Bishop Fisher at Tower Hill

Some refusals are not the work of a moment but the long ripening of a discipline. A scholar who has spent fifty years inside a single intellectual order does not, when the order is broken by statute, suddenly invent a position. He simply continues, in public, the sentence he began at fourteen in a Cambridge library. The state, finding him in the way, must remove him; and in removing him discovers that the sentence has been finished by the axe.

THE TUTOR OF ELTHAM

John Fisher was born at Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire in October 1469, son of Robert Fisher, mercer. He went up to Cambridge at fourteen, took fellow of Michaelhouse, then Master of Michaelhouse, and in 1503 was set down at Eltham to give the Latin grammar and the catechism of Catholic Christendom to a robust eight-year-old second son of Henry VII. The boy was Henry, Duke of York. The following year, when the elder brother Arthur was already two years in his grave, Fisher was made Bishop of Rochester and chancellor of Cambridge University. He kept the chancellorship for thirty-one years and the see of Rochester, the poorest in England, for the same. He refused the richer translations offered him. He preached the funeral sermon of Lady Margaret Beaufort in 1509, and that of Henry VII the same year, and watched his pupil ride to the coronation in June. For twenty-five years after, he wrote against Luther in the Latin of the schools, defended the seven sacraments, defended the marriage of Catherine of Aragon, and, when the King's Great Matter came before the legatine court at Blackfriars in 1529, stood and said to the King's face that no power on earth could dissolve a marriage God had joined. The boy at Eltham was now a man who had heard himself contradicted, in public, by his old master. Henry did not forget.

THE TOWER

On the eighteenth of April 1534 the commissioners came to Rochester with the Oath of Succession, which carried in its preamble the new claim of Supreme Headship over the Church in England. Fisher would swear to the succession of the children of Anne; he would not swear to the preamble. He was committed to the Tower the same week. He had then sixty-five years on him, a body already worn by ascetic habit, a chest that did not warm easily. The cell was on the upper floor of the Bell Tower. His servant George Gold brought him books and a thin gown. He wrote, in the months that followed, two short treatises of consolation for his half-sister Elizabeth, a Dominican nun at Dartford, A Spiritual Consolation and The Ways to Perfect Religion, in plain English, and he wrote to Cromwell asking for warmer clothing and some little book of devotion, for I have here none. Cromwell sent neither. In May 1535, Pope Paul III, knowing what was coming and choosing to make it costly to Henry, named Fisher to the cardinalate. The red hat was dispatched from Rome and stopped at Calais. Henry was reported to have said that by the time the hat arrived its wearer should have no head to wear it on. The remark, true or invented, set the date.

THE LAST WEEK

From the fifteenth of June he ate almost nothing. He told his chaplain John Holland that the body must be light enough that the stroke would not be impeded, that the axe shall not have to do my body any injury beyond the one stroke. He slept little. He read the Office. He read the Psalter through twice. On the twenty-first, the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edmund Walsingham, came to his cell at five in the afternoon and told him plainly that he would die in the morning. Fisher asked at what hour. Nine, said Walsingham. Fisher said he was grateful for the warning and would now sleep, and did sleep, by Walsingham's later report, for seven hours without waking. At dawn he rose, washed, and dressed himself in a clean shirt and his episcopal scarlet, the only colour he had left to him, the cardinal's red being still at Calais. He took up a small New Testament. He opened it at hazard and his eye fell upon the seventeenth chapter of John: Haec est autem vita aeterna, ut cognoscant te solum Deum verum, et quem misisti Iesum Christum. He closed the book and said, by Holland's record, here is learning enough for me to my life's end.

THE WALK UP

The morning of the twenty-second of June was clear and already warm by eight. Tower Hill lay on the open ground north of the Tower moat; the scaffold had been erected the night before in heavy summer light. A crowd had gathered behind the rails, larger than the lieutenant had expected, mostly silent. At nine, the two yeomen of the guard came to the cell. Fisher could not walk unaided. They took him under each arm and brought him slowly down the stone stair, across the inner ward, through the Bulwark Gate, up the slight rise of the Hill. He weighed, by Holland's observation, about a hundred pounds. At the foot of the wooden steps he asked the yeomen to let go of him, and he climbed the steps himself, holding the rail, taking each step separately. On the platform he turned to the crowd. He said, audibly, that he died for the faith of the Holy Catholic Church, and asked the people to pray for him, and to pray for the King, that the King might receive good counsel. He forgave the executioner Cratwell. He knelt to the block. He recited, in his scholar's Latin, the Te Deum from memory, Te Deum laudamus, Te Dominum confitemur, and the antiphon In te Domine speravi, non confundar in aeternum. The stroke was single and clean.

THE BRIDGE

By the King's direct order the head was carried that afternoon to the southern end of London Bridge and set on a spike facing south toward Southwark. The body was left naked on the scaffold until evening, when two halberdiers carried it on their pikes to All Hallows Barking by the Tower and threw it into a shallow grave without office or shroud. The chroniclers Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed both record what then happened on the bridge. The head, exposed to the June sun and the river damp for fourteen days, 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 crowds gathering on the bridge to look became a hindrance to the cart-traffic. The Lord Mayor petitioned the King's Council. On the second of July, by Henry's order, the head was taken down at midnight and thrown into the Thames. Two days later, on the morning of the sixth of July, Sir Thomas More was brought to the same scaffold on the same hill. More had been Fisher's friend for thirty years; they had not been allowed to see one another in the Tower. More said, climbing the steps, that he died the King's good servant, but God's first. The same axe took his head off. It was set on the same bridge.

THE LONG SHADOW

The legislation Fisher had refused his name to went forward without him. The Dissolution of the Monasteries began the following spring and was complete by 1541. The Six Articles followed in 1539, the first English Prayer Book in 1549, the Elizabethan Settlement in 1559. The connection with Rome was not restored. The poorest see in England had produced the one English bishop who would not bend, and twenty-six others had bent. Fisher's books, the controversial Latin against Luther, the English consolations for his sister, the funeral sermons for Margaret Beaufort and Henry VII, survived; his college foundations at Cambridge, St John's and Christ's, both worked through with Lady Margaret in his chancellor's years, survived; the Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity which he had drafted the statutes for survived, and holds his name in its preamble still. Four hundred years to the month after the red hat was sent and stopped at Calais, Pope Pius XI canonised John Fisher and Thomas More together, on the nineteenth of May 1935. The feast falls on the twenty-second of June. The scaffold-site at Tower Hill is now a small public garden in Trinity Square, kept by the City of London; the granite memorial plaque, set up in 1936, lists in order the Tudor and Stuart names that died on that ground, Cromwell and Surrey and the Seymours and Strafford among them. Fisher's name is the first cut into the stone.

Some refusals do not stop what they refuse. The country went the way the statute pointed; the cardinal's hat never reached Calais; the head that would not change colour was thrown into the river at midnight and the river carried it away. What remained was the sentence finished in scarlet on the twenty-second of June, and a name first on a list of names, cut into granite a hundred yards from where the body fell.