Preview: King Henry VIII Visits an Old Friend in Prison

On Monday, June 19, we'll discuss Henry VIII's visits to his old friend/courtier, Blessed Sebastian Newdigate, held in prison on the king's orders because he would not swear the Oath of Supremacy. It's very appropriate that we remember these events because Monday is the anniversary of Newdigate's martyrdom, along with Humphrey Middlemore and William Exmew on June 19, 1535.

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time: about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern: please listen live here and/or listen to the podcast later here!

Arrested on May 25, they had been imprisoned in Marshalsea for about a fortnight before their trial at Westminster on June 11. The three were taken before the Privy Council before their trial, refused again to swear Henry's oaths and were condemned to death. While in prison, they were chained at the neck and hand and foot against pillars, unable to move. 

While his former courtier, now a Catholic priest, was in Marshalsea, Henry VIII visited him to try to persuade to swear the oath. It's interesting that according Father Bowden, the king's method of persuasion, other than imprisonment and confinement, is similar to the line of questioning often used in this period, when the issue was the monarch's Supremacy over the Church in England: Why can't you just go along with everyone else? Why do you have a problem with the king being the Supreme Head and Governor of the Church of England? What makes you so special? Do you think you're better, holier, than everyone else?

As Bowden quotes the exchange: after hearing the Henry's bribes and threats, Father Newdigate replied:

In court I served your Majesty loyally and faithfully, and so continue still your humble servant, although kept in this prison and bonds. But in matters that belong to the doctrine of the Catholic Church and the salvation of my poor soul, Your Majesty must excuse me.

Then Henry VIII asked:

Art thou wiser and holier than all the ecclesiastics and seculars of my kingdom?

Father Newdigate's reply:

I may not judge of others, nor do I esteem myself wise or holy, being far short in either; only this: I assure myself that the Faith and doctrine I profess is no new thing, but always among the faithful held for Christians and Catholics. We must obey God rather than men.

Thinking of why Father Bowden assembled these Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors in 1910: it was because he knew Catholics in England then--as Catholics all over the world today--face the same question Henry VIII asked: why do you have to be different from everyone else? 

And Blessed Sebastian Newdigate answered, basing his steadfastness not on himself, but on the Truth he believed in: We must obey God rather than men, quoting the Acts of Apostles (5:29)

Father Bowden titles this memento: "The Whims of a King" with the Psalm verse: "Put not your trust in princes: in the children of men, in whom there is no salvation." (Psalm 145:2-3)

Blessed Sebastian Newdigate, pray for us!

Blessed Humphrey Middlemore, pray for us!

Blessed William Exmew, pray for us!

The First Three of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales

As promised, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show with Matt Swaim at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central to start our survey of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales, beginning with the three Carthusian priors, St. John Houghton, St. Augustine Webster, and St. Robert Lawrence.

Please listen live here; the podcast will be archived here.

On Friday, I highlighted St. John Houghton's leadership in guiding the Carthusian community in their response to Henry VIII's changes in religious policy. The other priors, Webster and Lawrence, were in London to consult with him on the situation and that's why the three of them went to Cromwell with their plea for the respect of conscience after praying, fasting, and celebrating Mass. Robert Lawrence had succeeded Houghton as the Prior of Beauvale in Nottinghamshire. All three men had attended the University of Cambridge.

Even among Tudor fans of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, the treatment of the Carthusian monks rouses great repulsion and disgust, because Cromwell and Henry flaunted all the customs of England and displayed so much cruelty.

The Carthusians were hanged, drawn, and quartered in their habits--as traitors they should have been in secular clothing as laity--and Houghton was still wearing a hair shirt. Dragged from the Tower to Tyburn, their religious status was clearly displayed.

