There is a tradition that John Forest was Katherine of Aragon’s confessor, though there is no reliable evidence to support this. But he, like Peto and a number of fellow Observant Franciscans, was – and was known to be – opposed to the King’s divorce and for this he was denounced in a series of letters to Cromwell by two other Observants, John Lawrence (also a priest) and Richard Lyst (a lay brother).
Cromwell had recruited John Lawrence and Richard Lyst as informers in 1532, exploiting the divisions at Greenwich as he would do in many other monastic houses. One of the first letters from Friar Lawrence to Cromwell, written in June of that year, demonstrates how this friar was at odds with his community, and how he wanted to curry favour with the King and his secretary by reporting how he, unlike the rest of his brethren, was prepared to speak in support of ‘the King’s matter’:
I am not able to hide the ill will that our fathers have conceived against me for favouring the King’s part. They invent all the means possible to put me to confusion; and I cannot preach and induce the people to do reverence to their Sovereign, but the friars say I preach the King’s matter. Preaching at Kingston yesterday I spoke but a few words, persuading the people to reverence their prince by Scripture and example; and as soon as I entered the convent, divers set upon me with open mouth, saying I had preached the King’s matter, and that all our religion should be slandered thereby, and all our benefactors and lovers should, in consequence of my preaching, withdraw both their benefits and devotions.
Richard Lyst, a former grocer and apothecary in Cheapside, and at one time a servant of the late Cardinal Wolsey, did not make contact with Cromwell until November 1532, and may have done so at the instigation of Friar Lawrence, for he writes in support of the latter in his first letter to ‘Master Secretary’. He also immediately sets out to denounce John Forest, who has – most unfortunately for him – made an enemy of Friar Lawrence:
Father Forest, who neither loves nor favours you, has laboured to supplant Father Lawrence, the King’s true subject, and bring him out of favour with the King, and our fathers and brethren, and to expel him from the convent of Greenwich … If the King knew Lawrence’s good qualities, both in learning, preaching, and politic wit, he would not esteem him little; and that he will well know, when he hears him preach, for he has a common custom in his preaching ever to draw the hearts of the King’s subjects to favour his Grace. I trust that he will do the King as much honour and pleasure as Fathers Peto, Elston, Forest, and his fellows have done dishonour and displeasure.
As for Forest’s preaching, Lyst’s opinion was clear: ‘I think the chancellor of London should be spoken to no more to assign Father Forest to preach at Paul’s Cross. Our fathers have often assigned me to accompany him, supposing me to possess intelligence and learning. Many a time when he has preached, I have sat under the pulpit with a pair of red ears.’
In August 1532 a Chapter of the Order had been held, at which Forest (by now the warden of the community at Greenwich) had warned his brethren that the King was sufficiently annoyed with them to have considered suppressing the Order throughout England but that he, Forest, had managed to dissuade the King from this course of action. Instead, a new Commissary General was to be sent from France to take charge of the English Observant Franciscans. Friar Lawrence seems to have informed Cromwell of when Friar Forest was next going to see the King and what he was likely to say, so that the meeting could be set up to fail – or even be prevented from taking place – as can be seen from a letter Lawrence wrote to Cromwell in September: ‘Today or tomorrow they intend to make suit to the King. It would be well if you would keep them from speaking to him.’ Lawrence further informed Cromwell, on 30 November, of what Forest had said to the friars in chapter, and suggested that the expected new Commissary General be told: ‘If he do come, in my opinion it will be necessary for you to counsel him to beware of Father Forest, who boasts that he will rule the Commissary at his pleasure. He greatly rejoices that he put the King beside his purpose at our last chapter, saying that if he had not been there, the King would have destroyed our whole religion.’
