John Fisher

John Fisher (c. 19 October 1469 – 22 June 1535) was an English Catholic prelate, humanist scholar, and statesman who served as Bishop of Rochester from 1504 to 1535 and as chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is honoured as a martyr and saint by the Catholic Church and is also commemorated in some Anglican calendars of saints. Executed by order of King Henry VIII during the English Reformation for refusing to acknowledge the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England and for upholding the Catholic doctrine of papal supremacy and the independence of the Church from control by the State, he was named a cardinal shortly before his death and later canonized as a representative of the many Catholic martyrs of England.

Fisher was born at Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1469, the son of Robert Fisher, a prosperous mercer of Beverley, and his wife Agnes. The couple had four children, of whom John was one. Robert Fisher died in 1477 and was buried in St Mary’s, the parish church at Beverley; in his will he made bequests to his children and to various poorhouses, churches, and priests, as well as providing stipends for Masses. John was then about eight years old. His widowed mother subsequently married a man named White, to whom she bore four further children. Fisher’s early education was probably at the school attached to the collegiate church in his home town, and he appears to have maintained close contacts with his extended family throughout his life.

Recognizing Fisher’s aptitude for learning and being in a position to support his studies, his mother assented to his admission to the University of Cambridge in 1482, when he was about twelve or thirteen. He studied at Cambridge from 1484, entering Michaelhouse, where he came under the influence of William Melton, a pastorally minded theologian receptive to the new currents of reform in studies arising from the Renaissance. Fisher received the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1487, proceeded to the Master of Arts degree in 1491, and in that same year was elected a fellow of his college. Also in 1491 he received a papal dispensation to be ordained to the priesthood despite being under the canonical age, and on 17 December 1491 he was ordained priest and appointed nominal vicar of Northallerton, Yorkshire. In 1494 he resigned this benefice to become proctor of the university; three years later he was appointed master debater, and about the same time he became chaplain and confessor to Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, the mother of King Henry VII. On 5 July 1501 he received the degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology, and ten days later he was elected vice-chancellor of the university.

Fisher’s association with Lady Margaret Beaufort proved decisive for both his career and the development of Cambridge. Under his guidance, his patroness founded St John’s College and Christ’s College at Cambridge, as well as the Lady Margaret Professorships of Divinity at both Oxford and Cambridge. Fisher himself became the first occupant of the Cambridge chair. From 1505 to 1508 he served as President of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and at the end of July 1516 he was present at Cambridge for the formal opening of St John’s College, where he consecrated the chapel. In an oration delivered before Henry VII in 1506, Fisher recalled that when the king first showed concern for the university, learning there had declined, perhaps because of constant litigation with the town, frequent plagues that had carried off leading scholars, and a lack of patrons. Fisher’s strategy for renewal was to assemble funds and attract leading scholars from Europe, promoting the study not only of classical Latin and Greek authors but also of Hebrew. He placed great weight on pastoral commitment, especially popular preaching, among the endowed fellows, and he dedicated his personal resources and energies to long-term projects that effectively allowed him to administer the entire university, then one of only two in England. His foundations were also dedicated to prayer for the dead, particularly through chantry endowments. Known as a stern and austere man, Fisher was reputed to place a human skull on the altar during Mass and on the table during meals as a memento mori. The humanist Desiderius Erasmus, whom Fisher induced to visit Cambridge and whose protection he provided so that the study of Greek could proceed there without the active molestation it faced at Oxford, wrote of him: “He is the one man at this time who is incomparable for uprightness of life, for learning and for greatness of soul.”

By papal bull dated 14 October 1504, Fisher was appointed Bishop of Rochester at the personal insistence of Henry VII. Rochester was then the poorest diocese in England and was usually regarded as a first step on an episcopal career, but Fisher remained there, apparently by his own choice, for the remaining thirty-one years of his life. In 1504 he was also elected chancellor of the University of Cambridge, a post to which he was re-elected annually for ten years before receiving a lifetime appointment. At this period he is also said to have acted as tutor to the future King Henry VIII. As a preacher his reputation was such that he was chosen to deliver the funeral orations for both Henry VII and Lady Margaret Beaufort in 1509, sermons whose texts survive. Alongside his work in education and diocesan administration, Fisher fulfilled the usual state duties of an English bishop, sat in the House of Lords, and participated in national ecclesiastical affairs. In 1512 he was nominated as one of the English representatives to the Fifth Council of the Lateran, then in session at Rome, though his journey was postponed and ultimately abandoned.

