We glide away as doth a shadow and wither as hay; thy time, Good Lord, is everlasting and thy memorial time without end.
Psalm 101:10. From The Penitential Psalms in the
English Version, John Fisher.
The former Bishop of Rochester had been sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but on the morning of his execution on 22 June this decision was altered, apparently for fear that if dragged on a hurdle for 4 miles to Tyburn there was every likelihood of his death along the way. Instead, the executioner’s axe alone was to suffice at nearby Tower Hill, and at 5 a.m. on the day, shortly after dawn, he was informed that ‘he should suffer that forenoon’, after which the following exchange is said to have occurred with the Tower’s lieutenant:
‘Well,’ quoth the bishop,’ if this be your errand hither, it is no news unto me; I have looked daily for it. I pray you, what is it a’clock?’
‘It is,’ quoth the Lieutenant, ‘about five.’
‘What time,’ quoth the bishop, ‘must be mine hour to go out hence?’
‘About ten of the clock,’ said the Lieutenant.
‘Well, then,’ quoth the bishop, ‘I pray you, let me sleep an hour or twain. For I may say to you, I slept not much this night, not for fear of death, I tell you, but by reason of my great sickness and weakness.’
With which answer the Lieutenant departed from him till about nine o’clock. At which time he came again to the bishop’s chamber, and found him upward, putting on his clothes, and showed him that he was come for him.
There followed a request from Fisher that he be allowed to wear his fur shoulder cape ‘to keep me warm for the while until the very time of execution’, and when the lieutenant responded by asking why he was so careful of his health with ‘little more than half an hour to live’, the bishop confessed that:
Though I have, I thank our Lord, a very good stomach and willing mind to die at this present … yet I will not hinder my health in the mean time not a minute of an hour, but will preserve it in the mean season with all such discreet ways and means as Almighty God of his gracious goodness hath provided for me.
Racked by the gruelling chill of the Tower for months past, and unable, it seems, to take anything more than milk for his last breakfast, even John Fisher would not be denied one last fleeting comfort before he finally left his cell at the ordained hour, ‘taking a little book in his hand, which was a New Testament lying by him’ and making a cross on his forehead as he passed through the prison door, ‘being so weak that he was scant able to go down the stairs’. Indeed, according to William Rastell’s account, which differs slightly from that of Fisher’s anonymous early biographer, the condemned man was actually ‘carried down out of his chamber between twain in a chair’ and thereafter conveyed to the Tower gate:
Where, being delivered to the sheriffs of London, he was with great company of halberds, bills and glaives, carried in a chair by four of the sheriffs’ officers, the sheriffs riding next after him, from thence not far off to a plain besides the Tower of London commonly called Tower Hill, otherwise called East Smithfield, where he was brought near to the scaffold on which he should be beheaded.
Yet the scaffold itself was still being completed, we are told, when Fisher arrived before it, resulting in a delay of at least an hour, since (according to Rastell, who was actually present) the bishop did not mount the steps to the waiting executioner until ‘eleven of the clock’. In the meantime, the early biographer tells us, he had risen out of his chair, ‘leaned his shoulder to the wall’, and ‘opened his little book in his hand’ in search of an appropriate passage to glorify his Maker ‘in this my last hour’. He had awaited the day of his ordeal in no little dread after Cromwell had first informed him of it – at the very same time that the pope had made him a cardinal – and now, though finally at peace, he had still longer to wait as he read in heavy silence amid the unfinished preparations. But when the arena for his suffering was finally ready, he nevertheless managed to make his ascent unaided – ‘to no little marvel,’ as Rastell noted, ‘of them that knew his weakness and debility’ – and was able to address the axeman ‘with a bold courage and a loving cheer’, forgiving him ‘heartily’ and telling him how he ‘trusted on our Lord’ that ‘thou shalt see me die even lustily’. Nor, when he delivered his final words to ‘the wondrous number of people gathered to see this horrible execution’, did his strength falter either. On the contrary, Rastell tells us, he ‘spake with a cheerful countenance and with such a stout and constant courage as one no wit afraid but glad to suffer death’.
