2

Martyr-in-Waiting

He was in holiness, learning and diligence in his cure and in fulfilling his office of bishop such that of many hundred years England had not any bishop worthy to be compared unto him. And if all countries of Christendom were searched, there could not lightly among all other nations be found one that hath been in all things like unto him, so well used, and fulfilled the office of bishop as he did. He was of such high perfection in holy life and strait and austere living as few were, I suppose, in all Christendom in his time, religious or other.

The opinion of a young contemporary of John Fisher, recorded by William Rastell, nephew of Sir Thomas More.

It was not until 10 May 1509, after a long and creaking descent into illness and old age, that Henry VII was finally consigned to dwell ‘more richly dead than he did alive’ in his splendid tomb of black marble at Westminster. But by then, as spring was quickening and 17-year-old Henry VIII was bursting upon his unsuspecting kingdom, a new government, peppered with remnants of the old order, had already taken shape. For the young king’s chief councillors remained largely his father’s men: weighty, substantial, grave and elderly. Prominent among them was Thomas Howard, the 66-year-old Earl of Surrey – a thick-shouldered old warhorse who, until his death in 1521, would sally northward from time to time to sharpen his sword against marauding Scots. But the balance lay with the clerical interest, all of whom, in stark distinction to their new ruler, were conservative in outlook, cautious by nature, and, to a man, wholly unable to bridle the young man’s restless temperament. Though he retained the Great Seal, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, seems to have taken little or no responsibility at all for moulding his sovereign’s outlook. Unambitious and almost certainly weary of twenty years of official life, his hang-dog expression in his most famous portrait seems merely to imply a long lifetime of mild regrets, and though Erasmus rightly described him as ‘witty’ and ‘generous’, the Dutchman was by no means altogether unfair either in adding the epithet ‘laborious’ to the archbishop’s description. Overall, he was a pliant, sceptical character who, it was said, ‘only read’ and would die with merely £30 in hand, ‘enough for my funeral’, all of which contrasted markedly with, on the one hand, his fellow councillor, Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester – who, as a result of Warham’s comparative indifference, came to assume direction of affairs as Lord Privy Seal – and, above all perhaps, Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham, whose narrow devotion to the everyday drudgery of accumulating vast lands made him the richest prelate in the realm.

None of these, it seemed, could hold the king indefinitely from war and breakneck marriage, and none, more obviously still, was made of martyr’s stuff. Yet among their number, of comparatively junior status but altogether more tenacious fibre, was John Fisher, who was to become by turns the most outspoken and challenging opponent of the king’s eventual divorce two decades later. Born at Beverley in Yorkshire around 1469, his home town’s history explains in part, perhaps, his own, and in particular that religious zeal and independence of mind, which, along with his outstanding intellect, rendered him so capable and determined an opponent when roused. For his birthplace nestled at the foot of the eastern slopes of the wolds of East Yorkshire, an area well known both for the jealous protection of its liberties and unwavering orthodoxy, which it advertised boldly by its famous Minster, as well as two long-established Dominican and Franciscan houses, a commandery of the Knights Hospitaller, and the hospitals of St Giles and St Nicholas, not to mention Fisher’s own parish church of St Mary. And if Beverley’s 5,000 inhabitants were well served by the Church whose rituals and rulings they observed so readily, their interests were no less adequately furnished either, it seems, by those self-same merchant governors who had ensured its place as one of the leading cloth-making and marketing centres of the kingdom. A thriving agglomeration of fine houses, paved streets and public buildings, protected by a surrounding moat and guarded by five sturdy gates, its people were not to be lightly offended, as Edward IV wisely appreciated when he led his army through their midst in 1461 on his way to Towton, carefully avoiding all hint of indiscipline or offence. And it was a precedent not lost on his rivals, who likewise acknowledged the need to leave the tenth largest town in the kingdom untouched through all the arduous twists and turns of what became known to posterity as the Wars of Roses.

If a later king had been equally judicious in his dealings, of course, John Fisher might have proved no less compliant himself than the townsfolk whose steadfast loyalty to the Crown he instinctively shared. For there was certainly nothing about the future bishop’s family background to imply anything other than law-abiding pragmatism, in addition to honest, unquestioning piety. Indeed, as a mercer of moderate prosperity, his father Robert’s final will and testament bore every routine hallmark of the characteristically rock-like, late medieval bourgeois, whose bequests to local churches and almshouses were as conventional as the in-built faith that underpinned them, and the earnest endeavours of a lifetime that made them possible in the first place. Hailing originally, it seems, from southern Lincolnshire, the head of the Fisher household left fitting sums to religious foundations in that county: one to the Premonstratensian monastery at Hagnaby, to which he left 10s for a trental of Masses for the repose of his soul; the other a smaller amount for the upkeep of a church at Holtoft. And there were similar payments directed closer to home – including one of 6s 8d to Robert Cook, chaplain of his parish church – likewise confirming the residing impression of a solid, if unassuming, pillar of his local community, whose main life’s business, beyond God-fearing right behaviour, had been business itself, and the dedicated care and protection of his family. For there is mention, too, in his will of four children, who, though unnamed, can be safely assumed to include John, the probable eldest if an early manuscript version of his life is to be trusted, and his brother Robert who was later his steward at Rochester. All, including a daughter, were securely provided for by a father who had clearly been nothing less than dutiful in the execution of his parental responsibilities, and more likely still, a loving parent to each of his offspring.

Yet by the time of his eldest son’s eighth birthday, Robert Fisher senior was dead and buried, at St Mary’s, his parish church, whose vicar witnessed the will on 17 June 1477. And the result was a new stepfather for the boy John, whose mother, Agnes, had soon remarried to a William White by whom she had five further children: Thomas and another boy named John, who became merchants; Richard, a priest; Elizabeth, who entered the Dominican nunnery at Dartford in Kent; and a last named Edward. Certainly, if scope for tension arose as a result of the new arrangement, it was never apparently realised, since two of the three works Bishop John Fisher composed during his final imprisonment in the Tower were addressed to his half-sister, at which time his brother Robert was still attending him in the confines of his cell. Not long previous, moreover, according to a delightful vignette recorded by his earliest biographer – who wrote anonymously, but was probably Dr John Young, a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and sometime member of his household – he had provided lavish Christmas fare for his relatives at Rochester before seeking welcome refuge from their merry-making in the seclusion of his study. Always more at ease in solitude among his books or at the pulpit, declaiming upon the joys of heaven and perils of hell, Fisher had nevertheless retained a love for his family’s company long after his horizons had shifted far beyond their own. And a similar pride and affection extended too, it seems, to his Yorkshire roots in general, as was amply indicated by his assiduous promotion of a northern presence at Cambridge, through fellowships and scholarships, once he had become the university’s chancellor.

From numerous perspectives, then, the imprint of Beverley upon both boy and adult man should not be underestimated. For while John Fisher, true to character, was an impersonal writer who left us only two or three definite references to his childhood experiences, and although there are no other records or legends of his earliest years, we can nevertheless recreate with considerable accuracy the everyday environment of the bustling late medieval town in which he grew up, and fully imagine its lasting influence upon him. No doubt, the silver-gilt shrine of St John of Beverley, martyred in the eleventh century and to whom Henry V attributed his victory at Agincourt, will have left its mark upon young Fisher’s spirituality. For it had made the town a major source of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages and, as such, contributed in no small measure to Beverley’s prosperity – so much so that when it was destroyed on Henry VIII’s orders in 1541, significant economic decline ensued. No doubt, too, Fisher watched the completion of the great west front of Beverley’s Minster, the Collegiate Church of St John of Beverley, as it soared heavenwards, and we can also picture him witnessing the miracle plays for which his birthplace was famous – on Corpus Christi and the Feast of the Purification, and on the Sunday after the feast of St Peter ad Vincula, at which the Paternoster play was performed. All were sources of delight to any child, and episodes that, like the liturgy at the Minster and his own parish church of St Mary’s, will all have left their trace upon the growing boy. Perhaps, indeed, the lasting emphasis that John Fisher was eventually to place upon the necessity for good preaching may well reflect further childhood impressions, good or bad, when local priests served up their own instruction to him from the pulpit. In any event, there would have been ample scope for him after such occasions to venture forth beyond Beverley’s moated walls, and indulge his abiding appreciation of the countryside and country life in general, which is apparent in his sermons and writings of later years.