Michael Davies transcribes the scene at Tyburn, based upon the reports of Maurice Chauncy or Chauncey, a Carthusian who had sworn the oath his Priors refused:

To [Saint] John Houghton God was pleased to grant the signal honour of being the first man since pagan times to suffer death in England for being a Catholic. After lovingly embracing the executioner, who craved his pardon, the holy Martyr entered the cart which stood beneath the gallows; and there, in the sight of the multitude, he was asked once again whether he would submit to the king's laws before it was too late. Nothing daunted, he replied: "I call Almighty God to witness, and I beseech all here present to attest for me on the dreadful danger of judgement, that, being about to die in public, I declare that I have refused to comply with the will of His Majesty the King, not from obstinacy, malice, or a rebellious spirit, but solely for fear of offending the supreme Majesty of God. Our holy Mother the Church has decreed and enjoined otherwise than the king and Parliament have decreed. I am therefore bound in conscience, and am ready and willing to suffer every kind of torture, rather than deny a doctrine of the Church. Pray for me, and have mercy on my brethren, of whom I have been the unworthy Prior." He asked for time to say his last prayer, which he took from the 30th Psalm: "In thee, O Lord, have I hoped; let me never be confounded: deliver me in Thy justice . . . Into Thy hands I commend my spirit; for Thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, the God of truth." [Saint] John Houghton was now ready to meet death.

A thick rope had been chosen, for fear he might be strangled and expire too quickly. It was placed about his neck. The sheriff gave the signal. The cart was drawn aside; and the gentle monk, who had done good to many, and harm to none, was hanging like a malefactor from the gallows. Then came the worst part of the business, for no mercy was shown, and the hideous sentence was carried out in all its details. The rope was cut, and the body fell heavily on the ground; but John Houghton was not dead. They tore off his holy habit, and laid him on a plank or platform. The executioner inflicted a long and ghastly wound with a sharp knife, dragged out his entrails, and threw them in a fire prepared for the purpose. The poor sufferer was conscious the whole time; and while he was being embowelled  (sic) he was heard to exclaim: "Oh most holy Jesus, have mercy upon me in this hour!" When at last the executioner placed his hand upon the heart to wrench it from its place, the blessed Martyr spoke again. A German, Anthony Rescius, who afterwards became auxiliary Bishop of Wurzburg, was close by. He overheard his last words: "Good Jesu! what will ye do with my heart?" The struggle was over at last John Houghton had been faithful unto death, and gained the crown of life. 76

Webster and Lawrence suffered the same torture--although Houghton's hair shirt had made it harder for the executioner to disembowel him--and then their bodies were prepared for Henry VIII's warning to others:

The bodies were cut into quarters which were thrown into a cauldron of boiling pitch to prevent decay, and then set up in different parts of London as proof positive that the king was indeed the head of the Church in England. These executions constituted a clear and savage warning to every priest and monk in the country of what awaited them if they failed to swear upon oath that they accepted the Royal Supremacy. In order to terrify the remaining Carthusians into submission, John Houghton's severed arm, all bloody from Tyburn, was nailed above the gateway of the Charterhouse.

Many members of Henry VIII's Court and Council attended the executions and there are unfounded and later retracted reports that the king was there too. You may read a fuller account of their executions here, starting on page 41 of the document.

Saint John Houghton, pray for us!

Saint Augustine Webster, pray for us!

Saint Robert Lawrence, pray for us!

Image Source: used by permission.

Preview: The Protomartyrs of the English Reformation

On Monday, June 15, we'll start our survey of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales on the Son Rise Morning Show. Matt Swaim and I will talk about the three Carthusian priors who suffered being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn Tree on May 4, 1535. Saints John Houghton, Augustine Webster, and Robert Lawrence are among the five protomartyrs of the English Reformation. St. John Houghton, portrayed by the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán holding his heart, asked before he was eviscerated by the hangman "Jesus, Jesus, what will you do with my heart?"

The Tudor administration particularly wanted the Carthusians to accept the change in Church leadership in England because of their great reputation for holiness and integrity. Houghton had argued in 1534, when presented with the Oath of Succession, that Carthusian hermit monks had no interest in worldly events and their opinion should not matter to the world (the King). For that argument, Father Houghton and Father Humphrey Middleton were imprisoned in the Tower of London for a month. They later agreed to take the Oath of Succession, persuaded that the King's authority over the Church would be limited "as far as the law of Christ allows". This was the same oath that Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More refused to take in April of 1534 and were thus imprisoned in the Tower of London at the King's pleasure, attainted traitors and stripped of all worldly possessions and rights. Fisher was even removed from his see and was no longer considered a bishop (a Lord and Member of the House of Lords).