By then he had removed his gown and cape, revealing ‘a long, lean, slender body nothing in manner but skin and bare bones, so that the most part that there saw him marvelled to see any man bearing life, to be so far consumed’. But, notwithstanding his abject physical condition, he was still able, in the view of the Bishop of Faenza, ‘to speak to the people boldly’, telling them how he how had ‘come hither to die for the faith of Christ’s Catholic Church’, while urging them at the same time to be loving and obedient to the king, who, though deceived in this matter, was good by nature. As for himself, he confessed that since he was only flesh, he feared death as any man would. Yet in doing so, he continued to speak, wrote Rastell, ‘with such a strong and very loud voice that it made all the people astonished’ – so much so, in fact, that many ‘noted it in a manner as a miracle to hear so plain, strong and loud a voice come out of so old, weak and sickly a carcass’. After which, the executioner went quickly about his work, though leaving the ‘headless body lying there naked upon the scaffold almost all day after’ until about ‘eight a’clock in the evening’ when ‘the dead body’s privities’ were finally conveyed to the parish church of All Hallows, Barking, and ‘vilely’ thrown – ‘without any winding sheet or any other accustomed ceremonies’ – into a grave hastily dug by guards with their halberds.
The final insult had been carried out, it seems, at the express ‘commandment of the king’, who had insisted that the body be buried ‘very contemptuously’. Nor was there any visible hint of remorse on the king’s part thereafter. On the contrary, Henry was soon remarking upon the lenity of Fisher’s treatment, since he had been spared more agonising cruelty and merely ‘sworded’. And in the meantime, the bishop’s few remaining personal possessions were duly taken to the king’s use – among them a small book with a gilt cover and the French king’s arms on the inside, a mitre set with a worthless stone and pearl, a pair of knitted gloves embossed with gold, and some plate of silver gilt. But it was not merely Fisher’s possessions that preoccupied his former royal master in the wake of the execution. For his head, which was subsequently placed on a pike on London Bridge, remained ‘fresher’, according to a Spanish report, than the others perching there in putrefaction, necessitating an order, a fortnight or so later, that it be knocked into the Thames to quell suspicion among the credulous of divine approval for the victim. In just over another fortnight, moreover, the head of Thomas More would take its place on the self-same pike.
Yet while More’s death would redound to his glory across the centuries, John Fisher’s sacrifice would never be burnished by posterity to anything like the same degree. And though the names of both men are celebrated with a joint feast in the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, the equality of honour they enjoy in their sainthood by no means reflects an equality they have received at the hands of historians, or, for that matter, their relative historical importance within the English Reformation. Indeed, the massive scholarly attention lavished on More continues to dwarf the efforts of the few who have chosen to study the career of his fellow martyr – even in the realm of ideas where Fisher’s work as a professional theologian was undoubtedly more solid, enduring, original and influential. Nor is this discrepancy new. For even in 1535, when they were executed, the romantic figure of the wary and witty lawyer, sharing bon mots on his way to the scaffold, attracted wider popular attention and sympathy than that of his altogether graver and more outspoken clerical counterpart. The first biography of More, the memoir by his son-in-law William Roper, was in print by the end of Mary Tudor’s reign. The first biography of Fisher, by contrast, was completed only under Elizabeth, and was circulated solely in manuscript form until the middle of the next century. Compiled by a few members of St John’s College, and written most probably, as we have seen, by John Young, former Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and Master of Pembroke Hall, it was based on critical research into original documents and evidence from Young’s time of service within Fisher’s own household. But its anonymous authorship and first appearance in print under the tainted editorship of Thomas Bailey did nothing to enhance either its own reputation or that of its subject.