But it was at school and in study that Fisher spent the lion’s share of his time, and it was in this area that he excelled particularly. For along with his brother Robert, he attended the Minster grammar school, which could trace its history back to the tenth century and continued to enjoy a high reputation. Boasting the unusually high number of three masters, the school seems, moreover, to have served his own specific needs to particularly good effect, since in 1483, to the especial satisfaction of his mother and stepfather, he was duly dispatched to Cambridge at an age when boys of similar background were mostly preparing for the more humdrum demands of life within the family business. Certainly, the path to university was not untrod by many others of Fisher’s background, but only those of exceptional talent tended to take it. And nor was it insignificant that John Fisher should arrive at his new place of study without the need to earn his keep as either a sizar,¹ or as was sometimes necessary, a mendicant. Plainly, his family was determined to assist his success – and sufficiently confident of their own resources – to ensure his comfort and due dignity at any necessary expense. Nor was it any less noteworthy, perhaps, that as young John Fisher set out on the 150-mile journey along the old Roman road through Lincoln down to Cambridge, he did so in the paid-for company of one of the university’s ‘fetchers’ – another sign in its own right of his family’s means. No doubt excited by the opportunities ahead, but daunted, too, by the challenges involved, there would be ample scope for reflection as the week-long journey to his appointed destination unfolded before him. For one thing above all else will have impressed itself upon the talented 14-year-old: namely, that success or otherwise from this time forth was dependent upon no other thing than his native talents and diligence.

Cambridge, after all, was already slowly shedding its former reputation as the cosy nesting place of unguided youth, and gradually becoming a place of more exacting standards and competition. No longer quite the home to riotous high jinks and dissolute living it had undoubtedly become after the fleeting brilliance of its heyday, it was emerging, in fact, as a more ordered and rigorous society, as a result of reforms which Fisher himself, appropriately enough, would further encourage after his own eventual promotion within the university’s hierarchy. New hostels and colleges were being built, and the first freshening breeze of an altered approach to learning was beginning to blow away the cobwebs from Cambridge’s ancient cloisters, though, as its new student would eventually make clear in an oration before Henry VII delivered in 1506, there was still much ground to make up.

At the time when your majesty first showed your concern for us [Fisher observed], learning had begun to decline among us. This may have been the result of constant litigation with the town, or of the frequent plagues that beset us so that we lost many of our leading scholars, or of the lack of patrons of learning. Whatever the cause, we should indeed have been reduced to despair had not your majesty shone down upon us like the rising sun itself.

For a scholar of Fisher’s uncompromising rigour and hard-edged honesty, of course, the comment was hardly surprising. And he was not alone in bemoaning his university’s previous shortcomings. For in a letter of 1516 to his old pupil Henry Bullock of Queens’ College, Erasmus himself commented that ‘about thirty years ago, nothing was taught at Cambridge but Alexander [de Villa Dei], the Parva Logicalia, as they are called, those old dictates of Aristotle, and the questions from Scotus’.

But if the New Learning came later to Cambridge than to Oxford, and both the mode and manner of learning had changed insufficiently since the previous century to satisfy fully a perfectionist like Fisher, change, as he himself recognised, was at last afoot, and, for all the shortcomings elsewhere, his own college, Michaelhouse – which was soon to be absorbed into the new foundation of Trinity – was well placed to set him on his future path. Noted for its distinctly conservative theological orientation, it possessed, moreover, at least one tutor of no mean distinction in William de Melton, who was not only more open to humanistic scholarship but also more pastorally minded in outlook than many of his more hidebound peers, and a stickler for the kind of intellectual precision that became such a hallmark of Fisher himself. Later, the pupil was to refer to his master as ‘a very eminent theologian’ and recall in one of his rare autobiographical reminiscences how Melton ‘used often to admonish me when I was a boy and attended his lectures on Euclid, that if I looked on the least letter of any geometrical figure as superfluous, I had not seized the true and full meaning of Euclid’.

And it was precisely because of such thoroughness that Fisher would steadily emerge as a student of such considerable prowess in his own right, notwithstanding his arrival at Cambridge at an age that was young even by contemporary standards. His success, indeed, was glittering and precocious, and would provide the first clear indication of those personal qualities – combining outstanding eminence with high moral seriousness, endurance and willpower – that eventually made him so illustrious, and formidable, a figure.

When he acquired his bachelor’s degree in 1488, Fisher did so in the company of two other men of note. One was John Bouge, who later recalled how he and Fisher took their degrees ‘both of one day’, and went on to become parish priest at St Stephen’s Walbrook and confessor to Sir Thomas More. The other was Nicholas West, a fellow of King’s until 1498, who was a protégé of Bishop Richard Fox, and became Bishop of Ely in 1515. We know, too, that John Skelton, court poet and tutor to Henry VIII, was another of Fisher’s contemporaries. Yet, unlike ‘merrie Skelton’, rank and reputation in the broader world outside were low on the young Yorkshireman’s priorities as he applied himself to study for his MA, which he duly acquired in 1491. Instead, his eyes were squarely set upon an academic career and the priesthood, to which he was subsequently ordained by Thomas Rotherham, Archbishop of York, that same December, when still some four years below the acknowledged canonical age. Facing thereafter at least ten or twelve long years of further study for his doctorate in theology, Fisher’s horizons did not, indeed, appear to have extended any further than the fellowship at Michaelhouse that duly accompanied his MA, or, at most, his subsequent promotion within the university’s administrative hierarchy, which, in spite of his predominantly academic leanings, was not long in coming.

Since 1246, in fact, Cambridge’s supreme officer had been its chancellor, elected for two years by the so-called house of regents, which consisted of those Masters of Arts who presided over the disputations that constituted a key element of the academic curriculum. But as the chancellor himself was sometimes a bishop or statesman, his duties were often delegated in turn to the vice-chancellor who, after much rankling, had eventually become independent of ecclesiastical control, to bear primary responsibility for a single area of overriding concern: the inculcation of discipline and good order among the student body. For at a time when Cambridge’s provision for more general aspects of welfare was so limited, and so many students were more widely known for their shortcomings than their virtues, it was hardly surprising that priority should have lain here. Yet even contemporary Cambridge had to be fed and paid for, and it was for this reason that two other figures, the university’s proctors, had come to assume over the years an increasingly significant role in matters both routine and more substantial. Elected annually to serve as executive and administrative officers responsible for supervising all ceremonies and disputations, they also managed finance, controlled market supplies and bore the everyday task of keeping peace in the streets. No less importantly, they usually represented the university in any negotiations with the town authorities. And in 1494, at the unusually tender age of 25, John Fisher was elected to this senior post by his fellow regents in recognition not only of his outstanding scholarship but of his drive and efficiency, which had singled him out so ideally for his new role.

Henceforth, though his efforts as a scholar and cleric remained undiminished, the rising young star was no less an administrator and man of practical affairs. And from this point forward, too, he was to become not only a familiar figure in the streets of Cambridge but, in all probability, a particularly striking one. For the famous portrait by Holbein of a painfully gaunt and careworn figure depicts him within two or three years of his sixtieth year, by which time the troubles of the last decade of his life had clearly taken their toll. Yet in his prime he was tall, lean and big-boned, with auburn hair, prominent grey eyes and a strong jaw suggestive of a man not easily turned from his purposes, though his speech was as spare as his person, and his imposing appearance was belied by the mildness and modesty of his demeanour. Always too earnest, it seems, to invite easy acquaintanceship, he remained nonetheless a caring and trustworthy guide to those who pierced his outward defences, while to those who gained his support he was a brave and unyielding ally. Indeed, where loyalty, both to people and principles, was concerned, he was unsurpassed, and where truth was at issue, his trenchant reasoning and natural tenacity made him a rock-like adversary. For while there was no more ardent advocate of the established order, both political and religious, or more passionate critic of opposition for opposition’s sake, Fisher was invariably a servant, first and foremost, to his God, his Church and his conscience: a man prepared to endure to the limit and to champion the cause of any wrongfully persecuted underdog that others might see fit to abandon for fear of the consequences.

