Fisher · 1535
Bishop Fisher at Tower Hill
On the morning of the twenty-second of June 1535, on the scaffold at Tower Hill, John Fisher, seventy-six years old, Bishop of Rochester since 1504, theological tutor to the young Henry VIII, chancellor of Cambridge University since 1504, recently elevated by Pope Paul III to the cardinalate (his red hat had been sent from Rome but never reached him), was beheaded by axe for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy of 1534, which required every subject of Henry VIII to acknowledge the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England. Fisher had refused on the canonical grounds that the Pope was the head of the Church of Christ and that no temporal prince could supersede the spiritual authority. He had been a prisoner in the Tower for fourteen months. He went to the scaffold on foot from his Tower chamber, supported by two yeomen of the guard because he could not walk unaided; he had refused food in his last week to weaken himself sufficiently that the axeman's stroke would not be impeded by his vigour. The tradition of London held that the head, by the order of Henry VIII, was set on a spike at London Bridge for two weeks but did not, by the testimony of three contemporary chroniclers, decay or change colour; the head was removed on the king's orders on the second of July and thrown into the Thames, two days before Sir Thomas More followed Fisher to the same scaffold on the sixth of July.
It is twenty past nine on the morning of the twenty-second of June 1535, on the scaffold at Tower Hill on the open ground north of the Tower of London moat, in heavy summer light. He is seventy-six years old. He is John Fisher, born at Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire in October 1469, son of a Beverley merchant Robert Fisher, schooled at Cambridge from fourteen, fellow of Michaelhouse, Master of Michaelhouse, theological tutor to the young Prince Henry from 1503, Bishop of Rochester from 1504, chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1504, elevated to the cardinalate by Pope Paul III on the twentieth of May this year (a deliberate Roman provocation of Henry VIII, the red hat sent from Rome but stopped at Calais and never delivered).
He has been in the Tower for fourteen months, since the eighteenth of April 1534, on the charge of refusing the Oath of Supremacy. He has been ill through the spring. He has, in the past ten days, refused most food, by his own statement to his chaplain John Holland, that the axe shall not have to do my body any injury beyond the one stroke. He weighs, by Holland's observation, about a hundred pounds. He is in the scarlet of his episcopal rank, which the warders have permitted him for the morning because his red hat has been intercepted at Calais and he wishes to be hanged in his bishop's colour.
He thinks: the Oath as it stands requires me to swear that the king is the Supreme Head of the Church of England on earth. The Oath as written is theologically impossible for me to swear. The Pope is the head of the Church of Christ. The king is the prince of the realm. The two are distinct in jurisdiction.
He thinks: Henry has been my pupil. I was tutor to the eight-year-old prince in 1499 in his chamber at Eltham. I gave him the Latin grammar and the theology of Catholic Christendom.
He thinks: Henry has, since the divorce of Catherine, been a man I do not recognise.
He thinks: More will be on this scaffold within the fortnight. More has been in the Tower as long as I have. More has held to the same point.
He thinks: the country is going to lose the connection with the universal Church inside the next decade. I cannot stop it. I can refuse my own signature. The refusal is the only public form of objection left.
He is supported up the wooden steps by two yeomen of the guard because he cannot, by the weakness of fourteen months' imprisonment and ten days' fasting, walk unaided. The form of the scaffold is observed. He recites Psalm 30 (Te Deum laudamus, Te Dominum confitemur) from memory, in Latin, in his scholar's voice. He kneels to the block. He lays his head. The executioner Cratwell takes the head off in a single stroke.
The head was, by Henry VIII's direct order, set on a spike at the southern end of London Bridge facing south toward Southwark. The tradition of the city, recorded in Holinshed's Chronicles of 1577 (which is the primary source for the chronicle period) and in Edward Hall's Chronicle of 1548 (a contemporary), held that the head did not decay or change colour during the time it stood on the bridge, but only grew daily fresher and ruddier, so that the people went in great companies to look at it. The Lord Mayor petitioned the King's Council that the head be removed because the crowds were disrupting the bridge traffic. The head was taken down on the second of July and, by the King's order, thrown into the Thames at midnight.
Sir Thomas More was beheaded on the same scaffold on the sixth of July 1535. Fisher and More were the two senior English-Catholic refusals of the Oath of Supremacy. The English-Reformation legislation continued through the next decade: the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–41), the Six Articles (1539), the Book of Common Prayer (1549), the Elizabethan Settlement (1559). Fisher was canonised by Pope Pius XI on the nineteenth of May 1935, the four-hundredth anniversary of the Cardinalate of May 1535, jointly with Sir Thomas More. His feast in the Roman Catholic Church is the twenty-second of June, the day of his execution. The Tower Hill scaffold-site is now a public garden in Trinity Square with a granite memorial plaque, put up by the City of London in 1936 on the four-hundredth anniversary, listing the names of the Tudor and Stuart victims of the scaffold: Fisher, More, Thomas Cromwell, Surrey, the Seymours, the Dudleys, the Earls of Essex, Strafford. Fisher's name is the first on the list.