Nor were these the only – or for that matter the most important – reasons why John Fisher failed to achieve the recognition that his role undoubtedly merited. For Henry VIII’s vengeance pursued him beyond the grave and involved nothing less than a systematic campaign not only to eradicate his memory at home but to blacken it abroad. Even before Fisher and More were brought to trial they were both the target of malicious sermons in London, and between the death of the former and the trial of his fellow martyr, the king ordered, too, that the ‘treasons’ of the two men should be publicly declared at the assizes throughout the country. Within a year, moreover, one of Fisher’s sermons had been specifically banned by proclamation, while before long his treatises against the divorce were passed to a committee headed by Cranmer with a view to discrediting them once and for all, though the archbishop, no doubt wisely, stopped short of any attempt at refutation. And in the meantime, Thomas Cromwell made every effort on the international level to portray Fisher’s execution as the result of political treason involving hostile foreign powers, while encouraging the propaganda slurs of, first, Stephen Gardiner and, later, Richard Sampson, Bishop of Chichester. Even at St John’s, for that matter, Fisher’s memory underwent steady onslaught. For although the college had protected itself by seeking generous patronage from Cranmer and Cromwell, it was soon obliged not only to abandon plans for the tomb that had been prepared for Fisher in its chapel – limestone slabs for which were discovered in 1773 amid rubbish being cleared from a disused chapel – but to efface the heraldic emblems relating to him that had been placed on much of the chapel furniture, and to eliminate all mention of his name within the college’s statutes. Except, indeed, for a brief revival of Fisher’s statutes during the reign of Mary Tudor, he was all but forgotten at St John’s until the time of Thomas Baker, a fellow of the late Stuart period, whose political and religious principles caused him to be ejected from his fellowship.
The relegation of Fisher to the status of a non-person was effected with all the systematic thoroughness that one might expect for a perceived enemy of the Tudor state. But neither, of course, would the London Charterhouse escape suppression in the wake of the execution of its martyred members, notwithstanding the fact that the process would be conducted over all of two years, since Cromwell, unlike his royal master, was unwilling to outrage public sentiment with too sudden a destruction of a community so generally esteemed. Instead, after all further attempts at persuasion had finally failed, the tactic of division was once again attempted, and on 4 May 1536, four of those considered most recalcitrant were sent to other houses: Maurice Chauncy and one named Fox to Beauvale; John Rochester and James Walworth to Hull. A little later, too, eight more were sent to the Bridgettines at Syon, in what proved to be the largely vain hope that they might be won over by learned and obedient example to acceptance of the royal supremacy. Yet in May 1537, after a threat from the council to suppress the Charterhouse out of hand, the Crown did at last achieve some progress when a number of the monks, exhausted by the persecution and anxious to save their monastery from dissolution, finally agreed to renounce the authority of the pope. For without the solidarity resulting from everyday contact with their peers, some, as Cromwell had anticipated with characteristic shrewdness, were simply unable to sustain their resistance. And among them was Maurice Chauncy, who would be loaded with guilt for the rest of his life, while still maintaining to the very end that the hearts and consciences of all concerned had always given lie to their lips.
Even so, however, it was not this way with all, since ten remained ‘unmoved, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified’. Three were priests, one a deacon and six were converses [i.e. not in preparation for ordination], all of whom eventually found themselves lodged in a filthy Newgate cell. Unlike their martyred predecessors, moreover, these Carthusians – the most numerous band of all – were to be denied even the dignity of a formal trial and execution. Indeed, having sought to live as hidden servants of Christ within the Charterhouse, they would now die hidden from the eyes of all, chained, like Sebastian Newdigate before them, without possibility of movement in a foul atmosphere, and systematically starved until, as Thomas Bedyll put it, ‘dispeched by thand of God’. Abandoned by all, and dying slowly of hunger and fever, they received, it is true, a solitary instance of love and a precious measure of succour from Margaret Gigs, the adopted daughter of Sir Thomas More, who knew well of her father’s admiration for their Order, and who now bribed her way into Newgate, acting the part of a milkmaid, to carry sustenance and clean linen in a bucket on her head. When discovered and barred from further entrance, she subsequently obtained access to the roof and endeavoured, by removing some tiles, to let food down in a basket. But her efforts were to little avail, since the monks continued to expire, one by one, throughout the summer months, the last being Thomas Johnson on 20 September, though a converse, William Horne, was for some reason removed beforehand and lived on in prison elsewhere until drawn to Tyburn on 4 August 1540, to suffer the same fate as his prior before him.
