John Forest

Life and Ministry

John Forest was born about AD 1471, entered the Franciscan Observant friary at Greenwich about AD 1491, and studied theology at Oxford. By the AD 1520s he was the leading Observant Franciscan in England, provincial of the order, and confessor to Queen Catherine of Aragon. From this position he became one of the chief clerical opponents of Henry VIII's annulment of his marriage to Catherine and of the Royal Supremacy that followed. The Observant Franciscans were suppressed in AD 1534 for their resistance to the Supremacy, and Forest was imprisoned in the Newgate; released for a time and assigned to a Conventual house, he continued in secret as Catherine's confessor and as a counselor to the resistance, sending letters in support of the Pilgrimage of Grace and writing privately against the Supremacy. He was sixty-seven years old at his arrest in AD 1538.

Circumstances of Death

Forest was charged with heresy (the unusual charge — under Tudor law more commonly used against Protestants — was brought against him precisely because the king's lawyers wished to distinguish his case from the political treason for which the Carthusian martyrs had been hanged three years earlier). He was condemned, brought to Smithfield on 22 May AD 1538, suspended in an iron cradle over a fire built partly from the broken-up wooden image of Saint Derfel Gadarn (a Welsh statue that the Welsh people had refused to surrender to the iconoclasts), and roasted alive. He preached from the cradle to the watching crowd, refusing the final offer of recantation extended by Bishop Hugh Latimer (who was present at the burning and preached the official sermon), and prayed aloud to the Virgin until the fire took him. (The case sits at the intersection of religious and political conflict — Henrician policy was complex — but Forest was killed under a heresy charge for refusing to recant Catholic doctrine and the papal supremacy, not under a treason charge for political action.)

Legacy

John Forest is the only Catholic martyr of the Henrician period executed by burning rather than by hanging, the only English Franciscan martyr of the Reformation, and one of the small number of Catholic clerics killed during Henry's reign rather than under Elizabeth. He was beatified by Leo XIII in AD 1886 among the English Martyrs. His witness is the witness of the old confessor at the queen's right hand who would not turn at sixty-seven: Christ is confessed in the cradle of iron above the fire of a broken image, and the Welsh saint's wooden body and the friar's living body burned together at Smithfield as a single icon of the Church the Tudor crown had tried to silence.