the poorest diocese of the realm; the theologian who refuted Luther with books, and the old man who answered Henry VIII with his head.

His martyrdom states a simple and formidable truth: there are things a bishop cannot sign. When almost the entire episcopate of his country bent the knee, one man stood firm — not from pride, but because he could not grant to a king what belongs only to Christ and His Church.

"Whenever it was a matter of defending the integrity of faith and morals, like a second Precursor of the Lord — in whose name he gloried — he was not afraid to proclaim the truth openly." — Pius XI on Saint John Fisher, canonization homily, 1935.^[90]

That is why, nearly five centuries later, Saint John Fisher remains the saint of consciences that do not yield: for every bishop, every theologian, every Christian tempted to silence the truth to keep his place, he recalls that one can be learned and a martyr, prudent and fearless, loyal to the king — but to God first.

• Saint Thomas More (1478-1535) — Fisher's lay friend, Lord Chancellor of England, beheaded two weeks after him and canonized with him in 1935.
• The Protestant Reformation — the European upheaval against which Fisher defended the Catholic faith through his great works.
• Anglicanism — the Church born of Henry VIII's break with Rome, which Fisher refused to endorse.
• Leo XIII (1810-1903) — the pope who beatified Fisher among the English martyrs in 1886.