‘And so this child’, we are told, who had been ‘tried longer and more severely than any other, followed his father, and died for the love of Jesus, and for the faith of His bride the Catholic Church’, thus completing the tale of eighteen Carthusian martyrs in all, since two others of those exiled from London had been hanged at York in 1537. And nor, of course, would their spiritual home remain unspoiled. For the London Charterhouse was formally suppressed on 15 November 1538, to be used as a store for the king’s pavilions, hunting nets and arms, after workmen, we are told, had seen fit to use its altars as gaming tables. By this time, many of the kingdom’s other monasteries had suffered a similar fate. The bells of Jesus Tower, the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London tells us, no longer rang, since they had been won at dice by Sir Miles Partridge, while, according to John Bale, precious books of all kinds, once belonging to monastic libraries, were now mainly in the hands of grocers and soap-sellers, ‘some to serve their jakes, some to scour their candlesticks, and some to rub their boots’. At the same time, convent buildings erected for pious contemplation were soon housing factories, while friary churches had found a new role as government storehouses. In one case, the church of the Crutched Friars was serving as a stone quarry for the repair of the Tower, and, in another, St Mary Grace’s was bursting with ship’s biscuits baked in the huge ovens that had been installed there. The church of the Austin Friars had been bought by an enterprising nobleman to store his corn and coal supplies in the steeple.
And where, of course, valiant resistance had been offered by others than the Carthusians, this also proved largely futile in forestalling the full bureaucratic momentum of the State. Most notably of all, the Abbots of Glastonbury, Reading and Colchester refused to give up their abbeys voluntarily. But it was decided, nevertheless, that these should ‘otherwise to come into the King’s hands’, and in the process Thomas Cromwell exhibited no hesitation in penning an infamous memorandum, which continues to darken his reputation down the years. ‘The Abbot of Reading to be sent down to be tried and executed at Reading with his complices, similarly the Abbot of Glaston at Glaston,’ Cromwell recorded in advance of the trial, clearly confirming the limitations of due process as he conceived it, and which resulted in another ghastly spectacle as Richard Whiting, the elderly Abbot of Glastonbury, was subsequently dragged through the streets of his little abbey town and hanged, drawn and quartered on the Tor overlooking it. When the venerable cleric had first ridden up to London to face his inquisitors, the orchards of his monastery were red with fruit, but now the trees were bare and the majestic pile of his abbey already desolate. And as he surveyed from the gallows the slopes of the clouded hills to Brent Knoll and Steep Holm, over to the outline of the Quantocks and the darker Poldens, he did so in full knowledge of the similar fate awaiting his counterparts. For Hugh Cook, Abbot of Reading, was hanged on the same day, and thereafter Thomas Beche, Abbot of Colchester, was convicted on the slender evidence of John Scrope, a priest in the town, to be executed on 1 December 1539, a fortnight after Cook and Whiting.
Yet even before the following summer was out, the king had not hesitated to be swung by vengeful counsel against the very man responsible for all three abbots’ deaths. For, having succumbed to a stillborn marriage to Anne of Cleves and facing a Protestant religious tide that he found as repugnant as his most recent bride, Henry VIII was fully prepared to sanction his chief minister’s violent removal when on 10 June, wholly without warning, the captain of the guard entered the room at Westminster where the council was assembled and arrested Thomas Cromwell on a charge of high treason. In response, the wretched victim is said to have leapt to his feet and dashed his bonnet to the ground, calling on his colleagues to confirm his loyalty. But the minister’s despairing outburst was to no avail as the Duke of Norfolk snatched the medal of St George from his neck and the Earl of Southampton stripped the Garter from his knee. After this their broken victim was taken by river to the Tower to suffer the justice of the bloody laws that he himself had fashioned. Later that evening when the king’s archers were seen outside Cromwell’s house, Londoners finally learned the news of his downfall, while men within, packing plate and money for the king’s use, were soon discovering that the accused had salted away Church jewels to the value of £7,000.