For so young a man, doubtless, there was even now an implicitly forbidding edge – sufficient, presumably, to cow recalcitrant students scarcely more callow than himself, not to mention hard-bargaining men of commerce with whom he now dealt regularly. But nor was the future bishop without his fair share of intimates or admirers, among whom he numbered John Syclyng, Proctor and Master of Godshouse, the college founded by William Byngham in 1439 ‘for the free herbigage of poor scholars of Grammar’. First thrown together in 1494 by the perennial controversies between the university and the town, involving disputed rights and grants of royal privileges, it was this interminable wrangling over petty local disputes that swiftly brought Fisher his first acquaintance with a figure of national importance who would be critical for his own rise to much wider prominence. For in their tussle with Cambridge’s municipal authorities, which had recently reached a new intensity, the university’s proctors were faced with numerous visits to London, not only for legal appeals but in search of influential patrons at the royal court. And as a leader in such negotiations, Syclyng had already emerged as a man with connections in high places, who identified at once in his counterpart a most reliable and capable ally. Sallying forth to the capital in the very first year of their acquaintance, therefore, they found themselves bound for a significant encounter that would mark a new development in the younger man’s life, involving none other than Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby – mother of the king, patron of culture and learning, and one of the major powers behind the throne itself.

Intensely devout in her religious faith and no less devoutly intense, it must be said, in her political schemings, Lady Margaret was, in fact, one of the most remarkable women of the century: a figure who had not only been instrumental in the plots that finally brought her son the crown but one who had lived through more reigns, with more opportunity to influence their outcome, than any other person at his court. To the Spanish ambassador in 1498, she was among the half-dozen people with the greatest influence in England. And it was into her presence that John Fisher now arrived, with consequences that could hardly have been more momentous, either for him or his university, though his own response to his first entrée into the circles of the truly high and mighty could hardly have been more typically detached. More concerned with the minutiae of the journey and in particular its cost, the earnest young proctor seems to have been almost entirely unmoved by its potential personal significance. Certainly, he seems to have harboured no prior wish to impress, beyond supporting the university’s interests as best he might, or demonstrated any appreciable excitement, as he made his way in Syclyng’s company on the two-day journey from Cambridge to Greenwich – by way of Barkway, Ware and Waltham – that would bring him face to face with, arguably, the kingdom’s most influential figure other than the monarch himself.

In the Proctor’s Book of 1494, recorded in Fisher’s own neat handwriting, is the following entry, detailing the expenses of the very trip.

For the hire of two horses for 11 days … 7s.

For breakfast before crossing to Greenwich … 3d.

For the crossing by boat … 4d.

And with the young man’s usual attention to detail, there are further references to expenditure on lodgings and refreshments, as the two men spent the first night of their trip ‘at the sign of St John’s Head’ at Barkway. Thus, ‘for wine and fruit’, we find a payment of 1s 3d, suggesting the entertainment of guests, while another entry – ‘for the use of altars at St Bride, and bread, wine and candles … 1s 8d’ – confirms that Fisher stopped to say Mass at the famous church of that name in Fleet Street. But it was another, typically laconic, item within the accounts where the real fascination lies, not only as evidence for a particularly significant historical event but as confirmation of Fisher’s own character. For without pause for further elaboration of any kind, or the slightest hint of the meeting’s personal importance, the proctor records how he had ‘dined with the lady mother of the king’ and also, for that matter, ‘supped with the [lord] chancellor’.

Probably known to the elderly lady already from her existing connections at Cambridge, Fisher’s impact upon her sensibilities on this occasion was nevertheless particularly profound, as he swiftly emerged thereafter as her most intimate and trusted associate: first as one of her chaplains and later as her confessor, in place of Richard Fitzjames, who would precede his young counterpart as Bishop of Rochester in 1497. In the words of his anonymous earliest biographer, Fisher ‘ordered himself so discreetly, so temperately and so wisely’ that ultimately both Lady Margaret ‘and all her family were governed by his high wisdom and discretion’. ‘Whereby at last,’ the account continues, ‘he became greatly reverenced and beloved, not only of that virtuous lady and all her household, but also of the king her son with whom he was in no less estimation and credit all his life than with his mistress’. Clearly, this was praise indeed. But the bond between the two, notwithstanding the gaping difference in their years, was hardly unpredictable since love of learning and deep devotion to the Church were, after all, defining features of the ‘Venerable Margaret’, and Fisher’s scholarly achievements and reputation for integrity and discretion went before him. Indeed, the countess’s exceptional spiritual intensity and austerity, and finely honed intellect, not only closely mirrored her young visitor’s own but had already formed an essential ingredient of the upbringing of the future Henry VIII – though hardly for the best in this particular instance, since both her obsessions and ambitions were to leave an indelible and fateful imprint upon her second grandson.

In effect all prayer and learning, she would become in fact, at one and the same time, both the best and worst of influences upon the highly impressionable grandson to whom she became a dominating presence. At her happiest when reading and translating pious works, such as The Imitation of Christ, her devotions commenced at 5 a.m. every day, one hour before the general time of rising, after which, notwithstanding the agonies of acute rheumatism, she was never deterred from spending long periods on her knees in prayer. Next to her skin, she wore a hair shirt ‘for the health of her soul’ and instead of regal fineries dressed merely in modest robes, much like a nun’s habit. Nor was this the sum of her austerities. For, like Fisher himself, who was always a sparing eater at best, she observed fast days meticulously, restricting herself during Lent to but one fish meal a day. Relentlessly self-mortifying, her final years would become almost an abnegation of earthly life itself, as she went about her remaining days maintaining twelve paupers in her house in Woking, washing their feet, serving them with meals when they were ill, and studying them as they approached death, so that she might thereby learn how to die well when her own eagerly awaited appointment with eternity arrived.

Although not permanently resident with her, the growing Prince Henry was therefore likely to have feared his grandmother no less than he loved her, since she represented an oppressive mix of sharp wits, high expectations and maudlin piety, leavened, for good measure, by a pinch of slowly gnawing anxiety that communicated itself to all those close enough to know her. She had never forgotten, after all, how history had hung in the balance at Bosworth Field and how her cherished son might have ended the day in King Richard’s place, a broken and dishonoured corpse. Indeed, it was John Fisher, ever the impartial observer and never the sycophant, who later noted her knack for ‘marvellous weeping’, and it was he, too, who remarked upon her morbid pessimism. ‘Either she was in sorrow by reason of present adversities’, he observed, ‘or else when she was in prosperity she was in dread of the adversity to come,’ though Fisher never forgot either her virtues or his personal debt to the lady herself. In particular, he would always commend her ‘singular wisdom far passing the common rate of women’, and in a dedicatory letter written in 1527 to Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, he paid this further tribute:

Were there no other besides the great and sincere love which she bore to me above others (as I know for a certainty), yet what favour could equal such a love on the part of such a princess? But besides her love, she was most munificent towards me. For though she conferred on me no ecclesiastical benefice, she had the desire, if it could be done, to enrich me, which she proved not by words only, but by deeds; among other instances, when she was about to leave this world … This only I will add, that though she chose me as her director to hear her confessions and to guide her life, yet I gladly confess that I learned more from her great virtue than ever I could teach her.

Elsewhere, perhaps significantly for the light it throws on his own priorities and aptitudes, Fisher would also praise the efficiency with which she managed her household, likening her to the biblical Martha:

First her own household with marvellous diligence and wisdom, this noble princess ordered, providing reasonable statutes and ordinances for them, which by her officers she commanded to be read four times a year … If any factions or bands were made secretly amongst her head officers, she with great policy did bolt it out and likewise if any strife or controversy, she would with great discretion study the reformation thereof.

And neither, it seems, would he forget the challenges of her youth, when, as an illegitimate descendant of Edward III through John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford, she had been married to Edmund Tudor at the age of 12. For in a speech delivered in the presence of Henry VII and Lady Margaret herself, Fisher declared how the king, like Moses, was:

Wonderfully born and brought into the world by the most noble princess, his mother, who at the time of the king’s birth, was not above fourteen years of age, and very small of stature, as she was never a tall woman; it seemed a miracle that at that age, and of so little a personage, any one should be born at all, let alone one so tall and of so fine a build as the king.

