Preview: Saints Eustace White and John Boste

On Monday, August 17, Anna Mitchell and I will continue our Son Rise Morning Show series on the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. We'll talk about two more Elizabethan era martyrs, Saint Eustace White and Saint John Boste. Usual time: 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central.

Saint Eustace was hanged, drawn, and quartered on the same day as Saints Swithun Wells, Edmund Gennings, and Polydore Plasden (December 10, 1591) but at a different location, Tyburn Tree.

Saint John was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Durham, County Durham, in northeast England on July 24, 1594.

St. Eustace White was a convert to Catholicism--his anti-Catholic father cursed him and White endured permanent estrangement from his family. In 1584 Eustace began studies for the priesthood in Rheims, France and Rome, Italy, and was ordained at the Venerable English College in Rome in 1588. In November 1588 he returned to the west of England to minister to covert Catholics. The Church was going through a period of persecution in England, made even worse by the unsuccessful attack of the Armada from Catholic Spain. Arrested in Blandford, Dorset, England on 1 September 1591 for the crime of being a priest. He was lodged in Bridewell prison in London, and repeatedly tortured. 

He endured the torture technique developed by Richard Topcliffe and used on St. Robert Southwell and others, being hanged by the wrists. As he wrote to Fr. Henry Garnet, SJ from prison:

"The morrow after Simon and Jude's day I was hanged at the wall from the ground, my manacles fast locked into a staple as high as I could reach upon a stool: the stool taken away where I hanged from a little after 8 o'clock in the morning until after 4 in the afternoon, without any ease or comfort at all, saving that Topcliffe came in and told me that the Spaniards were come into Southwark by our means: 'For lo, do you not hear the drums' (for then the drums played in honour of the Lord Mayor). The next day after also I was hanged up an hour or two: such is the malicious minds of our adversaries." 

According to Bishop Richard Challoner, who compiled reports of many of the martyrs in his Memoirs of Missionary Priests, Saint Eustace told Richard Topcliffe that he prayed for him--and Topcliffe did not appreciate the prayers of one he regarded as a traitor. Challoner also notes that because the date of White's execution is the same as the martyrs' on Grays Inn Road, some reports placed him at that All Saints Day Mass in Saint Swithun Wells' home--but he was arrested and held separately.

Blessed Brian Lacey, a layman, suffered with him at Tyburn Tree.

Saint John Boste was born in northwestern England, and could be considered a revert in a way because he was born in a Catholic family, conformed at least outwardly to the Church of England to study at Oxford and become a Fellow of Queen's College, and then returned to the Catholic Church. He, too, endured torture in London but Topcliffe's name isn't included in the reports of his torture on rack and being hanged by the wrists, which left him crippled and bent over. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Priest and martyr, b. of good Catholic family at Dufton, in Westmoreland, about 1544; d. at Durham, 24 July, 1594. He studied at Queen's College, Oxford, 1569-72, became a Fellow, and was received into the Church at Brome, in Suffolk, in 1576. Resigning his Fellowship in 1580, he went to Reims, where he was ordained priest, 4 March, 1581, and in April was sent to England. He landed at Hartlepool and became a most zealous missioner, so that the persecutors made extraordinary efforts to capture him. At last, after many narrow escapes, he was taken to Waterhouses, the house of William Claxton, near Durham, betrayed by one Eglesfield [or Ecclesfield], 5 July, 1593. The place is still visited by Catholics. From Durham he was conveyed to London, showing himself throughout "resolute, bold, joyful, and pleasant", although terribly racked in the Tower. Sent back to Durham for the July Assizes, 1594, he behaved with undaunted courage and resolution, and induced his fellow-martyr, Bl. George Swalwell [or Swallowell], a convert minister, who had recanted through fear, to repent of his cowardice, absolving him publicly in court. He suffered at Dryburn, outside Durham. He recited the Angelus while mounting the ladder, and was executed with extraordinary brutality; for he was scarcely turned off the ladder when he was cut down, so that he stood on his feet, and in that posture was cruelly butchered alive. An account of his trial and execution was written by an eye-witness, [Blessed] Christopher Robinson, who suffered martyrdom shortly afterwards at Carlisle.

As I mentioned last week, these priests were executed because they were Catholic priests who had returned to England. The authorities tortured them to find out where they had said Mass, who had sheltered them, how they'd arrived in England, etc. 

Saint Eustace White, pray for us!
Saint John Boste, pray for us!