Needless to say, Cromwell’s subsequent frantic appeals to the king went unheeded, for on 3 July he wrote to Henry as his ‘poor slave’. ‘Most gracious Prince,’ he implored, ‘I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy’, but no succour was forthcoming. Instead, Sir Richard Rich, whose testimony had already undone both John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, was now equally eager to report the treasonable sayings of the patron who had made his fortune. In the meantime, Cromwell was not allowed to be heard in his own defence, and in the trial that followed he was condemned to die by Act of Attainder – not for the numerous crimes of which he had been genuinely guilty, since the king himself had been party to them, but on the false accusation that he had opposed the master whom he himself had helped to make a tyrant. ‘Full of pride’, Cromwell had, it was declared, dealt in ‘weighty causes’ and, though of ‘very base and low degree’, he had boasted too freely of his power and influence. Early in 1540, for example, when taunted about his origins, he was alleged to have responded with a threat to the effect that ‘if the Lords would handle him so, he would give them such a breakfast as never was made in England and that the proudest should know’. Predictably, he was accused also of heretical leanings, demonstrated by his encouragement of ‘combinations’ and ‘conventicles’. But most damagingly of all, perhaps, he was said to have revealed intimate secrets about Henry’s relationship with Anne Boleyn to an unspecified third party. In his desperation to make a success of the king’s latest marriage Cromwell had, it seems, made a clumsy attempt to tutor Anne of Cleves in the arts of seduction by confiding to her certain sexual preferences of her husband. And more than any other single factor it was quite possibly this last revelation that rendered the king’s fury uncontrollable.
In all, six weeks would eventually elapse between Cromwell’s condemnation and his execution, since the king was determined to be rid of Anne of Cleves and, in this regard, there was still some further service to be had from the fallen minister, as Henry sent him fourteen questions concerning his marriage, which would confirm, among other things, that he had entered the match unwillingly and that the marriage had never been consummated. But in spite of final services rendered and further appeals for clemency, arguably the most curious of all Henry VIII’s ‘martyrs’ was nevertheless gruesomely hacked on 28 July 1540 by a bungling headsman who required two blows to complete the task. In John Foxe’s opinion, ‘he patiently suffered the stroke of the axe, by a ragged, butcherly miser, which very ungodly performed the office’. And nor was it long, of course, before Henry’s tortuous judgement was bemoaning the victim’s fate, and convincing him that ‘the best servant he ever had’ had been condemned ‘on light pretexts’.
But even this is not the most striking paradox surrounding Thomas Cromwell. For in spite of his clinical ruthlessness when occasion dictated, there had been little, if any, personal animus involved in any of his persecutions. Indeed, few revolutions of the kind he undoubtedly orchestrated have been ultimately accomplished with such limited bloodshed or judicial barbarity. Certainly, if obstacles to ‘progress’ like the Maid of Kent and her key adherents remained defiant, they could be hideously swept aside without the palest flicker of sympathy or remorse. But others of the Maid’s same circle – and indeed those like them – were sometimes treated not only to mercy but to rehabilitation on what might well be considered remarkably generous terms. Both Richard Master and Edward Thwaites received not only absolute pardons in June 1534 at the intercession of Sir Christopher Hales, but full restoration in due course to their former status. During five years of amiable compliance and more than a little self-interested service, indeed, Thwaites gradually recovered his possessions in Calais and his position as a magnate in Kent, largely by acting as Cromwell’s adviser on real-property investments, so that by 1539, he was back on the Bench of Magistrates, as well as the Commission for Sewage (inland waterways and drainage), and the Commission for Gaol Delivery with reference to Canterbury Castle, where the Maid and her companions, and possibly even he, too, had once been briefly incarcerated. Richard Master, likewise, was reinstalled in his Aldington rectory with full parochial responsibilities of the kind he had exercised when Elizabeth Barton’s original confessor.
And this, too, was not the limit of the broader irony involved. For in accepting the oath of supremacy, neither Thwaites nor Master repudiated in practice either the old religion or, indeed, the memory of the Holy Maid who had, at one point, been arguably its most influential defender. Not only obstinately refusing to preach against her fame, Master would also persistently defy Thomas Cranmer’s subsequent policy of protestantising the diocese of Canterbury, continuing to observe the Catholic calendar, to venerate the Blessed Virgin and the saints, to administer the sacrament of penance, and to preach the benefits of good works and of pilgrimage to Court-at-Street in particular. In 1550, moreover, at the age of 66, he would refuse to comply with the ordinance of Edward VI’s reign, which required him to desecrate and break down the altars of his church, keeping faith with both the Maid and all the traditions she herself held dear, until his death not earlier than 1553 and perhaps as late as 1557 – by which time all links with Rome had been firmly re-established under Mary Tudor.
