Adrian Fortescue

Blessed Adrian Fortescue was an English knight, landowner, and courtier of the early Tudor period who was put to death in 1539 and is venerated as a martyr by the Catholic Church. He was born about 1476, the son of Sir John Fortescue of Punsborne, near Hatfield in Hertfordshire, and of Alice, a daughter of Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, a former lord mayor of London. Through his mother he was kin to the Boleyn family and thus a cousin of Anne Boleyn. He belonged to a cadet branch of the Fortescues, a Devon family that had risen through the law and royal service in the fifteenth century; an earlier Sir John Fortescue of that house had been chief justice of the king's bench. Adrian was made a Knight of the Bath in 1503 and thereafter moved in court and county circles, with lands in Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, and Buckinghamshire.

He married first Anne, daughter of Sir William Stonor of Stonor in Oxfordshire. She died in 1518, leaving him two daughters, of whom Margaret married Thomas Wentworth, later first Baron Wentworth. By the courtesy of England he continued to hold the Stonor estates during his widowhood. He married secondly Anne, daughter of Sir William Rede of Boarstall in Buckinghamshire and already a widow; by her he had three sons, among them John, later Sir John Fortescue of Salden, who served as chancellor of the exchequer under Elizabeth I. Fortescue saw military service in France, taking part in the 1513 campaign that included the siege of Thérouanne and the so-called Battle of the Spurs, and he was present in the king's retinue at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. He also served as a justice of the peace and in other local offices typical of a substantial country gentleman of his rank.

In the early 1530s he was received as a knight of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitaller. The English langue of that order was soon to be dissolved by Henry VIII, and Fortescue's association with it, together with his known attachment to the old religion, later coloured interpretations of his fall. He does not appear to have taken a public part in the controversies of the royal divorce or the royal supremacy, and no contemporary evidence shows him engaged in conspiracy. Catholic tradition has long held that he suffered for refusing to accept the king's ecclesiastical claims, though the surviving legal record is thinner than that interpretation would suggest.

In February 1539 Fortescue was arrested and confined in the Tower of London. He was never brought to trial. In the parliamentary session of that year he was included in an act of attainder that condemned him, together with Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, Gertrude Courtenay, Marchioness of Exeter, and others, of unspecified treasons. The act was a political instrument of Thomas Cromwell's regime in the aftermath of the so-called Exeter Conspiracy and amid the suppression of the greater monasteries and of the English Knights of St John. On 9 July 1539 he was beheaded on Tower Hill, on the same occasion as Sir Thomas Dingley, another knight of St John. The precise legal ground of Fortescue's condemnation remains obscure; later Catholic writers treated him as a martyr for the Roman primacy.

Pope Leo XIII beatified him on 13 May 1895 among a group of English and Welsh martyrs of the Reformation period. His feast is kept on 9 July. He was not subsequently canonized, and he was not among those raised to the altars as the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales in the twentieth century. Veneration of Blessed Adrian Fortescue has remained modest, chiefly among Catholics in England and within the Order of Malta, which regards him as one of its martyred knights. His descendants through his son Sir John of Salden continued as a prominent Buckinghamshire family into the following century.