BLESSED JOHN FOREST – MARTYRED 22nd MAY 1538

 BLESSED JOHN FOREST – MARTYRED 22nd MAY 1538



                        Blessed John Forest, nave statue – St Etheldra, Ely Place, London.

John Forest was a Franciscan Friar. Confessor to Queen Catherine of Aragon under King Henry VIII, he was burned to death for heresy by refusing to acknowledge King Henry VIII as the head of the Church.
He was born in 1471 and became a Franciscan Friar Minor of the regular Observance in 1491. He studied at Oxford University and became provincial of the Observant Friars in England, situated at Greenwich friary, which was attached to the Royal Palace at Greenwich. He thus became confessor to Queen Catherine of Aragon.
In November 1532, as Guardian of the Greenwich friary, Forest spoke to the friars of the plans King Henry had to suppress the Franciscan Order in England. He denounced from the pulpit Henry’s plans for a divorce.
In 1533 he was imprisoned in Newgate and sentenced to death. In 1534 Henry VIII suppressed the Observant friars and ordered them to disperse to other friaries. He was released from prison but by 1538 he was held in confinement in a Conventual Franciscan friary at Smithfield.
He was detained in Newgate Prison, where he wrote a tract entitled, “De auctoritate Ecclesiae et Pontificis maximi” (“On the authority of the Church and the Supreme Pontiff”), defending the Papal supremacy of the Church. He was denounced by the King for this tract and for refusing to swear the oath of loyalty demanded by Cromwell, which affirmed the supremacy of the King over the Pope in matters ecclesial.
For this, Forest was condemned for treason and heresy. He was burnt to death at Smithfield, London on 22nd May 1538, where he was suspended over the fire in chains. Extra fuel for the fire was provided by an enormous statue of St Derfel from the pilgrimage of Llandderfel in Wales, of which it was prophesied, that it would ‘One day set a forest on fire.”
Llandderfel was the site of a monastery built by St Derfel in Gwynedd in Wales and was a popular site for pilgrims. The prophecy that the statue would one day set a forest on fire was, it seems, used by Cromwell for some vicious and nasty joke, to the weird degree that he actually ordered the enormous statue to be transported the many hundreds of miles to London, over the protests and pleadings of the local people, in order to enact the Puritan idea of humour - for the sole purpose of burning John Forest. He instructed Ellis Price to remove the statue and bring it to London. Price, like a good fundamentalist, followed the instruction literally and actually separated the statue from the stag that was attached to it and brought the statue of St Derfel, sans stag. The statue of the stag still remains in Landderfel. Maybe, however, the joke is on Cromwell, as it was his orders that fulfilled the prophecy.
Forest, together with 53 other English martyrs, was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on 9th December 1886.
Biography and image from Wikipedia.
Image from Wikipedia of Blessed John Forest, nave statue – St Etheldra, Ely Place, London.

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