At the same time, notwithstanding Edward Thwaites’s steady reacquisition of influence in local government, he too would ultimately follow a parallel path. For, if a tradition originating with the account of Nicholas Harpsfield is to be trusted, he dared to jeopardise all once more during 1539–40, to rescue the bones of St Augustine from a devastated Canterbury, and to re-erect the saint’s shrine, albeit only briefly, in his parish church at Chilham. Nor is there any doubt of his involvement in the so-called Prebandaries’ Plot of 1543, which nearly succeeded in bringing Cranmer to the stake for heresy. Indeed, when this scheme finally foundered on the rock of the king’s affection for his archbishop, Thwaites crowned all with the greatest irony of any: the purchase of the very manor and chapel of Our Lady at Court-at-Street that had lain at the epicentre of Elizabeth Barton’s former fame and glory. Though too late to save the wonder-working image, which had already been shattered to fragments on Cranmer’s orders, it was not too late to protect the holy ground on which she had built her reputation, and which remained in the possession of Thwaites’s family for almost half a century after his death in 1551.
Plainly, if the flesh of martyrs was perishable, the ardour of those who revered them sometimes proved less so. And the same was no less true, finally, of the bravery and fixation that continued to enthuse the likes of John Forest – last Provincial of the Greenwich Observants – who followed in their wake. Slowly roasted to death on a bed of chains at Smithfield on 22 May 1538, his pyre comprised the remnants of the wonder-working image of the ancient Welsh saint Dderfel Gadern, which, it was said, could destroy a forest by fire. Having first submitted to government threats, Forest had nevertheless recovered himself to deliver upon the scaffold before Thomas Cromwell, Lords of the Council, the Lord Mayor and the host of other dignitaries present, what represented, from some perspectives, a classic manifesto for all others of his kind:
I will die. Do your worst upon me. Seven years ago you durst not for your life have preached such words as these; and now, if an angel from heaven should come down and teach me any other doctrine than that I learned as a child, I would not believe him. Take me; cut me in pieces, joint from joint. Burn, hang, do what you will, I will be true henceforth to my faith.
North aspect of Cobb’s Hall, Aldington, Kent. It was at this place, while engaged in the household of Thomas Cobb, that Elizabeth Barton, later known as the Holy Maid of Kent, first established her reputation as a prophetess that would carry her to international fame and, ultimately, a traitor’s death at Tyburn.
St Mary’s Church at Aldington, little changed since the sixteenth century when Elizabeth Barton worshipped there. The rector at that time was Richard Master, who had been directly appointed by Archbishop Warham of Canterbury to serve the parish, and who succeeded a series of distinguished incumbents, including the Dutch scholar Erasmus and Thomas Linacre, physician, humanist intellectual and Latin tutor to the future Queen Mary.
All that remains of the deserted chapel at Court-le-Street where in the spring of 1526 Elizabeth Barton was said to have been miraculously healed of an epileptiform ailment by the Virgin Mary, in the presence of numerous witnesses.
Although initially circumspect, Archbishop William Warham was eventually convinced of the authenticity of Elizabeth Barton’s visions after her case was referred to him by Richard Master. A grave, devout, learned man, trained as a Wykehamist canon lawyer and one of the leading humanists of the day, Warham had been for most of his life a pliant servant of the Crown, but would ultimately declare himself ready to be ‘rewarded by God with the great honour of martyrdom, which is the best death that can be’.
On 20 April 1534, Elizabeth Barton was executed at Tyburn with her fellow ‘conspirators’ for having prophesied the death of Henry VIII and, in the words of the parliamentary attainder against them, ‘traterously attempted many notable actes intendyng therbye the disturbaunce of the pease and tranquyllytie of this Realm’. Today the site of the infamous Tyburn tree is marked by a stone on a traffic island at the junction of Edgware Road, Bayswater Road and Oxford Street.