Plainly, there was a familiarity in the relationship between the king’s mother and her confessor that allowed him scope for the kind of personal public utterance that might, for any other, have appeared awkwardly inappropriate in the formal context of the Tudor court. But the bond was obviously unusual and sufficiently intimate in due course for Lady Margaret to renew before Fisher the solemn vow of chastity she had undertaken earlier during her marriage to Thomas Lord Stanley. For after the death of Edmund Tudor in November 1456, she had subsequently been wed to Henry, Lord Stafford, and finally to Stanley himself after Stafford’s death in 1481, whereupon, as Fisher put it, ‘in her husband’s days long time before he died [1504], she obtained of him license and promised to live chaste, in the hands of the reverend father my lord of London [Bishop Fitzjames] – which promise’, Fisher adds, ‘she renewed after her husband’s death into my hands again’. By then 61 years of age and more devoted than ever, it seems, to the man with whom she had obviously consulted on this like all other matters, the step had nevertheless been a predictable one – and not only for what the countess termed ‘my more merit and quietness of soul’ but as a token of her undiminished esteem for Fisher, ‘to whom I hath been, since the first time I see you, admitted, very determined (as my chief trusty councillor) to my own obedience in all things concerning the well and profit of my soul’.

Yet for all its significance to both parties, the precise chronology of Fisher’s actual residence in Lady Margaret’s household remains unknown. Unquestionably, he succeeded William de Melton as Master of Michaelhouse in 1497, the same year in which her previous confessor, Richard Fitzjames, became Bishop of Rochester. After which, according to his earliest biographer, ‘he resigned the mastership of Michaelhouse and left the University for that time’, in order to enter the Beaufort household. But if we subsequently allow at least two years of service in his new university role, then 1499 seems appropriate, notwithstanding the fact that he was back at Cambridge in an official capacity by 1501 when he was elected its vice-chancellor at the remarkably early age of 32 and received the highest of its degrees, the doctorate in divinity, upon completion of the stipulated ten-year intermission from the award of his MA. Even so, he retained his appointment as Lady Margaret’s spiritual director, and would indeed continue to fill this role after he had taken up his role as Bishop of Rochester, since a papal dispensation of 6 January 1506 granted him leave of absence from his diocese to serve, as required, as ‘confessor Reginae Anglia’ (Queen of England) – an interesting exaggeration of Lady Margaret’s status, which nevertheless reflects the undoubted magnitude of her reputation.

Significantly, Fisher had been reluctant initially to accept his promotion to the episcopacy. But the influence of his friends seems to have prevailed, and on 24 November 1504 he was duly consecrated by Archbishop Warham. Only two days later, moreover, he was present in the Star Chamber at Westminster as a member of the king’s council, alongside the Lord Privy Seal, Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, who had likewise played a key role in his rise. ‘You also’, he later told Fox:

Recommended me to King Henry VII, who then, with the greatest prudence, held the reins of this kingdom, so that by the esteem he had for me from your frequent commendations, and of his own mere motion, without any obsequiousness on my part, without the intercession of any (as he more than once declared to me) he gave me the bishopric of Rochester, of which I am now the unworthy occupant. There are, perhaps, many who believe that his mother, the Countess of Richmond and Derby, that noble and incomparable lady, dear to me by so many titles, obtained the bishopric for me by her prayers to her son. But the facts are entirely different, as your lordship knows well.

Almost obsessively at pains to distance his advancement from the kind of nepotism that was so common in ecclesiastical appointments, Fisher would also remain anxious subsequently to ensure that the purity of his intentions remained unquestioned. And this was uppermost, too, in the mind of the king himself who admitted in a letter to his mother, announcing Fisher’s appointment, how, ‘by the promotion of such a man’, he hoped ‘to encourage many others to live virtuously and to take such ways as he doth, which should be a good example to many others hereafter’. ‘I have in my days promoted many a man unadvisedly,’ he continued, ‘and I would now make some recompense to promote some good and virtuous men which I doubt not should best please God.’ Even during his last illness, according to Fisher, Henry had declared that ‘the promotions of the church that were of his disposition should from henceforth be disposed to able men such as were virtuous and well-learned’.

Yet the gift of Rochester itself offered few rich pickings for its new incumbent. On the contrary, it was the smallest and poorest diocese in England, yielding Fisher a revenue of no more than £350 a year – a tenth of that enjoyed by the Bishop of Winchester. Indeed, it was even smaller than a map may suggest, since thirty-four of its parishes, forming the deanery of Shoreham, actually fell under the jurisdiction of Canterbury. There were, it is true, two episcopal palaces and several manors belonging to its bishops. But in those days of horseback travel and bad roads, it was necessary for any prelate to have access to several centres from which to carry out his work, and the palace of Rochester, which had been built the previous century, was far from grand in the broader scheme of things. Lying between Canterbury Cathedral and the mud of the Medway, which did little to enthuse visitors like Erasmus in particular, its remains today have disappeared, and the bishop’s other episcopal residence in London, by Lambeth Marsh and adjoining the archbishop’s palace to the east, was hardly more salubrious. It was from there that Fisher subsequently hurried off to show William Warham Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum, but beyond building a brick wall around the palace, and conducting routine repairs, he undertook no building works of significance. Likewise, his manors at Halling and Bromley were little used, while those at Stone, near Dartford, and Trottescliffe, near Wrotham, do not appear to have been employed at all.

No more, then, than a humble first rung on the episcopal ladder, Rochester did, however, hold out the promise of further promotion, were Fisher to seek it. Thomas Savage, for example, was bishop there from 1492 to 1496, when he was translated to York, while his successor at Rochester, Richard Fitzjames, was promoted to Chichester in 1504 and thence to London in 1506. Certainly, the plum ecclesiastical appointments, including the prospect of a rich abbacy held ‘in commendam’, lay open to Fisher, as did the possibility of high government office, especially in view of his considerable administrative capacity. Nor, it seems, was he without the personal funds necessary to indulge altogether grander tastes, had he so desired. For, as he recorded in his preamble to his statutes for St John’s College, Cambridge:

The noble princess, Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, the foundress of this college, in her great condescension had a great desire to procure me a richer bishopric. But when she saw that her approaching death would frustrate this desire, she left me a no small sum of money to use for my own purposes, which I mention lest anyone think that I have made this large endowment with other people’s money.

But Fisher’s priorities lay elsewhere, and his thirty-one years of episcopal service would indeed be spent as Bishop of Rochester – a uniquely long tenure. During the remaining years of Henry VII’s reign, it is true, only three bishoprics fell vacant, and these were within two years of Fisher’s appointment to Rochester. But when Henry VIII offered him Lincoln in 1514, followed by Ely the year after, he declined both. And over the same uniquely long period, after his appointment in 1504, he would also remain Chancellor of Cambridge, not content like many of his predecessors to be little more than a non-resident figurehead. On the contrary, he would be deeply concerned with the university’s affairs, often facing an uphill task in executing Lady Margaret Beaufort’s wishes after her death, while continuing to write extensively and conduct his theological studies at the highest level. He would remain, indeed, a student throughout his life, learning Greek and Hebrew as he approached the age of 50 and remaining singularly unconcerned with the goings-on at court and politics in general until fate intervened to force his hand otherwise. Instead, Cambridge and his bishopric were the effective limits of John Fisher’s horizons, and with regard to the latter his contribution was both novel and significant for two main reasons.

Firstly, as a resident pastoral bishop, he was determined to create an effective preaching clergy, and secondly, at a time when episcopal office was conceived mainly in judicial-administrative terms and the ministry of preaching was often offloaded to friars, he determined to play his own part in the pulpit to the full. Indeed, at a time when most bishops never addressed a congregation at all, Fisher would emerge as the foremost preacher in the kingdom, notwithstanding the fact that his sermons bear all the highly structured and analytic hallmarks of the scholastic tradition from which he sprang. The ‘four last things’ (death, judgement, hell or heaven), repentance for sin, the passion of Christ, and, appropriately enough, the vanity and transitoriness of life were all recurring themes. And although they reflect a mind set in a medieval mould, albeit at its most austere and transcendental, their emphasis upon the problem of human sinfulness and advocacy of a primarily penitential religion still seems curiously attuned to the spirit of the age in which they were delivered. Salvation was critical and Fisher’s terms for its attainment uncompromising, since mankind’s propensity for sin was as limitless as its consequences were catastrophic, and the only resulting aid lay in the ministry of Christ’s divinely appointed Church, which no human agency could supersede or subvert, in spite of the fact, as Fisher also constantly repeated, that the Church itself was under threat – not only from the infidel without but, more lamentably still, from the inefficacy of a decadent clergy within, which had lost the evangelical spirit and ceased to proclaim Christ’s call for repentance as the end of days approached.