Having sworn the Oath of Succession, the Carthusians went back to their way of life and hoped for peace and to be let alone. Then on February 1, 1535 the revised Oath of Supremacy proclaiming Henry VIII the Supreme Head and Governor of the Church of England without that limiting phrase was presented to the Carthusians. They weren't going to be let alone.

Prior John Houghton led the Carthusians to do what hermit monks do: fast and pray for three days and then offer the Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit to decide whether or not they could take the Oath of Supremacy. Dom David Knowles praises Houghton in his Saints and Scholars: Twenty-Five Medieval Portraits, for his leadership and docility: When Father Houghton elevated the Host during the Canon of the Mass, he felt the Holy Spirit's call to remain united with the universal Church, and refuse the Supremacy Oath. So he, Webster and Lawrence asked Henry VIII for an exemption from taking this oath, again on the stated grounds that they were hermit monks who had no interest in or influence on worldly events, and that their opinions on worldly matters should not matter to the world (Henry VIII). For that argument, they were arrested and called before a special commission in April 1535, and sentenced to death, after the jurors on the commission were told to change their first, not guilty, verdict.

Fathers Webster and Lawrence were priors of the other Carthusian houses in England, of Epworth and Beauvale, respectively. Two others were sentenced to death with the three Carthusian priors: Father Richard Reynolds of the Briggitine House of Syon and Father John Haile, the Vicar of Isleworth.

Then comes that great scene on May 4, 1535. Margaret More Roper was visiting her father, Thomas More in the Tower of London, and they were standing by a window so that they just happened to see the five martyrs to be dragged away from the Tower to Tyburn. More said to his daughter, who was there to persuade her father to take the Oath of Supremacy:

Lo, dost thou not see (Meg) that these blessed fathers be how as cheerful going to their deaths, as bridegrooms to their marriages? Wherefore thereby mayest thou see (mine own good daughter) what a difference there is between such as have in effect spent all their days in a strait, hard, penitential, and painful life religiously, and such as have in the world, like worldly wretches, as thy poor father hath done, consumed all the time in pleasure and ease licentiously. For God, considering their long-continued life in most sore and grievous penance, will not longer suffer them to remain here in this vale of misery, and iniquity, but speedily hence take them to the fruition of his everlasting deity: whereas thy silly father (Meg) that, like a most wicked caitiff, hath passed forth the whole course of his miserable life most pitifully, God, thinking him not worthy so soon to come to that eternal felicity, leaveth him here yet, still in the world further to be plunged and turmoiled with misery.

Margaret More Roper had her answer: her father would not take the Oath. Prior John Houghton would soon have his answer: what would Jesus do with his heart?

More about the scene at Tyburn on Monday at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here; the podcast will be archived here.

St. Bruno of Cologne and the Carthusians in England

I have often posted about the Carthusian Order and its English Reformation martyrs on this blog. Today we celebrate the feast of the order's founder, St. Bruno of Cologne:

Born in Cologne around 1030, he begins studying at the school of the Cathedral of Reims at an early age. Made a "doctor", Canon of the Cathedral Chapter, he is made the Rector of the University in 1056. He was one of the most remarkable scholars and teacher of his time "a prudent man whose word was rich in meaning."

He finds himself less and less at ease in a city where scandal has little affect towards the clergy and the Bishop himself. After having fought, not without success, against this disorder, Bruno feels the desire of a life more completely given to God alone.

After an attempt at a solitary life of short duration, he enters the region of Grenoble, of which the Bishop, the future Saint Hugues, offers him a solitary site in the mountains of his diocese. In June 1084, the Bishop himself leads Bruno and six of his companions in the primitive valley of Chartreuse, where the Order eventually gets its name from. They build a hermitage, consisting of a few log cabins opening towards a gallery which allows them access to the communal areas of the community -- church, refectory, and chapter room -- without having to suffer too much from intemperate conditions.

After six years of a pleasant solitary life, Bruno is called by Pope Urban II to the service of the Holy See. Not thinking of being able to continue without him, his community first thinks of separating, but it allows itself to be convinced to follow in the life that he first formed. Advisor to the Pope, Bruno is ill at ease a the Pontifical Court. He only lives in Rome for a few short months. With the Pope's blessing, he establishes a new hermitage in the forests of Calabria, in the south of Italy, with a few new companions. There he dies 6 October 1101.

