Just over 490 years ago in August 1534 King Henry VIII finally lost patience with the community of Observant Franciscans who lived adjacent to his palace at Greenwich, and on August 11th closed the monastery. This was because of their steadfast opposition to his attempts to get his marriage to Queen Katherine annulled. Although it is not as well documented as the fate of the London Carthusians in 1537 the fate of the community was in some cases direct physical martyrdom, and in other cases a lingering death from neglect after they were exiled to other Franciscan Conventual houses. At least 31 out of a national membership of 140 are recorded as having died directly or indirectly in the following years, not counting others who were actually executed or disappeared, so there probably more than forty martyrs.
The Observants were recognised as a distinct order by the Church in 1415. King Edward IV was showing interest in the Order in 1471 and in 1480 set in motion the foundation at Greenwich. Early in his reign in December 1485 King Henry VII confirmed the foundation for a Warden and at least twelve members. The proximity of the house to the palace was even closer than that arrangement at Sheen - now Richmond - as rebuilt by King Henry V with the nearby Carthusian priory, or the relationship at Westminster between abbey and palace. Indeed the Sheen relationship has been likened to that of the Escorial, and the Greenwich layout does very much demonstrate the intimate link between the monarch and the monastic community. Late medieval monarchs and aristocrats across Europe showed a predilection for austere or reformed communities such as the Carthusians and Observants to pray for them both in life and in death, and to act as exemplars of reform in their territories.
King Henry VII and his family were closely involved with the building of the church at Greenwich and, in particular, the design of the east window in or about 1500, as is set out on the BL Medieval manuscripts blog at Inventing a royal past
Queen Katherine was known to join the friars for the midnight office when in residence at the palace, and in her will in 1536 requested burial in an Observant church. The Greenwich friary church was the setting, as the VCH account shows, for the baptisms of royal children, including probably the future King Henry VIII, and certainly the future Queen Mary I in 1516 and of the future Queen Elizabeth I in 1533.
Other foundations followed at Canterbury, Richmond, Southampton, Newcastle upon Tyne and Newark. From 1517 the Observant friars took over the Province of England when the other Franciscans organised themselves separately as Conventuals.
The Victoria County History of Kent vol II has a good account of the history of the house at Friaries: The observant friars of Greenwich
There is a good account, which places the community within wider Franciscan history, from the contemporary order of Franciscans of Great Britain and Ireland at Our Heritage
There is more about the fate of the community in the article to which the previous article linked from the Immaculate Heart of Mary’s Hermitage here
The individual fates of members of the community in detention at other, Conventual, Franciscan houses, presumably from ill treatment and neglect, can be read on the Anne Boleyn Files at 11 August 1534 - The Expulsion of the Friars Observant
The King installed a conventual Franciscan community in 1534, but that was dissolved four years later in 1538. In 1555 Queen Mary I restored the Observants to the house under a surviving member of the old community, Cardinal William Peto. In 1556 the church was the setting for the consecration of Cardinal Pole to the episcopal state to become Archbishop of Canterbury. The house was suppressed again in 1559 and the surviving members went into exile.
Today nothing survives above ground of the once very important royal palace of the Tudors at Greenwich and confronted by the undoubted splendours of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century buildings on the site not easy to imagine. Excavations in recent years have added to our knowledge and understanding of the Tilt Yard and the location of the armouries - which took over the friary church in the 1540s. There is an excellent modern reconstruction painting of the palace complex, together with the sixteenth century drawings of the buildings, including the friary, by Antony van der Wyngaerde on the Blackheath and Greenwich History Blog at History of Greenwich Palace and The Old Royal Naval College