It was a powerful message: more than sufficiently powerful, as events would prove, to propel a man to martyrdom. But it was a notion, too, that bedded Fisher’s thought firmly within the kind of reforming impulses that would ultimately underlie the Reformation that he opposed so bitterly. For it comprehended the concerns of humanists like Erasmus, the evangelical revivalism of the Dominican friar Savonarola, and the revived Augustinianism of theologians such as Martin Luther. And if the themes of Fisher’s preaching might well have been familiar to any congregation of the later Middle Ages, they exhibited, nonetheless, few stylistic resemblances, since there were none of the elaborate rhetorical devices so heartily commended in medieval treatises on the subject, and Fisher preached, just as St Augustine did, straight out of the Bible, familiarising his audience with the text that most could not read themselves by numerous scriptural quotations. For the Book was the key to revelation and the salvation that went with it, and Fisher knew its every nook and cranny. Hence, in his sermons on the Penitential Psalms, which were later published at the request of Lady Margaret Beaufort before whom they had been preached, there were no fewer than 160 biblical quotations, excluding those from the Psalms themselves: forty from the Old Testament; sixty from the Gospels, forty of which involved Christ’s own words; and fifty-five from the Epistles, including thirty-six from St Paul. And where Fisher did not quote directly, he recounted tales from Scripture in his own words, including the parables of the Good Samaritan, and the Prodigal Son, as well as the story of the meeting between Jesus and the woman of Samaria, and the stories of Jonah, and David and Goliath by way of illustration.

Delivered on Sundays in August and September 1504, the sermons on the Penitential Psalms were manifestly not for the easily daunted. Fisher, after all, was a scholar and academic, and each lasted about an hour and a half. But for one of Fisher’s bent, of course, the business of salvation was no light matter to be tripped over casually with the clock in mind. And though quotations from the Fathers and Schoolmen are not numerous, neither did he shirk them, as a result of which St Augustine was cited ten times, along with St Jerome (four times), St John Chrysostom (three times), St Anselm and William of Auvergne (twice each), and both Origen and St Thomas Aquinas once. Of classical writers, meanwhile, Demosthenes was twice quoted, and there were additional single references to Cicero, Ovid, Vergil and Plato (Gorgias), though it should be remembered always, of course, that this was a time when printed books, let alone manuscripts, were still comparatively inaccessible, so that Fisher was far from engaging in pedantry for pedantry’s sake. And if his style lacks the range of Sir Thomas More’s prose, with its light touches of humour and leavening flashes of wit, he was also capable nevertheless of employing the commonplace to good effect. Hence the references to millstones, sore eyes, the snaring of birds, and the mending of a clock, as well as the following example of an everyday chore, to drive home a favourite theme:

If a table be foul and filthy by a long continuance, first we rase [scrape] it, after when it is rased we wash it, and last after the washing we wipe and make it clean. Our soul is compared unto a table wherein nothing was painted, nevertheless with many misdoings and spots of sin we have defouled and made it deform in the sight of God. Therefore it is needful that it be rased washed and wiped. It shall be rased by the inward sorrow and compunction of the heart when we are sorry for our sin. It shall be washed with the tears of our eyes when we [ac]knowledge and confess our sin. And last it shall be wiped and made clean when that we be about for to make amends and do satisfaction by good deeds for our sins. These three things that we have spoken of cometh without doubt of the gracious pity of God. Thou art sorry for thy sin, it is a gift of Almighty God. Thou makest knowledge of thy sin weeping and wailing for it, it is a gift of Almighty God. Thou art busy in good works to do satisfaction, which also is a gift of Almighty God.

Clearly, Fisher was by no means incapable of expressing a fundamental principle of his Christian message both elegantly and cogently, and in terms fully comprehensible to the ordinary man or woman. And though the bishop’s style in the sermons on the Penitential Psalms and elsewhere sometimes rings strange to the twenty-first-century reader, this too may well be partially explained by his own Yorkshire dialect, which differed significantly from the London strain that eventually shaped our own.

More notably still, of course, some of Fisher’s images, like his account of how to capture monkeys, are especially curious to modern ears:

Like as men say apes be taken by hunters by doing [putting] on shoes, for the property of an ape is to do as he seeth a man do. The hunter therefore will lay a pair of shoes in his way, and when he perceiveth the hunter doing on his shoes he will do the same, and so after that it is too hard for him to leap and climb from tree to tree as he was wont, but falleth down, and anon is taken.

Yet if Fisher’s comprehension of the more exotic reaches of the natural world could be suspect, the appeal, or, more accurately, the power of his preaching was rarely in doubt, and never more so, perhaps, than in his sermon at Paul’s Cross ‘preached on a Good Friday’ against ‘the pernicious doctrine of Martin Luther’, where the resulting celebration of the physical ordeal involved in Christ’s crucifixion not only demonstrates his ability to produce a forceful image, but confirms an ongoing preoccupation with self-sacrifice and the suffering it necessitates:

But you marvel peradventure why I call the crucifix a book? I will now tell you why. A book hath boards, leaves, lines writings, letters both small and great. First I say that a book hath two boards: the two boards of this book is the two parts of the cross, for when the book is open and spread, the leaves be couched upon the boards. And so the blessed body of Christ was spread upon the cross. The leaves of the book be the arms, the hands, legs and feet, with the other members of his most precious and blessed body. Never any parchment skin was more straightly stretched by strength upon the tentors [framework for drying] than was this blessed body upon the cross.

And it is at this point that Fisher extends his metaphor from the reverential to the more harrowing:

Thus you perceive that this book was full of lines and small letters, which were of divers colours, some black, some blue, some red, some blueish, that is to say full of strokes, and lashes, whereby the skin was torn and rent in a thousand places. Besides these small letters, yet was there also Capital Letters illumined with roset colour: roset is a red colour like unto the colour of a rose, which colour that most precious blood, which issued out of his hands and feet [whereby] was illumined the five great Capital Letters in this wonderful book. I mean by these Capital Letters the great wounds of his body, in his hands, and in his feet, and in his side. These five great wounds were engraved with sharp and violent pens, that is to say, the sharp nails and the spear.

Such preoccupation with Christ’s agonies was not, of course, unique. On the contrary, it was central to the whole Christian message and, in particular, the soteriological assumptions of all Christian theologians. But when placed in the broader context of its author’s life and destiny, it assumes, perhaps, greater significance, since death was, in effect, the almost obsessive object of John Fisher’s daily meditation for many a year. ‘And lest that the memory of death might hap to slip from his mind,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘he always accustomed to set upon one end of the altar a dead man’s skull which was also set before him at his table as he dined or supped.’ So when the time came, the martyr’s option was always, arguably, a likely, if not preferable, outcome. For although suffering and death were not without terror, even for a temperament like his, not only faith but logic, too, upon which he set such especial store, would eventually leave him little choice other than to declare defiantly how he would willingly die like St John the Baptist on behalf of the indissolubility of the king’s marriage.

In the meantime, however, as Fisher busied himself with the affairs of his diocese and university, and turned himself increasingly between 1522 and 1527 to literary warfare against Martin Luther – entailing well over half a million words of Latin polemic – there was still little hint of the destiny beyond the horizon. There were, as might be expected, glimpses of political involvement and even the pomp of high affairs, though Fisher continued a marginal, if not largely indifferent, figure on such occasions. He was summoned, for example, to the Parliaments and Convocations of 1510, 1512 and 1515, the last of which was notable for an early clash between the Crown and the Church when MPs sought to renew an act depriving criminals in minor orders of benefit of clergy, only to be opposed by the House of Lords, in which the bishops and abbots held a majority. The result was a conference of Lords and Commons called by the king and dominated by Friar Henry Standish, warden of the Greyfriars, who, in supporting the position of the Commons, subsequently found himself summoned before Convocation and appealing to the king for protection. Vindicated finally, after a further conference at which Henry VIII maintained the prerogatives of his predecessors and rejected Wolsey’s plea that the matter be referred to Rome, Standish had, in effect, struck a significant blow for England’s religious independence of the papacy. Yet nothing was heard of John Fisher’s part in this momentous controversy, in which the judges had referred ominously to the fourteenth-century Act of Praemunire, with its curbs on the Church’s ability to impinge upon the jurisdiction of secular courts.