Pope St. John Paul II wrote a message to the "Superior General of the Carthusian Order and to all members of the Carthusian family" in 2001 in celebration of the nine hundredth anniversary of St. Bruno's death:

While the members of the Carthusian family celebrate the ninth centenary of the death of their Founder, with them I give thanks to God who raised up in his Church the eminent and always relevant person, St Bruno. With a fervent prayer, appreciating your witness of fidelity to the See of Peter, I gladly share the joy of the Carthusian Order which has a master of the spiritual life in this "very good and incomparable father". On 6 October 1101, "on fire with divine love", Bruno left "the fleeting shadows of the world" to reach definitively the "eternal delights" (cf. Letter to Ralph, n. 13). The brothers of the Hermitage of Santa Maria della Torre in Calabria, to whom he had given much affection, could not doubt that this dies natalis would have inaugurated a singular spiritual adventure, which still today produces abundant fruit for the Church and for the world.

Bruno was a witness to the cultural and religious upheaval that shook Europe at its dawn and an architect in the reform that the Church wanted to realize in the face of internal difficulties. After having been an esteemed teacher, Bruno felt the call to consecrate himself to the one good that is God himself. "Is there anything so good as God? Is there any other good except God alone? Thus the holy soul that perceives this good, its incomparable brightness, its splendour, its beauty, burns with the flame of heavenly love and cries out: "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God!'" (Letter to Ralph, n. 15). The radical character of the thirst impelled Bruno, in patient listening to the Spirit, to invent an eremitic lifestyle with his first companions, where everything favours the response to the call of Christ who, in all times, chooses men "to lead them into solitude and unite himself to them in an intimate love" (Statutes of the Carthusian Order). With this choice of "life in the desert" Bruno invited the whole ecclesial community "never to lose sight of the supreme vocation, which is to be always with the Lord" (Vita consecrata, n. 7).

Bruno, who could forget "his" project to answer the requests of the Pope, manifests his lively sense of the Church. Aware that the journey on the way to holiness cannot be conceived without obedience to the Church, he shows us that true life in the following of Christ means putting ourselves in his hands, expressing in self-abandon a surplus of love. He always maintained a similar attitude in joy and constant praise. His brothers noticed that "his face was always radiant with joy and his words modest. With a father's strength, he knew how to show the sensibility of a mother" (Introduction to the funeral parchment dedicated to St Bruno). These delicate words of the funeral parchment express the fruitfulness of a life dedicated to contemplation of the Face of Christ, the source of apostolic efficacy and of fraternal charity. May the sons and daughters of St Bruno, after their father's example, continue untiringly to contemplate Christ, thus mounting "a holy and persevering guard, awaiting the return of their Teacher to open to him as soon as he knocks" (Letter to Ralph, n. 4); this is an encouraging appeal so that all Christians remain vigilant in prayer in order to receive their Lord!

I note this on the website for the Carthusian order, headquartered in Switzerland: "Liturgical celebration does not have any pastoral intent. This explains why those outside the Order are not admitted to participate at the offices or the Mass celebrated in the churches of our monasteries. Because of our call to solitude, visits are limited to the family members of the monk (2 days a year) and to those who feel called to our life, whom we call retreatants." 

(Note also how much Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley, at al, were interrupting the solitude of the Carthusians as they continued to encourage them to take the required oaths, interrupting their studies and their way of life, constantly intruding upon their retreat from the world.)

Yet as Pope St. John Paul II commented in 2001, that solitude and separation serves the Body of Christ:

How can we doubt for even an instant that a similar expression of pure love can give an extraordinary missionary effectiveness to the Carthusian life? In the withdrawal of monasteries and in the solitude of the cells, patiently and silently, the Carthusians weave the nuptial garment of the Church, "prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (Apoc 21,2). They present the world to God daily and invite all humanity to the wedding feast of the Lamb. The celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice is the source and summit of the life in the desert. It conforms to the very being of Christ those who abandon themselves to love, so that they may make visible the Saviour's presence and action in the world, for the salvation of the world and the joy of the Church.