In February 1533 Richard Lyst wrote with further accusations against Forest to Cromwell, and was keen to be allowed to denounce him in person. However unpleasant and vengeful Lyst may have been, his descriptions do suggest a degree of incautious overconfidence on Forest’s part and perhaps a tendency towards self-aggrandizement:
It grieves me sore to see Forest’s unkindness and duplicity against the King, considering how good the King has been to him and his poor friends for a long time. I can tell all his behaviour, if you and the King wish to know. On Monday last he was with the King, and he said that he was with his Grace more than half an hour, and was well received; that the King sent him a great piece of beef from his own table, and that my lord of Norfolk took him in his arms and bade him welcome. I understand that he advised the King to send beyond the sea for Father Hey, who was our commissary, but this would not be to the King’s honour, for he was ruled by Forest when here last, and so did little good amongst us, neither to the King’s honour nor to the profit of the religion. As far as I can perceive, he is on the Queen’s part. I understand that Forest is to attend on the King on Saturday to receive writings for Hey. If the King and you were to send for Father Hurlston, a preacher of our house, and me, we could tell the King how Forest has used himself against the King’s honour and your worship. I wish we could speak with the King before he sees Forest again.
Lyst also passed on to Cromwell Father Lawrence’s willingness to preach ‘the King’s matter’ whenever requested. ‘In my judgment,’ wrote Lyst, ‘he is more able to do the King honour and you worship than three such as Father Forest.’ It is unlikely that Cromwell was particularly interested in Lyst’s judgement, being more than capable of forming his own. Father Lawrence, no less than Lyst, was clearly an unpleasant, self-seeking character, and he even seems to have managed to fall out with his ‘spy master’, Cromwell, writing to him:
I hear you have conceived great displeasure against me, for which I am right sorry. There is, however, no just cause for it. I have always been anxious to do you service. Whatever I have done has been for the King’s honour and yours, for which I have incurred great odium. I have informed you I could never be suffered to come to you. If it be your pleasure to admit me to your presence, you will find me at all times pliant and obedient.
It is evident from a letter of 18 February 1533 from Lyst to Cromwell that Father Forest knew denunciations were being made against him. Lyst saw himself as what we might term a ‘whistle blower’: ‘[Forest] says that he will labour to the King to get out of your hands all such letters as I and others have written about him, that he may get us punished, though we have written nothing but truth. Our fathers have made a law that whoever shows any act done secretly in the religion, or makes any complaint of any in the religion to secular persons, shall be grievously punished.’
Lyst now takes a superior, self-righteous tone, revealing his own delusions of grandeur, as he tells Cromwell how he means to point out to Forest the error of his ways:
I wish you to burn all my letters, for I intend to write a long ‘epistle’ to Father Forest, containing all his faults and transgressions among us, for which he has always avoided punishment. I shall remind him of them, that in this holy time of Lent he may be sorry for them, and make some amends to God and the religion. I shall mention his unfaithful and indiscreet conduct towards the King and you, and will show you a copy of the letter, if he take it not well secundum evangelium, to which, I think, his perfection will not extend.
Lyst’s tone is that of every lay person who has ever written in indignation to their bishop to complain about the vicar. He reported that Forest had been unpleasant towards him personally, which is hardly surprising in the circumstances: ‘Since you first rebuked him for his indiscreet words about you, of which I gave you knowledge, he will never speak to me, nor show any tokens outward that he is in charity with me.’ Th
ere had also recently been some scandal concerning the Greenwich friary, involving the death in prison of one ‘brother Ravenscroft’. Lyst had made this fact known to Cromwell and the King, referring to Ravenscroft’s death as ‘suspect’ and somehow implicating Forest, in the hope that it would furnish them with an excuse to investigate the Observant Friars and come down hard on them.