Elsewhere, the records tell us of Fisher’s role at great functions. Thus, on 15 November 1515, he was crosier to Archbishop Warham at Westminster Abbey when Wolsey received his cardinal’s hat, ‘in so solemn wise’, according to George Cavendish, ‘as I have not seen the like unless it had been at the coronation of a mighty prince or king’. And in the following year, it was the Bishop of Rochester who christened the son of Princess Mary, the king’s sister and former Queen of France, who was by that time Duchess of Suffolk. Since Rochester lay on the road from Canterbury to London, moreover, visitors of distinction travelling to and from Dover would frequently expect to be entertained by him, and the letter he received from the royal council in 1514 when the sword and cap presented by Pope Leo X to Henry VIII arrived in England, is typical of numerous others:

The prior of Christ’s Church of Canterbury shall meet with the said ambassador and … shall conduct him to some place convenient between Sittingbourne and Rochester, where the king hath appointed that your lordship, the Master of the Rolls and Sir Thomas Boleyn shall meet with him and so conduct him to London.

Certainly, Fisher was among the prelates present at Canterbury on 23 July 1518 to receive Cardinal Campeggio on his mission to create Wolsey a papal legate a latere, and on that occasion doubtless joined the cardinal’s train as far as Rochester. So, too, in 1522 when Charles V came to England, the Bishop of Rochester was obliged to be at Canterbury with the archbishop to meet him, and to entertain the emperor along the way to London at Rochester during a Sunday.

But, as always at such times, he appears to have been a largely passive, if not reluctant, participant – civil always, but perhaps a trifle awkward too. ‘If any strangers came to him,’ his first biographer records, ‘he would entertain them according to their vocations with such mirth as stood with the gravity of his person, whose talk was always rather of learning or contemplation than of worldly matters.’ Lacking the easy urbanity of which Thomas Wolsey, for example, was undoubtedly capable, Fisher seems, in fact, to have been even peevishly uncomfortable at times amid the glitter of the Tudor court, as became strikingly clear when he later reflected upon Henry VIII’s hugely lavish extravaganza at the so-called Field of Cloth of Gold – one of those notable occasions when Fisher’s normally latent irascibility got the better of him, it seems. For his presence in the midst of such excess was clearly a source of irritation, as he made clear in a sermon shortly afterwards that bordered on the indiscreet. ‘Never before was seen in England such excess of apparelment,’ observed the flint-faced bishop, reflecting no doubt upon the king’s decision to expend vast sums on rich fabrics, including 1,050 yards of velvet, and jousting clothes costing more than £3,000. And in emphasising the contrast between heavenly and earthly joys, he not only looked back with equal exasperation at the ‘midsummer games’ that had been played out between Guisnes and Ardres, but recalled, with somewhat more satisfaction, the strong winds that had blown dust into the faces of the mighty and shaken the dwellings erected for their pleasure.

Fisher’s only recreation, in fact, appears to have been hunting, where we hear, in one case, of an invitation from Sir George Neville, Lord Bergavenny, Keeper of Ashdown Forest and owner of several manors in Kent and Sussex. Nor when the invitation came was it any mere formality, it seems, since Bergavenny would present the advowson of Ibstock, Leicestershire, to the Bishops of Rochester in perpetuity in 1531, suggesting that the two men were clearly on good terms, and leaving little doubt that the gift was a particularly appropriate one. For Fisher’s comparison in both his sermons and writings ‘between the life of hunters and the life of religious persons’ suggests that he was not only soundly versed in the skills of the chase, but an enthusiastic practitioner in his own right. Indeed, as the nobleman’s invitation confirms, he kept his own dogs for the purpose – one of his few extravagances: ‘If it shall please you to see your greyhounds run at any time, either within or without, I have commanded my keeper to give you attendance and make you such disport as if I were there present.’

Yet where Fisher was sometimes forced by virtue of his status to stray into affairs of State, he continued to perceive such episodes as wasteful distractions from his more serious concerns. Indeed, if his anonymous earliest biographer is to be believed, the bishop even said as much at the legatine synod called by Wolsey in 1518 to affirm his superiority in rank as cardinal-legate to that of Archbishop Warham:

Truly, most reverend fathers, what this vanity in temporal things worketh in you I know not; but sure I am that in myself I perceive a great impediment to devotion, and so have felt a long time, for sundry times when I have settled and fully bent myself to the care of my flock committed unto me, to visit my diocese, to govern my church, and to answer the enemies of Christ, straightways hath come a messenger from higher authority by whom I have been called to business and so left of my former purpose. And thus by tossing and going this and that way, time hath passed and in the meanwhile nothing done but attending after triumphs, receiving ambassadors, haunting of princes’ courts and such like, whereby great expenses rise that might better be spent in other ways.

And although Fisher’s words are unlikely to have been recorded verbatim, they nevertheless encapsulate his known opinions – and indeed cantankerous streak – to perfection, since he, like many men with a mission, could become fractious, and when it came to his priorities, the rigorous routine of his everyday dealings as Bishop of Rochester, however mundane, invariably came first.

In this regard, during the first half of his episcopate, he carried out visitations in 1505, 1508, 1511, 1514 and 1517, and though assisted by his archdeacon, his thoroughness was characteristic. According to his first biographer, he began the first, on 15 May 1505, by:

Calling before him the priors and monks, exhorting them to obedience, chastity and true observation of their monastic vows; and where any fault was tried, he caused it to be amended. After that he carefully visited the rest of the parish churches within his diocese in his own person; and sequestrating all such as he found unworthy to occupy that high function, he placed other fitter in their rooms; and all such as were accused of any crime, he put to their purgation, not sparing the punishment of simony and heresy with other crimes and abuses. And by the way he omitted neither preaching to the people, nor confirming of children, nor relieving of needy and indigent persons; so that by all means he observed a due comeliness in the house of God.

Almost a decade later, Fisher was as diligent as ever. For both his episcopal Register, along with the Act Book of his Consistory Court, not only still exist but confirm his activity. Occasional intervals of a month or two indicate when he was away on State or university business, but the routine affairs of his diocese were never neglected, as the records for 1513, by way of example, amply demonstrate. The first entry, dated 5 March, notes an abjuration of heresy before the bishop in his chapel at Halling, after Henry Potter of West Malling was accused of declaring publicly that he would not believe in the Last Judgement ‘till I see it’. When brought before Fisher, the guilty party promised to avoid suspect persons in the future, as well as books of Scripture in English, and to give information about them as soon as possible. Whereupon he was duly absolved from excommunication and ordered to walk in procession to his parish church with the faggot on his back, and to do so again in the cathedral on the following Sunday unless dispensed from this by the bishop. In addition, he was to ensure that no harm came to those who had testified against him and make no attempt to leave the diocese without presenting himself to Fisher in person – all of which Potter seems to have agreed to without demur, leaving his cross upon the record.

On 12 March, meanwhile, also at Halling, Fisher ordained a deacon, before collating one priest at Rochester on 4 April and admitting another to vicarages. The same day, he confirmed the election of the new Abbot of Lesnes, William Ticehurst, formerly Prior of Bilsington, and received his profession of obedience, along with testimonies that the abbot-elect was of legitimate birth, discreet and circumspect. Thereafter, by 27 June Fisher was at his Lambeth residence admitting a cleric to a vacancy in Cobham College in conformity with the king’s wishes, while on 20 August, at Bromley, he collated three priests to livings, and on 7 October, two others at the same place, notwithstanding his broader duties to the king. For, according to a letter dated 1 October, he had already found himself requested by the Barons of the Exchequer to organise the collection of the four-tenths ordered by the king – a task that he duly entrusted to the Augustinian canons of Tonbridge and Lesnes, and the prior of Rochester, after listing nearly forty benefices that he deemed too poor to be taxed. Interestingly, too, the episcopal Register contains a copy of a further letter from Fisher, instituting Richard Clarke to the vicarage of Halling, which had been made vacant by the deprivation of John Cotton, whose adultery is recorded in the Acts of the Consistory Court for 17 September when five cases of correction of his clergy came before the bishop. Cotton, it seems, came clean, declaring, ‘I would my lord had put me in prison when he commanded Joan Hubbard to prison.’ But the Bishop of Rochester was nothing if not meticulous in the execution of his judicial duties, since the investigation involved several sittings and was not concluded until 27 September.

