Who Was St John Fisher?

The College takes its name from John Cardinal Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor-for-life of the University of Cambridge. Along with his close friend Sir Thomas More, Fisher was beheaded in 1535. Both Anglican and Catholic communions celebrate these staunch English martyrs on June 22 each year:

St John Fisher was a Yorkshireman who loved the place where he was born. His sermons and his writings were as blunt as his speech and as sharp as his mind. They won him the reputation of being the best theologian in England, if not in Europe. It was his theology that brought him to the scaffold.

Fisher went up to Cambridge in 1483, when he was 14. He took his Master's and was ordained in 1491. Ten years later, a Doctor of Divinity, he became Vice Chancellor

A dozen years later still, and now Lady Margaret Reader in Divinity, he was elected Chancellor for life.

When Fisher came to Cambridge, the University was in sad decline. He sought funds and found generous benefactors like the Lady Margaret Beaufort.

He attracted men like Erasmus to help him make his University a centre of 'education, religion, learning and research' that was esteemed throughout Europe.

Both Thomas More and St John Fisher had been friends and counsellors of the Henry VIII who was to execute them both for high treason. They could not in conscience accept his novel claim to be Supreme Head of the Church in England 'as far as the law of Christ allows'.

St John Fisher was beheaded by Henry VIII on June 22, 1535, only a month after Pope Paul III had made him a cardinal and just fourteen days before Thomas More suffered the same barbaric fate.

Catholic and Anglican traditions are at one in celebrating Fisher and More as martyrs for Christ. Both these great Englishmen were truly 'the King's good servants and God's first'. They are heroes for us to emulate. But the particular challenge they put to every member of College is that of whole-hearted, single-minded dedication to truth.

They remind us that conscience is not a matter of feeling or of expediency not a matter to be decided by other men's minds whatever the issue. Conscience is a matter of honest and persevering seeking after the facts of the case without fear or favour. This seeking is the scholar's vocation and every man's duty.

In our own time as in Fisher's we have seen dedication to truth lead beyond easy platitudes to prison, torture and death.