John Forest

John Forest (1471 – 22 May 1538) was an English Franciscan friar and martyr. Confessor to Catherine of Aragon, Forest was burned to death at Smithfield for "heresy", in that he refused to acknowledge the King as head of the church.

Life Born in the Oxford area in 1471, John Forest became a Franciscan friar Minor of the Regular Observance in 1491 in Greenwich. He went on to study theology at the University of Oxford, later becoming provincial of all the Observant Friars in England, and confessor to Catherine of Aragon, first wife to King Henry VIII. (The Greenwich friary was attached to the Royal Palace at Greenwich.)

The King was eager to gain the sanction of learned men and of those esteemed highly to his plans in regard to the Church. Wealth and honours were offered to those who complied. Those who resisted were threatened. From 1531 the Friars Minor had gained the enmity of the King by opposing his divorce and his movements toward Protestantism.

In November, 1532, as Guardian of the Greenwich friary, Forest spoke to the friars of the plans the King had to suppress the Order in England and denounced from the pulpit at St. Paul's Cross Henry's plans for a divorce. In 1533 he was imprisoned in Newgate prison and condemned to death. In 1534 Henry suppressed the Observant friars and ordered them dispersed to other friaries. John was released from prison but by 1538 was in confinement in a Conventual Franciscan friary at Smithfield, his death sentence having been neither commuted nor carried out. Forest was sent to a convent in the north.

Despite initially recanting, Forest was detained at Newgate Prison, on the basis of denial of the king's supremacy, together with several other Friars, who persuaded him to stand fast in his Roman Catholic beliefs. His confinement, therefore, was not strict, and he was allowed to celebrate mass and hear confessions. From this confinement he could correspond with the Queen and he also wrote a tract entitled De auctoritate Ecclesiae et Pontificis maximi ("On the Authority of the Church and the Supreme Pontiff"), defending both the papal primacy and the independence of the Church from control by the State. He was denounced to the King for this tract and also for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy demanded by Cromwell. where he was suspended over the fire in chains. John Forest was the only Catholic martyr to be burned at the stake during the English Reformation.

Veneration Forest, together with 53 other English martyrs, was beatified by Pope Leo XIII, on 9 December 1886.

There are stained glass windows of the martyr in the following churches:

Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Hills Road, Cambridge Shrewsbury Cathedral, he is the first figure on the fifth window, next to Edmund Campion.