It was not without irony, of course, that Fisher had earlier found himself in legal hot water of his own, after the escape of two men indicted from his prison at Bromley. On 11 December 1506, indeed, a pardon and release is recorded in the Patent Rolls for ‘John Fisher of Rochester’, though his involvement in his Consistory Court was, in any case, largely limited to more serious cases like the one he heard at Lambeth on 17 March 1511 when he absolved a priest from contumacy (the nature of which is not stated), but suspended him from saying Mass in his parish or elsewhere in the diocese. Instead, Fisher kept mainly to his primary objectives of ensuring a better-educated and more zealous clergy, and encouraging the zeal of his flock. Thus, on 29 November 1508, a certain Hugh Taylor of Foot’s Cray came before him with letters of presentation from the canons of St Mary Overbury to that benefice, though Fisher was dissatisfied with the young man’s attainments and ordered him to spend a year of study in a grammar school before proceeding. Clearly a stickler for standards, Fisher would not hesitate to embarrass any individual clergyman for failing to achieve them. But there were also happier duties for him to perform, as on 17 July 1508 when he received the profession of William Temple as a hermit in the chapel of St Blaise at Bromley. Accepting his eremitical habit from the bishop, Temple promised before God and the saints to direct his conduct and conversation according to the rule of St Paul, the first hermit, and was duly assigned to the hermitage of St Catherine at Dartford. And similarly, on 21 April 1511, Fisher confirmed a vow of chastity from Elizabeth Fitzwarren, a widow of Beckenham, who reverently undertook ‘to be chaste of my body’ and ‘truly and devoutly’ to remain chaste ‘from this time forward as long as my life lasteth after the rule of St Paul [the hermit]’.

It was on such occasions, no doubt, that John Fisher felt particularly gratified, witnessing the spirituality of those entrusted to his care, not to mention the tangible fruits of his own example and diligence in a diocese whose affairs he had come to know like no other. For by 1520, certainly, he was familiar to the clergy under his charge both as a person and as a pastor to whom they might resort in times of difficulty – his own austere example serving as an inspiration to the faithful and reproach to the more easy-going. As one contemporary put it:

All pastors and curates used him for their lantern, as one of whom they might perfectly learn when to use action and when contemplation. For in these two things did he so far excel that hard were it to find one so well practised and expert in any one of them apart, as he was in both of them together.

And in the meantime, as he regulated his diocese through a period of steady work and quiet achievement, so his broader responsibilities as his university’s chancellor had borne fruit of a more spectacular kind, with the encouragement of sound learning and preaching, the promotion of Greek and Hebrew, and above all the establishment of Christ’s College and founding of St John’s – all of which would help to lead Cambridge out of its past lethargy into the humming world of the new scholarship.

In this regard, Fisher was ably assisted by other talented administrators whom he astutely identified and employed to relieve him for the episcopal duties that he always considered his overriding priority. Henry Hornby (master of Peterhouse, and also chancellor of Lady Margaret), Robert Shorton (first master of St John’s and later master of Pembroke, who served, additionally, in the households of Wolsey and Catherine of Aragon), and Nicholas Metcalfe (third master of St John’s, and Fisher’s right-hand man as archdeacon of Rochester) were all invaluable aids. But Fisher’s guiding role and overall impact cannot be doubted. For until her death in 1509, he had remained Lady Margaret Beaufort’s closest adviser, and it was under his influence that she re-founded Godshouse as Christ’s College ‘on account of her singular devotion to the most glorious and most holy name of Jesus Christ’. At the same time, she provided a Cambridge residence for him from which to carry out his heavy load of business and secured for him the presidency of Queens’ College, where since the death of Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth, she had in effect wielded foundress’s rights. And though he resigned that post in 1508, as a result of his other commitments, his association with the king’s mother had, in the meantime, brought other benefits to the university, including the endowment of a readership in divinity, which fell initially to Fisher himself, and a preachership, paid for in part by the endowment of a chantry, and entailing, among other things, six sermons annually at Paul’s Cross or at St Margaret’s, Westminster.

Altogether more significant still, however, was Fisher’s role in persuading his patroness to found St John’s College, though her death prevented the proper completion of arrangements, and embroiled him ultimately in two long years of legal wrangles with none other than the new king, who was anxious for a share of the lands earmarked by his grandmother for the college’s endowment. More than 1,500 acres were involved, along with a sum of £500, and since the relevant codicil to Lady Margaret’s will had not been sealed, the full provision could not be granted by the courts. To compound matters, a number of her servants had put in claims of their own that also received royal support, so that from first to last, as Fisher openly acknowledged, Henry VIII was to prove ‘a very heavy lord against me’. Indeed, a settlement of sorts was only reached ultimately, after the bishop had sacrificed around half of the lands undoubtedly intended by Lady Margaret for the endowment. ‘Forsooth,’ he wrote, ‘it was sore laborious and painful unto me that many times I was right sorry that ever I took that business upon me.’ Indeed, it is doubtful whether a less determined man would have completed what had seemed so often a hopeless task. But Fisher’s tenacity in the courts was unwavering and, though the king himself was his adversary, he would not be bowed – a clear sign, it would seem, of things to come.

Speaking of his success in securing a reasonable interpretation from the judges, Fisher was typically terse. ‘If this had not been obtained,’ he reflected, ‘here would have been a poor college.’ But ultimately, as a result of his dogged pursuit of a principle, St John’s would become in his own mind – and not without some justification – his chief hope for perpetuating his memory. For it was he who drafted the college’s original statutes, which were promulgated in 1516, and he, too, who became engaged in almost constant revision of them right up to the time of his eventual imprisonment. Besides this, he also persuaded several other benefactors to add to St John’s endowments and personally made over lands worth £500 for the establishment of a chantry chapel there, with several chapels attached both for the benefit of learning and salvation of his soul. While doing so, furthermore, he remained unstinting in his broader activities as the university’s chancellor, as a result of which his fifty-year association with Cambridge would witness not only the arrival of the first lecturers in Greek and Hebrew, but further lectureships in the arts and mathematics, the reform of the proctorial elections, the introduction of the office of public orator, and the establishment of the first – though short-lived – Cambridge press.

Significantly, too, Fisher would even prove willing to sacrifice his own status on behalf of what he perceived to be the university’s better interests. For in 1514, he offered to resign as chancellor after his re-election for ten consecutive years. Instead, he proposed that Thomas Wolsey, then Bishop of Lincoln, should replace him, since Wolsey was already growing vastly in power and his patronage would have been to Cambridge’s great advantage. Reluctantly, the university authorities actually accepted Fisher’s proposal, only for Wolsey to reject it – and with a humility that seems strangely out of kilter with his later pretensions. As a result, Fisher was at once offered the unique distinction of election as chancellor for life, and immediately set about the task of renewing his links with the university and consolidating his legacy to it. For even when he was later attainted and lodged in the Tower, Cambridge remained faithful to him, refusing to win royal favour by rejecting him. And not without good reason either, since it has been rightly suggested that Fisher’s chancellorship made Cambridge for the first time the intellectual equal of Oxford, notwithstanding the fact that he himself has frequently been depicted as an intellectual conservative, whose thoughts were firmly set in a medieval mould – an image reinforced, perhaps, by his own more general antipathy to any challenge to the religious status quo.

