This Morning: Saint John Rigby and Saint Anne Line

Just a reminder that I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central to continue our series on the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. Matt Swaim and I will discuss Saint John Rigby and Saint Anne Line.

Please listen live here on the Sacred Heart Radio website; the podcast will be archived here; the segment will be repeated on Friday next week during the EWTN hour of the Son Rise Morning Show (from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. Eastern/5:00 to 6:00 a.m. Central).

Saints Rigby and Line are the last two martyrs from the reign of Elizabeth I among the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. Her reign ended in 1603.

Saint John Rigby was martyred, not at Tyburn, but at St. Thomas Waterings or St. Thomas-a-Watering on the Old Kent Road. The St. Thomas in the name is St. Thomas a Becket, and the Old Kent Road was on the way to Canterbury and St. Thomas a Becket's shrine. Chaucer's pilgrims stop at the spring. As this website explains:

Set on a former route for pilgrims visiting Canterbury, St Thomas-a-Watering on Old Kent Road gets its name from a spring that emerges at this spot dedicated to St Thomas a Becket.

St Thomas-a-Watering became a well-known site for the execution of Catholics and dissenters during the reformation.

In 1539, Griffith Clerke, Vicar of Wandsworth, along with three others, thought to be Catholic friars, were hanged and quartered on this site. Wales’s most famous Protestant martyr, John Penry was also executed at St Thomas-a-Watering in 1593, for doing little more than ‘issuing strong words of warning’ against the then Queen Elizabeth and her bishops.

Many more executions of common criminals took place right up until 1740, when a father and son were hanged for murder.

Note that the website leaves out St. John Jones, Rigby's confessor, Rigby, and Blessed John Pibush, also martyred at St. Thomas-a Waterings. Because of the site's location on the old route to the former shrine of a great Catholic saint, it must have seemed an appropriate place for executing Catholics.

Here's the mention of St. Thomas-a-Watering at the end of the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales:

Amorwe, whan that day gan for to sprynge,
Up roos oure Hoost and was oure aller cok,
And gadrede us togidre alle in a flok;
And forth we riden, a litel moore than paas,
Unto the wateryng of Seint Thomas;
And there oure Hoost bigan his hors areste,
And seyde, "Lordynges, herkneth, if yow leste:
Ye woot youre foreward and I it yow recorde. . . .

Saint Anne Line is also thought to have a literary connection: to William Shakespeare's poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle"(dove). Several critics have thought that Saint Anne Line and her husband Roger are being commemorated in the funeral for the lovers in that poem:

Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.

If Shakespeare remembered a Catholic martyr and her exiled Catholic husband in a poem, it lends credence to those who suggest that the Bard of Avon was, if not a practicing Recusant Catholic, at least a Church Papist, outwardly conforming while secretly remaining a Catholic.

Saint John Rigby, pray for us!

Saint Anne Line, pray for us!