Fisher emerged as one of the leading Catholic theologians in Europe in the early Reformation period. He has been described as the first theologian to diagnose justification through faith alone as the founding dogma of the Protestant Reformation. He has also been named, though without convincing proof, as the true author of the royal treatise against Martin Luther, “Assertio septem sacramentorum” (Defence of the Seven Sacraments), published in 1521 and credited to Henry VIII, which won for the king the papal title “Fidei Defensor” (Defender of the Faith). Prior to this date Fisher had denounced various abuses within the Church and urged the need for disciplinary reforms, but he remained firmly opposed to Lutheran doctrine. In 1523 he published a massive, roughly 200,000-word response to Luther’s Latin “Assertio omnium articulorum,” entitled “Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio” (Confutation of the Lutheran Assertions). Luther omitted some of the more provocative material from his German version, which allowed the impression that Fisher, and later Erasmus, had misunderstood him; Luther did not reply directly to Fisher’s work. On about 11 February 1526, at the king’s command, Fisher preached a famous sermon against Luther at St Paul’s Cross, the open-air pulpit outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London, during a public ceremony in which some Lutherans abjured their views and confiscated Lutheran books were burned. In the preface to the printed English version of this sermon, Fisher offered to meet secretly with any Lutheran “to hear the bottom of his mind,” expressing confidence that either he would be persuaded to Lutheranism or he would induce his interlocutor to return to Catholic doctrine. The battle against what he regarded as heterodox teachings increasingly occupied his later years. In 1529 he was called upon to confirm with Thomas Hitton, a follower of William Tyndale arrested for suspected heresy, that the records of Hitton’s interviews and forthright admissions to Archbishop William Warham were correct and to persuade him to abjure; failing this, Hitton was handed to the secular authorities and executed at the stake for heresy. William Tyndale, then abroad, claimed that Hitton had been tortured by the archbishops, but the Protestant historian John Foxe, usually diligent in reporting such claims, did not repeat this allegation.

Fisher’s opposition to Henry VIII’s marital policies and ecclesiastical program brought him into direct conflict with the Crown. When Henry sought to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Fisher became the queen’s chief supporter. Appearing on her behalf before the papal legates’ court, he startled his audience by the boldness of his language and declared that, like St John the Baptist, he was ready to die in defense of the indissolubility of marriage. Henry, enraged, composed a long Latin address to the legates in answer to Fisher’s speech; Fisher’s copy of this address, with his marginal annotations, survives and indicates how little he feared royal anger. The removal of the case to Rome ended his direct involvement in the proceedings, but the king never forgave him. In November 1529 the so‑called “Long Parliament” of Henry’s reign began encroaching on the prerogatives of the Catholic Church. As a member of the House of Lords, Fisher warned that such measures could only end in the destruction of the Church in England. The Commons, through their Speaker and presumably at Henry’s prompting, complained that Fisher had disparaged Parliament. Summoned before the king to explain himself, Fisher satisfied Henry personally, but the Commons declared his explanation inadequate, allowing the king to appear as a magnanimous sovereign rather than as Fisher’s adversary. In 1530, as royal encroachments continued, Fisher, as Bishop of Rochester, joined the bishops of Bath and Ely in appealing to the Holy See. Henry seized the opportunity to forbid such appeals by edict, and the three bishops were arrested. Their imprisonment lasted only a few months; by February 1531 Fisher was again present in Convocation when the clergy, at a cost of £100,000, were compelled to purchase the king’s pardon for having recognized Cardinal Wolsey’s papal legatine authority and to acknowledge Henry as “supreme head of the Church in England,” a formula that, through Fisher’s efforts, was qualified by the clause “so far as God’s law permits.”

During these years Fisher’s life was also marked by episodes that contemporaries regarded as attempts on his life or as signs of royal displeasure. On one occasion in 1530 a cannonball fired from across the Thames struck his house, narrowly missing his study; this was widely rumored to be a warning or assassination attempt connected with the Boleyn faction at court. A few days after the 1531 Convocation settlement, several members of Fisher’s household fell ill after eating porridge served to them, and two died; Fisher himself, who was fasting that day, was unharmed. Henry VIII had Parliament enact a retroactive bill permitting the cook, Richard Roose, to be executed by being boiled alive for the crime of poisoning, without a public trial. At the same time Fisher began to move beyond passive resistance to more active, if covert, opposition. As early as 1531 he engaged in secret communications with foreign diplomats. In September 1533, using the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys as intermediary, he encouraged Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to invade England and depose Henry in concert with a domestic uprising.

Events hastened toward a final break. In May 1532 Sir Thomas More resigned the chancellorship, and in June Fisher preached publicly against the annulment of Henry’s marriage. In August 1532 Archbishop Warham died, and Henry at once proposed Thomas Cranmer to the pope as his successor. In January 1533 Henry secretly underwent a form of marriage with Anne Boleyn. Cranmer was consecrated bishop in March 1533, and a week later Fisher was arrested, apparently to prevent him from opposing the annulment that Cranmer pronounced in May or the coronation of Anne Boleyn on 1 June. Fisher was released within a fortnight of the coronation, no formal charge having been brought. In the autumn of 1533, however, a series of arrests followed the exposure of the so‑called revelations of Elizabeth Barton, the “Holy Maid of Kent,” who had prophesied against the king’s marriage. Fisher, taken seriously ill in December, saw proceedings against him postponed, but in March 1534 a special bill of attainder was introduced in Parliament against him and others for complicity in the Barton affair. The bill passed, condemning Fisher to forfeit all his personal estate and to imprisonment during the king’s pleasure; he later received a pardon on payment of a fine of £300. In the same year Parliament enacted the Act of Succession and the Act of Supremacy, requiring an oath recognizing the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and his supremacy over the Church. Fisher’s continued refusal to accept the royal supremacy ultimately led to his condemnation for treason and his execution on 22 June 1535.

Fisher’s death and steadfastness in defense of papal authority and traditional Catholic doctrine quickly gave rise to a widespread reputation for martyrdom. In response to a popular petition of English Catholics, Pope Pius XI canonized John Fisher and Thomas More on 19 May 1935 as representatives of the many Catholic martyrs of England. The two martyrs share a common feast day on 22 June in the current General Roman Calendar of the Catholic Church, and Fisher’s name also appears in some Anglican calendars of saints, reflecting his enduring significance in the religious and political history of England.