“The hat came as far as Calais, but the head was off before the hat was on.”—Raphael Holinshed, on Bishop of Rochester John Fisher, executed on orders of King Henry VIII before he could receive his cardinal’s hat, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (1998)
Today marks the feast day of martyrs Thomas More and John Fisher, both canonized in 1935 for refusing to accept King Henry VIII’s title of head of the Church in England. Their sainthood was declared at a moment when new forms of tyranny—Fascism on the right, Communism on the left—convinced Rome of the need for positive models for witnessing to the faith against the demands of an all-powerful state.
Yet, though the Roman Catholic Church links the two on this common feast day, their personalities—and posthumous fame—differ dramatically.
My initial misimpression notwithstanding, the two men were not executed on the same day. Fisher (in the image accompanying this post)—confessor to Henry’s estranged wife, Catherine of Aragon, and an unremitting foe of the monarch’s divorce from her and re-marriage to Anne Boleyn--was the first to be tried and executed, on this date in 1535.
Pope Paul III, unaware, because of slow communication in that time, of Fisher’s great danger by early 1535, thought he could draw Henry and the bishop closer by naming the latter a cardinal. The pontiff certainly did nothing at this point to maintain the Church’s reputation in those years for worldliness.
Henry, by now well launched on his tyrannical, psychopathic later period, was so enraged by the appointment that he fulminated that the bishop would die before he had a chance to wear his red hat. Five days after being brought to trial at Westminster, Fisher was brought to the gallows. More followed two weeks later.
Most of the college-educated, it seems safe to say, know something about More. If Utopia, a staple of college literature courses, didn’t produce that result, then Robert Bolt’s play and screenplay about the humanist-politician, A Man for All Seasons, has assured his lasting fame.
Not only is Fisher’s name recognition today nowhere near as great as his fellow martyr’s, but a general appreciation for his life and supreme sacrifice is distinctly lacking.
To modern eyes, Fisher is a less sympathetic figure than More—a man unencumbered by family, not so gifted with wit, not dreading the loss of his position or even his life. An age that regards clerical insistence on Church prerogatives versus the state is also likely to be suspicious of Fisher’s advocacy of this as concealing criminal activity.
He also, as recent More biographers Richard Marius and Peter Ackroyd make clear, engaged in activities that not merely Henry but nearly any medieval monarch would regard as treasonous—chiefly, contacting Eustace Chapuys, ambassador from the court of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, about a possible invasion of England by this aggrieved nephew of Catherine’s.
But the assumptions of Fisher’s world about loyalty are not ours, and if he did not possess More’s supple intelligence, anguished loyalty to the king, and all-too-human love for the good things of this world, he had something else: a stubbornness that stiffened his backbone when everyone else was losing theirs. Alone among all the bishops in England, he withstood Henry’s five-year campaign of intimidation to bring the Church to heel if he didn’t gain his divorce. And, though he insisted on the Church’s autonomy within England and wrote fiercely against what he perceived as the heresies of Martin Luther, he was also a bitter critic of weakness in the Church both among fellow English bishops and even in Rome itself (where, he charged, leaders of the Church “neither fast nor pray, but give themselves up to luxury and lust.”)
Like More, Fisher endured months of confinement that weakened him and would have destroyed other men, but he did not bend. Allowed a few words before his execution, he prayed that Henry would receive good counsel. His body was so emaciated that onlookers marveled that his corpse (left naked after the execution on the scaffold until sunset) could emit so much blood. His parboiled, severed head was exhibited on a pike by London Bridge as a warning that anyone who followed his example would be treated as a traitor.
Nowadays, posterity has a far different idea of which of the two—the unflinching man of God or the intolerant royal—truly lost his head as a result of the Anne Boleyn affair.
Today marks the feast day of martyrs Thomas More and John Fisher, both canonized in 1935 for refusing to accept King Henry VIII’s title of head of the Church in England. Their sainthood was declared at a moment when new forms of tyranny—Fascism on the right, Communism on the left—convinced Rome of the need for positive models for witnessing to the faith against the demands of an all-powerful state.
Yet, though the Roman Catholic Church links the two on this common feast day, their personalities—and posthumous fame—differ dramatically.
My initial misimpression notwithstanding, the two men were not executed on the same day. Fisher (in the image accompanying this post)—confessor to Henry’s estranged wife, Catherine of Aragon, and an unremitting foe of the monarch’s divorce from her and re-marriage to Anne Boleyn--was the first to be tried and executed, on this date in 1535.
Pope Paul III, unaware, because of slow communication in that time, of Fisher’s great danger by early 1535, thought he could draw Henry and the bishop closer by naming the latter a cardinal. The pontiff certainly did nothing at this point to maintain the Church’s reputation in those years for worldliness.
Henry, by now well launched on his tyrannical, psychopathic later period, was so enraged by the appointment that he fulminated that the bishop would die before he had a chance to wear his red hat. Five days after being brought to trial at Westminster, Fisher was brought to the gallows. More followed two weeks later.
Most of the college-educated, it seems safe to say, know something about More. If Utopia, a staple of college literature courses, didn’t produce that result, then Robert Bolt’s play and screenplay about the humanist-politician, A Man for All Seasons, has assured his lasting fame.
Not only is Fisher’s name recognition today nowhere near as great as his fellow martyr’s, but a general appreciation for his life and supreme sacrifice is distinctly lacking.
To modern eyes, Fisher is a less sympathetic figure than More—a man unencumbered by family, not so gifted with wit, not dreading the loss of his position or even his life. An age that regards clerical insistence on Church prerogatives versus the state is also likely to be suspicious of Fisher’s advocacy of this as concealing criminal activity.
He also, as recent More biographers Richard Marius and Peter Ackroyd make clear, engaged in activities that not merely Henry but nearly any medieval monarch would regard as treasonous—chiefly, contacting Eustace Chapuys, ambassador from the court of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, about a possible invasion of England by this aggrieved nephew of Catherine’s.
But the assumptions of Fisher’s world about loyalty are not ours, and if he did not possess More’s supple intelligence, anguished loyalty to the king, and all-too-human love for the good things of this world, he had something else: a stubbornness that stiffened his backbone when everyone else was losing theirs. Alone among all the bishops in England, he withstood Henry’s five-year campaign of intimidation to bring the Church to heel if he didn’t gain his divorce. And, though he insisted on the Church’s autonomy within England and wrote fiercely against what he perceived as the heresies of Martin Luther, he was also a bitter critic of weakness in the Church both among fellow English bishops and even in Rome itself (where, he charged, leaders of the Church “neither fast nor pray, but give themselves up to luxury and lust.”)
Like More, Fisher endured months of confinement that weakened him and would have destroyed other men, but he did not bend. Allowed a few words before his execution, he prayed that Henry would receive good counsel. His body was so emaciated that onlookers marveled that his corpse (left naked after the execution on the scaffold until sunset) could emit so much blood. His parboiled, severed head was exhibited on a pike by London Bridge as a warning that anyone who followed his example would be treated as a traitor.
Nowadays, posterity has a far different idea of which of the two—the unflinching man of God or the intolerant royal—truly lost his head as a result of the Anne Boleyn affair.
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