Certainly, he was no more built for breakneck innovation than he was for triviality. Yet he remained acutely aware of the intellectual issues of the day, and, though his statutes for St John’s provided for disputations on the doctor subtilis, Duns Scotus, they also encouraged regular teaching in Greek for junior students as well as Hebrew for seniors. Nor, of course, should it be forgotten that while in his forties, Fisher launched himself with almost schoolboy enthusiasm into the study not only of Greek but of Hebrew, too, which he learned under Robert Wakefield. As such, he was a figure who, like Duns Scotus himself, arguably, looked both backwards and forwards: a powerful and vigorous thinker who, though imbued with the best elements of the scholastic tradition emphasising dialectical skill and rigour, nevertheless bridged epochs. Only thus, of course, could he have seriously sustained his undoubted reputation throughout Europe and only thus, moreover, could he have enjoyed such close and cordial relations with the man usually considered to be the most renowned humanist figure of his day, Erasmus of Rotterdam. For although the two men seem unlikely to have formed an acquaintance during the Dutchman’s first visit to England in 1499, or even during his second stay when he was entered as a pensioner at Queens’ College between August 1505 and April 1506, the third trip tells a different story, when in the summer of 1511, John Colet appears to have been pressed by Erasmus for financial aid and saw fit to pass the load on to Fisher.

‘I am going to show a specimen [of Erasmus’s translation of Basil on Isaias],’ wrote Colet, ‘and see if he [Fisher] is prepared to lighten my labours with a small reward.’ Fisher duly complied, albeit with a noteworthy hedging of his options regarding any future payments, and a final suggestion to the Dutchman himself that any other funds might best be supplied by Lord Mountjoy, Erasmus’s primary patron in England:

Greetings to you Erasmus. I beg you don’t be too offended that I did not write when I sent to you recently. The messenger was in a hurry to leave town, and I met him just as I was going out. So, as I was unable to write, I gave him the small gift you asked for; it was not however from the fund you assume to be at my disposal and to be of some size. Believe me, Erasmus, whatever may be said, I have no funds that I can use at my sole discretion. The use of that money is restricted and cannot be varied. I feel that you are so much needed in our University that I will not let you be in want as long as there is anything to spare out of my own modest resources. At the same time, I will do all I can, whenever an opportunity comes, to beg help from all others when my own means are insufficient. Your Mountjoy, nay, mine also, will I am sure remember you if he has promised to do so, and I will gladly encourage him since he is now at court. The best of health, Erasmus. From London.

Yet this not altogether uncharacteristic partial palm-off by a thrifty Yorkshireman did not, it seems, diminish Erasmus’s genuine admiration of Fisher. On the contrary, in 1512 he would write in glowing terms to Thomas Halsey, the English Penitentiary in Rome, of the man who would go on to become both his friend and admirer: ‘Unless I am sadly mistaken, he is the one man at this time, who is incomparable for uprightness of life, for learning, and for greatness of soul.’ And by the time that Erasmus returned to England in May 1515, the two men were indeed on the most cordial terms, as Fisher confirmed in a letter penned at Halling in the following month: ‘When the time comes for your journey to Basle, do arrange to come here as I need your advice. I beg you not to let this slip your memory. Long may you be healthy. Yours, John of Rochester.’

Most striking of all, perhaps, was Fisher’s response to Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum – his edition of the New Testament – which was published in 1516 and provoked a response from the bishop that, by his own exacting standards of self-restraint, verges on uncontrollable excitement:

Although I am up to my eyes in business – in fact I am just setting out for Cambridge for the opening of the College [St John’s] which is at last to take place – I could not let your Peter [Meghen] return without a letter. You have put me greatly in your debt by the gift of your Novum Instrumentum translated from the Greek. As soon as I received it and saw some of the notes in which you extol your Canterbury Maecenas [Archbishop Warham] with many compliments, I hurried to him to show him these passages. When he had read them, he promised he would do much for you, and begged me, if I should write to you, to urge you to return. Indeed I do not doubt if you do he will be more generous to you than ever.

It was the Novum Instrumentum, moreover, that stirred Fisher at the age of 48 to learn Greek, initially from Erasmus himself, who appears to have given some preliminary instruction during a ten-day sojourn at the episcopal palace in Rochester, which incidentally left the Dutchman bemoaning the palace’s condition ‘ten times over’. Writing some years later, indeed, his visitor actually warned the bishop of the dangers of residing there:

The near approach of the tide, as well as the mud which is left at every ebb of the water, makes the climate unwholesome. Your library, too, is surrounded with glass windows which let the cold air through the crevices. I know how much time you spend in the library which is to you a very paradise. As for me, I could not live three hours in such a place without being ill. You would be better in a room with a wooden floor, with wainscoted walls; brick and lime give off unhealthy vapours.

Apart from Fisher’s own company, it seems, the only real compensation for the inconveniences of the scholar’s stay was a visit from Sir Thomas More. Yet Fisher accepted his guest’s grumbling in good spirit, studiously ignoring, it must be said, his advice on more comfortable living, while continuing to admire his guest’s achievements at a time when conservative critics of his work were numerous. For after a further brief stay at Rochester as he made his way to Dover in April 1517, and what would prove to be the last meeting of the two men, Erasmus received the following letter of encouragement, plainly demonstrating its author’s receptivity to what might be considered the most laudable elements of the New Learning:

No sensible person could be offended at your translation [into Latin] of the New Testament for the common benefit of everyone, since not only have you made many passages clear by your learning but have indeed provided a full series of comments on the whole work; thus it is now possible for everyone to read and understand it with more gratification and pleasure … I owe it to you, Erasmus, that I can to some extent understand where the Greek does not quite agree with the Latin. Would that I could have had you as my tutor for a few months.

In the event, Fisher’s only criticism was that the text contained a number of misprints. Nor did he hesitate to sign himself ‘Your disciple’. And the same openness to progressive scholarship was extended to Johann Reuchlin, whose works on Hebrew studies were later sent to him by the Dutchman. One of these, Caballistica, took some time to reach Rochester, since both Thomas More and John Colet had found it so interesting that they had delayed passing it on, though Reuchlin’s promotion of Hebrew had, in general, received much opprobrium, and Fisher displayed no small measure of bravery, not only in defending the German scholar, but arranging at one point to visit him. For in a letter to Reuchlin of August 1516, Erasmus makes clear that his English friend was intending a trip to Stuttgart for the purpose of meeting the scholar:

I cannot find words to express in what affection and veneration your name is held by that great leader of learning and piety, the Bishop of Rochester, insomuch that, whereas Erasmus had been hitherto in high esteem, he is now almost despised in comparison with Reuchlin … I never have a letter from him (often as he writes) without some honourable mention of you. He had made up his mind to put off his episcopal garb, I mean the linen vestment which the bishops always wear in England (except when they are out hunting) and to cross the sea, mainly in order that he might have an opportunity of talking with you. And on this account, as we were hurrying to the ship, he detained us for ten days on purpose that we might make the passage together. Some later incident made him change his plan, but if he has put off its accomplishment, he has not changed his purpose.

Manifestly, then, Fisher was no obscurantist or dyed-in-the-wool revenant of the Middle Ages. On the contrary, at a time when most theologians looked askance at Erasmus and altogether shunned Reuchlin, the Bishop of Rochester warmly embraced both – perhaps in no small part because of his perennial willingness to stand firm against the crowd in championing the underdog. The otherworldly man of God was also sufficiently skilled managerially to retain the confidence of his university’s authorities while committing himself to the advancement of reform on a moderate scale and at a reasonable pace. Certainly, his encouragement of bonae litterae and the New Learning at Cambridge was never his main priority. Nor were the developments he engineered in this area even remotely root and branch in kind. For at both St John’s, and more so still Christ’s, the training remained essentially scholastic, and Fisher’s own religious outlook, unlike Erasmus’s, would always remain more transcendental and charismatic than anthropocentric – more concerned, that is, with penance and the ultimate dependence of mankind upon the Church as both the yardstick of God’s intentions and designs. If men and women were to be saved, Fisher resolutely contended, they could not tread the path to salvation unaided. Nor could they opt for various routes according to taste or whim. Accordingly, the Church of Rome was not to be challenged under any circumstances or at any cost, however unsatisfactory some of its ways or superficially questionable certain its teachings. And on this, as both Martin Luther and Henry VIII himself would discover, John Fisher would never back down.

1 A sizar is an undergraduate of Trinity College, Dublin, or the University of Cambridge who receives some form of assistance.