Where Friar Forest was lacking in wisdom was in disregarding politics – not only the grand-scale politics of the King’s ‘great matter’, but the internal politics of life in a community. His arrogant dismissal of Lyst may be understandable, but was fatal for his own position. Lyst wrote in great indignation to Cromwell on Easter Eve, 12 April 1533:
I have written my mind to Father Forest, because he will not speak to me; but he has not regarded my letter, nor the pains I have taken after the form of the Gospel, disdaining both me and my writing. Will therefore take a further process with him after the Gospel. As he has been extreme in seeking great punishment for the small faults of others, I thought it necessary to write and remind him of his greater faults, and I send you a copy of the letter. You will see how he has misconducted himself against God, our religion, the King and you. A Frenchman, just come from beyond [the] sea, has been chosen our minister, head, and ruler in this province. I hope he will do much good, and help to reform Father Forest, and some other things among us. It would be well for the King and you to speak to him, that he may know how to use himself among us concerning the King’s honour. It would be a meritorious deed if you had Father Forest removed to Newark or Newcastle.
When the French friar arrived, he was given full power to act and one of the first things he had to do was deal with Friar Forest, on account of the repeated accusations of Lawrence and Lyst. And so Forest was indeed exiled to one of the northern convents in May 1533. Richard Lyst informed Anne Boleyn that year that he was intending to be ordained as a priest in the near future; the reason he had been unable to do so before, he claimed, was that he had been betrothed to a young woman – but she had now died (he did not sound particularly sorry about this), so he was free to seek clerical orders. Once ordained, he assured Anne, he would celebrate 100 masses for her ‘prosperous state, both spiritual and corporal’. By October he had set out on this course, having left the Greenwich friary and enrolled as a student at Cambridge, with the intention of being ordained as a secular priest. He seems to have been genuinely disenchanted with monasticism, though mainly because of his own experiences. In the meantime, however, he was in debt to the tune of 40 shillings and hoped Anne might be able to help him out.
In 1534 the Observant Friars, like all other friars, monks and canons, were required to swear acceptance of the Act of Succession and then of the Royal Supremacy. Their refusal led to the imprisonment of many of them and the suppression of the order in England. The friars who escaped imprisonment were sent to join various priories belonging to their rivals, the (non-Observant) Conventual Franciscans, where most of them eventually succumbed and made the required oaths. It is at one such house of Conventual Franciscans – that of the Convent of the Grey Friars in Newgate Street, London – that Father Forest enters the records again in 1538. By this time he too had given in and taken the necessary oath, though he would later declare that ‘he took his oath with his outward man, but his inward man never consented thereunto’. This could be termed ‘equivocation’ and was considered by some to be a legitimate means of misleading an unjust interrogator. ‘Broadly defined, equivocation involved making a statement which could bear two meanings, that which the speaker wished the hearer to take, and that which he himself “intended” in a purely technical sense.’
Despite this outward conformity, Forest was again arousing the attention of Cromwell (by now Lord Privy Seal), this time through his conservative teaching in the confessional. One of his penitents that year was John Lord Mordaunt. The Mordaunts had a large house nearby, in the parish of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, and John, 2nd Baron Mordaunt of Turvey, served at Henry’s court and had been created a Knight of the Bath on the occasion of Anne Boleyn’s coronation. He maintained his Catholic faith and practice throughout the subsequent reigns of Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, being imprisoned in the Fleet in 1561 as a ‘prisoner of the mass’.
Lord Mordaunt had made enquiries in February 1538 as to who was available to hear confessions at the Grey Friars, and Friar Forest was recommended to him. He duly made his confession to Forest, as part of his preparations for Easter, at about nine o’clock in the morning after Forest had celebrated the Lady Mass (celebrated daily in honour of the Virgin Mary) in the monastery. Forest took no fee for hearing the confession, but when Lord Mordaunt offered to make a donation, the friar requested it be used to pay for some coal (which was beginning to take over from firewood as the preferred heating fuel in the City). Mordaunt also gave what we would refer to as a ‘tip’ to the porter.
When questioned later about his encounter with Friar Forest, Lord Mordaunt insisted that nothing had been said by either of them about the question of the King’s supremacy: ‘And as for the Bishop of Rome, or any speaking with the said Friar Forest of the said Bishop of Rome, or in any manner further concerning the said Bishop or his authority, or of any matter touching the King’s Majesty, or the Bishop of Rome, there was no such matter touched upon or moved by the Friar or by the said Lord or either of them.’