Elizabeth Barton’s execution occurred in the company of two Benedictine monks, two Franciscan friars and a former secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, all of whom had been among her leading advocates. The five men were hanged, drawn and quartered, though Barton, as a woman, was merely hanged, after which, according to John Stow, ‘the Nun’s head was set on London Bridge, and the other heads on gates of the City’.
Clockwise from top left: Born in 1469 and venerated by Roman Catholics as a saint, John Fisher was an English Catholic bishop, cardinal and theologian who also served as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He was executed by order of Henry VIII for refusing to accept the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England and for upholding the doctrine of papal supremacy. He shares his feast day with St Thomas More on 22 June in the Roman Catholic calendar of saints, and is commemorated by the Church of England on 6 July; Portrait of Henry VIII’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, who, under John Fisher’s guidance, founded St John’s and Christ’s Colleges at Cambridge, and a Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity at each of the two universities at Oxford and Cambridge, Fisher himself becoming the first occupant of the Cambridge chair. From 1505 to 1508 he was also the President of Queens’ College; Located next to the Queen’s House at the Tower of London, and dating to the end of the twelfth century, the Bell Tower, where John Fisher was imprisoned, derives its name from the small wooden turret situated at its summit which contained a ‘curfew bell’. This was used to inform prisoners who were allowed to leave the confines of their quarters that it was time for them to return.
Title page of The Sermon of Johan the Bysshop of Rochester made agayn the Pernicious Doctryn of Martin Luther, c. 1521. The sermon concerned was preached ‘on a Good Friday’ at Paul’s Cross, and by 1527, Fisher had produced well over half a million words of Latin polemic against the teachings of the man whom he perceived as the most dangerous of the Church’s enemies.
Unlike some more fortunate prisoners, John Fisher was kept under close confinement in this cell, where he found himself raggedly clothed, deprived of his books and racked by the cold. ‘I have neither shirt nor sheet,’ he informed Thomas Cromwell in December 1534, ‘nor yet other clothes that are necessary for me to wear, but that be ragged and rent so shamefully. Notwithstanding I might easily suffer that, if they would keep my body warm.’
A small brick pavement in Trinity Square Gardens now marks the site of the scaffold on Tower Hill where John Fisher was executed on 22 June 1535. We are told that his ‘headless carcass’ was left ‘naked on the scaffold for the rest of the hot June day saving that one, for pity and humanity, cast a little straw upon it’.
The family of Sebastian Newdigate bore a long and intimate connection with the Church of St Mary the Virgin at their home of Harefield in Middlesex. Today it contains numerous fine memorials, including many dedicated to the Newdigates, who owned the local manor from the fourteenth century.
No likeness of Sebastian Newdigate remains, but this idealised image by Francisco Zurbarán depicts John Houghton, Prior of the London Charterhouse that Newdigate joined after withdrawing from service in Henry VIII’s privy chamber. A man of exceptional spirituality, Houghton was a source of particular inspiration to those entrusted to his charge, many of whom were of wealthy or distinguished family. On 4 May 1535, he would precede Newdigate to a martyr’s death.
This painting of the martyrdom of Humphrey Middlemore, William Exmew and Sebastian Newdigate by Vicente Carducho resides at the Monastery of El Paular in Spain. They were incarcerated at Marshalsea for at least a fortnight, during which time they were bound by ‘great fetters fast ryved [riveted] on their legs with great iron boltts’, as well as ‘iron collors’ and other chains loaded with lead. The three Carthusian monks were eventually hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 19 June 1535. Throughout their captivity at Marshalsea, they had never, we are told, been ‘loosed for any naturall necessitie [nor] voiding of ordure or otherwise’.
For several years after the dissolution of the London Charterhouse, members of the Bassano family of instrument makers were amongst the tenants of the former monks’ cells, whilst Henry VIII stored hunting equipment in the church. But in 1545 the entire site was bought by Sir Edward (later Lord) North (c. 1496–1564), who transformed the complex into a luxurious mansion house. North demolished the church and built the Great Hall and adjoining Great Chamber. In 1558, during North’s occupancy, Queen Elizabeth I used the house during the preparations for her coronation.