Before their dissolution in 1540 after the martyrdoms of six priors and several monks and brothers, there were nine (9) main Charterhouses. The English Heritage website offers this explanation for their growth in the Medieval era:

In 1346 one of Edward III’s captains in his wars with France, Sir Nicholas de Cantilupe, founded a third charterhouse, at Beauvale in Nottinghamshire. This marked the beginning of a vogue for the order in England. The trauma of the Black Death of 1348–9 and subsequent plagues drew a demoralised population to support the Carthusians, whose piety and devoutness were held in high regard.

In 1371 Sir Walter Mauny, another of Edward III’s captains – encouraged by John Luscote, prior of Hinton – founded the London Charterhouse on the site of a plague cemetery. It became an important focus of piety for well-to-do Londoners, who could endow individual monk’s cells. Other charterhouses soon followed suit – Hull in 1377, Coventry in 1381, Axholme in 1397–8, Mount Grace in 1398, and finally the royal charterhouse of Sheen in 1415.

In every case the founder came from the highest levels of society. The monks, too, came from the literate upper levels of society. Some transferred from other monastic orders, while others began their religious careers as chaplains to important landowners.

There is one Charterhouse in England today: St. Hugh at Parkminster. It was founded in 1873 and the house originally had monks from two closed houses from the Continent to accommodate. Their site includes a gift shop, with this book about the Beauvale martyrs of the English Reformation.

St. Bruno and the English Carthusian Martyrs

I have often posted about the Carthusian Order and its English Reformation martyrs on this blog. Today we celebrate the feast of the order's founder, St. Bruno of Cologne:

Born in Cologne around 1030, he begins studying at the school of the Cathedral of Reims at an early age. Made a "doctor", Canon of the Cathedral Chapter, he is made the Rector of the University in 1056. He was one of the most remarkable scholars and teacher of his time "a prudent man whose word was rich in meaning."

He finds himself less and less at ease in a city where scandal has little affect towards the clergy and the Bishop himself. After having fought, not without success, against this disorder, Bruno feels the desire of a life more completely given to God alone.

After an attempt at a solitary life of short duration, he enters the region of Grenoble, of which the Bishop, the future Saint Hugues, offers him a solitary site in the mountains of his diocese. In June 1084, the Bishop himself leads Bruno and six of his companions in the primitive valley of Chartreuse, where the Order eventually gets its name from. They build a hermitage, consisting of a few log cabins opening towards a gallery which allows them access to the communal areas of the community -- church, refectory, and chapter room -- without having to suffer too much from intemperate conditions.

After six years of a pleasant solitary life, Bruno is called by Pope Urban II to the service of the Holy See. Not thinking of being able to continue without him, his community first thinks of separating, but it allows itself to be convinced to follow in the life that he first formed. Advisor to the Pope, Bruno is ill at ease a the Pontifical Court. He only lives in Rome for a few short months. With the Pope's blessing, he establishes a new hermitage in the forests of Calabria, in the south of Italy, with a few new companions. There he dies 6 October 1101.

I note this on the website: "Liturgical celebration does not have any pastoral intent. This explains why those outside the Order are not admitted to participate at the offices or the Mass celebrated in the churches of our monasteries. Because of our call to solitude, visits are limited to the family members of the monk (2 days a year) and to those who feel called to our life, whom we call retreatants."--so when St. Thomas More spent any time with the Carthusians of the Charterhouse of London, it would have been as a retreatant. Note also how much Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley, at al, were interrupting the solitude of the Carthusians.

There is a Charterhouse in England today: St. Hugh at Parkminster (make sure you have the sound turned on your computer; the site comes with chant!) It was founded in 1873 and the house originally had two houses from the Continent to accommodate. Their site includes a gift shop, with this book about the Beauvale martyrs of the English Reformation.

Carthusian Gardens: Cells and Horticulture

Via Tea at Trianon: English Heritage describes how the Carthusians at Mount Grace Priory had gardens outside their cells:

The garden of the Mount Grace Priory cell is English Heritage’s best preserved example of monastic horticulture. It was replanted for the first time in 1994, following archaeological excavation of the cells. The excavations showed that the lay-out and use of each garden varied according to the inclination and interest of the individual monk.