Lord Mordaunt had been questioned as part of an attempt to persuade Forest’s penitents to give evidence against him on a capital charge. The Warden of the Grey Friars convent had been instructed by Cromwell to name those who were Forest’s friends, including any who had paid him a fee for hearing their confession. In obeying this instruction, the warden also made clear his own intention, and that of those for whom he was responsible, to do as they were bidden, not to stand in the way of the convent being dissolved and to accept their own transition to a secular life: ‘Your Lordship spoke to me of changing my coat. We shall be ready to change when commanded.’ (This is in contrast to what Forest would stubbornly assert at his trial – that ‘he might not lawfully change his habit at the King’s commandment, but he might at the bishop of Rome’s’.)
Cromwell has a note among his ‘remembrances’ – or, as we might say, his ‘to-do list’ – for April 1538: ‘To know the King’s pleasure touching Lord Mordaunt and such others as Friar Forest named for his principal friends.’ Sir John (whose strength of character is clear from his subsequent history) furnished no evidence against his confessor, but another penitent, a man called Waferer, was less resilient. It was Waferer who related that Forest had told him in the confessional that when he had assented to the oath demanded of him in 1534 he had done so ‘by his outward man, but not in the inward man’.
By March or early April Forest was under arrest, and a decision was made to try him for heresy. The principal charge against him was that of identifying the Catholic Church of the creed with the Church of Rome. At his trial Forest tried to defend himself by saying that he owed a double obedience: ‘first to the King’s highness by the law of God and the second to the Bishop of Rome by his rule and profession’. But no such explanation could satisfy the authorities who, while insisting on the inviolability of oaths made to the King, considered oaths made to the Pope to be null and void.
Forest was convicted and ordered to abjure his opinions at Paul’s Cross. He appeared initially to accept the judgement, but while incarcerated at Newgate prison with the Carmelite Laurence Cooke and the Carthusian William Horne (‘in a fair chamber more like to indurate than to mollify’, according to Bishop Latimer), Forest’s resistance stiffened. Latimer reported to Cromwell that ‘Some think he is rather comforted in his way than discouraged; some think he is allowed both to hear mass and also to receive the Sacrament. If it be so, it is enough to confirm him in his obstinacy.’ Latimer also feared that people had been telling Forest that, even if he abjured as a heretic, he would be convicted as a traitor – and so what was the point of abjuration? Whatever his reasons, a
t Paul’s Cross on 12 May Forest refused to read the recantation, laying himself open to the fate of relapsed heretics, death by burning.
The chronicler Wriothesley recorded the events of that day as follows:
This year, the 12th day of May, being the third Sunday after Easter, the Bishop of Worcester, called Dr Latimer, preached at Paul’s Cross, at whose sermon should have been present a penitent to have done his penance called John Forest, Friar Observant, Doctor of Divinity, lately abjured for heresy, the eighth day of the said month of May, at Lambeth, before the Most Reverend Father in God Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, with others, and after his said abjuration, sworn upon the Evangelists, to abide the injunction of the said Most Reverend for his penance; which said Friar Forest, obstinate and forwardly, not like a true penitent performing his said penance, but standing yet stiff and proud in his malicious mind, refused to do; yet this day again, entreated by the Dean of the Arches, called Doctor Quent, with others, like a good Christian to perform his penance, he yet notwithstanding, maliciously by the instigation of the devil, refused to do, although the said Dean opened unto him the indignation of God and damnation of his body and soul perpetually, and also have a temporal death by burning as all heretics should have by the laws of this realm; which said Friar Forest should this day have borne a faggot at Paul’s Cross for his penance, and also with a loud voice have declared certain things by his own mouth, after the said sermon enjoined him, for his said penance; all which said things he refusing to do, the said Bishop desiring all the audience then present at the said sermon to pray heartily unto God to convert the said friar from his said obstinacy and proud mind, that he might have grace to turn to be a true penitent …
The Burning Time Page 10