To York Place where the feast is held.”
(Henry VIII., Act iv. scene 1.)
Three short years passed away and a pall of darkness falls over this brilliant scene, and Anne’s regal state and “royal makings of a queen” are changed to the prison and the scaffold.
In September 1533, Anne brought a daughter into the world, the future Queen Elizabeth. In the following year Parliament passed an Act of Succession, devised by Henry, by which his former marriage with Catherine of Arragon was declared to be an unlawful one, and Anne’s daughter was made successor to the Crown, thus excluding the Princess Mary from the succession. All the King’s subjects were commanded to acknowledge this new Act, but the Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, whilst willing to obey the Act as an Act of Parliament, declined to allow that the King’s marriage with the Spanish Princess was illegal. Henry, on hearing this, burst into one of his Tudor furies, and both More and Fisher were, by his orders, sent to the Tower. At the same time Henry sent Commissioners through the length and breadth of England to suppress all the religious communities that refused to obey the Act, and also those who were not willing to conform to his new Law of Succession.
Thomas Cromwell was the principal agent in carrying out Henry’s commands against the monasteries. No fitter man for the task could have been found. Risen from a humble station, Cromwell, who had been introduced to the King’s notice by Wolsey, after his patron’s fall had become private secretary to the sovereign; and in 1534 he was appointed Henry’s Vicar-General in all matters appertaining to Ecclesiastical affairs.
One of the Orders of Friars, styled Friars Observant, had openly expressed their opinion concerning Henry’s second marriage, and for this the Order was ruthlessly suppressed, many of its members being executed. The same fate befell the Carthusians, some of whom were imprisoned in the Tower for refusing to conform to the oath of this Act of Succession. The Prior of Sion Hospital was hanged as a felon, and many other priests and friars were put to death with every brutal detail appertaining to the manner of execution for high treason.
Among all these martyrs for their faith, none were more eminent for holy living than the aged prelate, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. He was in his seventy-ninth year when Henry ordered him to be imprisoned in the Tower; he appears to have been a frail, emaciated old man, and, to judge from the life-like drawing of him by Holbein, had the look of a man who has but a few years before him. So beloved was he in his diocese, that when the order came to remove him from his see, the whole city of Rochester turned out to bid its revered Bishop farewell. The grounds for the charge of treason that was brought against him were that he had listened to the prophecies of a woman known by the name of the “Nun of Kent”; but Henry’s real reason for ridding himself of Fisher was the Bishop’s refusal to comply with the Act of Succession. Fisher, being a fervent servant of Rome, declared that Henry’s first marriage had the sanction of the Pope, and consequently of the Church, and therefore could not be declared illegal and invalid. Neither would he acknowledge Henry’s new title of “On earth supreme Head of the Church of England,” a title assumed by the King in 1534. This combined refusal was, in the eyes of Henry and his Council, tantamount to a penal offence, and both More and Fisher were condemned and executed for denying the King’s supremacy in the State.
Fisher was imprisoned in the Bell Tower on the 21st April (1534), and in the following November an Act of Parliament declared him to be attainted of high treason, and his Bishopric to be vacant. His household goods were seized and his library, which he had intended bequeathing to his College of St John’s, Cambridge, was confiscated. In the chapel of that same College the good Bishop had prepared his tomb, which, however, was fated never to contain his shrunken frame. The aged Bishop suffered much from the cold of the winter, 1534–35, in his prison, and there is a piteous letter from him, still existing, addressed to Cromwell, in which he describes his hardships. “Furthermore,” he writes, “I byseche you to be gode, master, unto me in my necessite; for I have neither shirt nor sute, nor yett other clothes that are necessary for me to wear, but that bee ragged, and rent so shamefully. Notwithstanding I might easily suffer that, if they would keep my body warm. But my dyett also, God knoweth how slender it is at any tymes, and now in myn age my stomak may nott awaye but with a few kynd of meats, which if I want, I decay forthwith, and fall into coafs and diseases of my bodye, and kan not keep myself in health.” He then begs Cromwell to soften the King’s heart on his behalf; he might as well have asked Cromwell to soften the nether millstone.
John Fisher. Bishop of Rochester
(From the drawing by Holbein at Windsor.)