The pattern of paths and beds in the garden was based on archaeological evidence, but it was uncertain which plants were used or how they may have been arranged in the beds. None of the recent planting was intended to be a restoration or reconstruction of the original garden. It instead was a demonstration of the kinds of plants that were grown in gardens at the time the monastery flourished.

Equipment, too, has changed how we tend to our gardens today. Monk’s tools would have been simple wooden and metal ards (like a small hand pulled plough) or mattocks rather than the mechanised marvels of today’s horticulture. Rather than a tractor, power for larger plots would have been provided by oxen.

Cell gardens as at Mount Grace Priory provided monks with the opportunity for manual labour within the confines of their own cell, which was a key part of the Carthusian ideal. As a hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) they also had biblical associations including the garden of the ‘Song of Solomon’, and alluded to the ‘original’ Garden of Eden, or to ‘Paradise’ itself. These spaces were not primarily for food production but had multiple functions of spirituality, health and utility. The mass of food for the monks came from much larger kitchen gardens, plots and farms elsewhere.

These cell gardens were strongly geometric in form, often compartmentalised (defining spaces for medicinal or poisonous species) and in the 15th century started to become decorative. This included a mix of medicinal and aromatic herbs, and flowering plants to lift the mind and spirit and to aid contemplation.

English Heritage also describes how Mount Grace was a thriving community as late as 1523, with a waiting list of men wanting to become Carthusians. The last prior, John Wilson, tried to save the house:

Though the Carthusians featured prominently in the early opposition to Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon and the consequent break with Rome, Mount Grace remained relatively untroubled during the first years of the Reformation.

The monks refused to become involved with the Pilgrimage of Grace, the popular rising that broke out in Yorkshire in the autumn of 1536 in reaction to the suppression of the lesser monasteries.

When Mount Grace was eventually suppressed in December 1539 the community were given generous pensions. The prior was granted the hermitage and chapel of The Mount in nearby Osmotherley, which belonged to the priory.[11] He, with one of his monks and two lay brothers, was to join the charterhouse of Sheen when it was refounded under Mary I in 1555.[12]

The last prior of Sheen Priory in Richmond, named the House of Jesus of Bethlehem, was Maurice Chauncey. He was:

one of the few religious of the London charterhouse who purchased their lives of Henry VIII. by compliance with his wishes, and on its dissolution obtained a pension of £5. In his future penitence he deeply bewailed that he had not shared the crown of martyrdom, and spoke of himself as 'the spotted and diseased sheep of the flock.' The Carthusians, who were for a short time gathered together under Prior Maurice at Sheen during Mary's reign, were the scattered remnant of the various English charterhouses. Several died during their brief sojourn at the restored house, and the rest followed their superior into exile on Elizabeth's accession. Prior Maurice died at Paris on 12 July 1581; two years later his history of the sufferings of the Carthusians under Henry VIII. was printed, of which Mr. Froude made so much use in his graphic and sympathetic account of their treatment. (fn. 34)

In exile, the remaining Carthusians gathering in Belgium under Chauncey's leadership in the Sheen Anglorum Charterhouse.

Ernest Dowson, Gone with the Wind!

Ernest Dowson died on February 23, 1900. The Poetry Foundation sums up his life and work:

Ernest Dowson lived in London, worked at his parents’ dry-docking business, and was a member of the Rhymers’ Club with W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons. Dowson’s poems trace the sorrow of unrequited love and are the source of the phrases “gone with the wind”[*] and “days of wine and roses.” [**] He also supplied the earliest written mention in English of soccer. Both of Dowson’s parents committed suicide, and Dowson, who rarely had a fixed home, died at the age of 32.

Note that Dowson became a Catholic in 1892. This article discusses the conversions of the fin-de-siecle poets and writers of the Decadent school. Of Dowson, the author says that in one letter:

 . . . Catholicism appears as a way—perhaps the only way—of escaping the mediocrity and vulgarity that according to Dowson characterise the world he lives in:

I am so tired of Anglican condescension and Latitudinarian superiority; where Rome is in question. That, and the vulgarity of the dogmatic atheists, and the fatuous sentimentality of the Elesmere people et hoc genus omne: I am afraid, my dear, I am being driven to Rome in self defence. Vulgarity, sentimentality, crudity: isn’t there an effectual protest against it all? I confess Our Lady of the Seven Hills encroaches on me, in these latter days.

Dowson denigrates the Anglican Church, in particular the Broad Church (Latitudinarians, as he calls them, suggested that the Church should re-examine traditional Christian teaching in the light of Biblical criticism and abandon positions that appeared as incompatible with modernity), clearly marking his preference for the unshakeable dogmas of Catholicism. It should be noted that he does not explicitly mention the Catholic Church, but “Rome,” which he also calls “Our Lady of the Seven Hills,” referring simultaneously to the Virgin Mary and to the ancient Latin city. Catholicism is attractive precisely because it is Roman, i.e. foreign. In opposition to a Church that defines itself as national (Church of England), the Catholic Church appears as alien, exotic, and hence uncorrupted by Victorianism.

*From the third stanza of "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae":

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

**From Vitae Summa Brevis" (1896):

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

He wrote this poem about Carthusian monks, and it certainly reminds me of the Carthusians of the Charterhouse of London, as Prior John Houghton and his monks tried "To dwell alone with Christ, to meditate and pray" and were instead pulled from their cloister to face trial, execution, and starvation:

Through what long heaviness, assayed in what strange fire,
Have these white monks been brought into the way of peace,
Despising the world’s wisdom and the world’s desire,
Which from the body of this death bring no release?

Within their austere walls no voices penetrate;
A sacred silence only, as of death, obtains;
Nothing finds entry here of loud or passionate;
This quiet is the exceeding profit of their pain:

From many lands they came, in divers fiery ways;
Each knew at last the vanity of earthly joys;
And one was crowned with thorns, and one was crowned with bays,
And each was tired at last of the world’s foolish noise.

It was not theirs with Dominic to preach God’s holy wrath,
They were too stern to bear sweet Francis’ gentle sway;
Theirs was a higher calling and a steeper path,
To dwell alone with Christ, to meditate and pray.

A cloistered company, they are companionless,
None knoweth here the secret of his brother’s heart:
They are but come together for more loneliness,
Whose bond is solitude and silence all their part.

O beatific life! Who is there shall gainsay,
Your great refusal’s victory, your little loss,
Deserting vanity for the more perfect way,
The sweeter service of the most dolorous Cross.

Ye shall prevail at last! Surely ye shall prevail!
Your silence and austerity shall win at last:
Desire and mirth, the world’s ephemeral lights shall fail,
The sweet star of your queen is never overcast.

We fling up flowers and laugh, we laugh across the wine;
With wine we dull our souls and careful strains of art;
Our cups are polished skulls round which the roses twine:
None dares to look at Death who leers and lurks apart.

Move on, white company, whom that has not sufficed!
Our viols cease, our wine is death, our roses fail:
Pray for our heedlessness, O dwellers with the Christ!
Though the world fall apart, surely ye shall prevail.

Mount Grace and The Lady Chapel

Of course it makes sense that when English Heritage posts information about 10 women from that country's history with connections to its various properties and attractions, some former monasteries or friaries would be mentioned. In this post from earlier this year (in March), the author starts with St. Hilda of Whitby--so that brings up Whitby Abbey; then Margery Kempe with her connection to Hailes Abbey AND Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire. The article concludes with the life of Gertrude Bell and Mount Grace Priory again:

Our rundown ends with a woman who maybe ‘made it happen’ more than anybody else in the list, but will soon lose her claim to being ‘lesser-known’ thanks to two new films, Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman . . . and a documentary, Letters from Baghdad. After a fairly conventional upper class upbringing in County Durham, London, and then at Oxford University – with frequent country house weekends at her grandfather’s house, Mount Grace Priory – Gertrude Bell embarked on the travels that would occupy her extraordinary life. After long periods in Bucharest and Tehran, two round-the-world trips, and a number of unprecedented mountaineering expeditions, Bell became obsessed with the Middle East. Years of cultural immersion, writing and archaeological study alongside figures including T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) followed, before she was recruited by British Intelligence during the First World War. Her expertise, and Lawrence’s, exerted a huge influence on British policy in the region, and both were invited to help determine the boundaries of the British mandate and the fates of nascent states such as Iraq in the aftermath of the war.

In addition to being one of the architects of its eventual borders, Bell became a powerful force in Iraqi politics; she could even be described as its kingmaker when her preferred choice, Faisal, was crowned King of Iraq in August 1921. Her focus soon returned to archaeology, however, and she became Honorary Director of Antiquities in Iraq, establishing its National Museum. It opened shortly before her death, in 1926. She has been described as ‘one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection’.

Mount Grace Priory was a Carthusian house dedicated to the House of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Nicholas and founded by Thomas Holland, the First Duke of Surrey, in 1398. Mount Grace was well known for its preservation of great works of English spirituality.

Like the Carthusians of the Charterhouse of London and its priories at Beauvale and Epworth/ Axholme, some of the hermit monks at Mount Grace refused to take Henry VIII's Oath of Succession and thus were imprisoned by Henry. When the last prior at Mount Grace submitted the priory to Thomas Cromwell, Henry's Vice-Regent in spiritual matters, the hermit monks were released.

Where once there were nine Carthusian houses in England (two in Somerset--Witham and Hinton; two in Yorkshire--Kingston upon Hull and Mount Grace, Coventry in Warwickshire, Sheen in Surrey, Beauvale in Nottinghamshire, Epworth in Lincolnshire and the Charterhouse in London), now there is only one: St. Hugh's Charterhouse, Parkminster, West Sussex. The first Carthusian Charterhouse in England was founded by King Henry II in reparation for the murder of St Thomas a Becket. Just remember, the Carthusians were never, ever accused of any violations of their rule: they were exemplars of the monastic/hermetic vocation and Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell DESTROYED THEM ANYWAY! Yes, those capital letters are well earned: I am shouting on the internet.

After Emancipation in 1829 and the Restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850, the order returned to England in 1873.

From Mount Grace Priory, the separate Lady Chapel survived:

In 1515 a former Franciscan, Thomas Parkinson, entered the hermitage at the Lady Chapel, provided for by Katharine of Aragon, after whom the hotel in Osmotherley is named. He appears to have remained there until the dissolution of Mount Grace Priory in 1539. At that time the lands and buildings of the Priory passed into the possession of Sir James Strangways. Meanwhile, John Wilson, the last Prior of Mount Grace, was granted a pension and given the Lady Chapel in perpetuity. Following a brief period of exile during the reign of Edward VI, he returned to England with the accession of Queen Mary and entered the restored Charterhouse at Sheen, where he died. It is thought that by this time the chapel was unroofed and in ruins. However, it appears that a member of the Wilson family continued to hold the Lady Chapel and a Wilson was caught on pilgrimage there in 1611.

Despite the ruinous state, the Lady Chapel continued to attract pilgrims to a degree that alarmed the authorities in York, and on the eve of Little Lady Day, 7 September 1614, sixteen people were arrested and subsequently confessed to having prayed at the chapel.

Among those visiting the Lady Chapel were sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, come to pray for their foundress, Mary Ward, who was gravely ill. Upon her recovery, she too made a pilgrimage to the chapel in thanksgiving. At the time one of the Sisters wrote: ‘The Chapel is to this day a [p]lace of great devotion, where many graces are granted, though so destroyed as only four walls remain without roof or cover; and… exposed to great winds. Yet there you shall find Catholics praying together for hours.’ Other pilgrims visiting the shrine during the Civil War period included the Jesuit priest John Robinson, who, three months after narrowly escaping the death penalty for a second time, wrote of returning ‘from a celebrated chapel of the Immaculate Virgin in the county of York’. This second escape, when actually on the scaffold, was the result of an order of Parliament bringing to an end the death penalty ‘for religion alone’.

Another Victim of the English Reformation

The Catholic Herald writes about the eclipse of St. Hugh of Lincoln, brought about by the English Reformation:

A leading figure in the 12th century proto-Renaissance, Hugh of Lincoln has suffered a spectacular historical decline, going from being one of the most famous saints in English history at one point to a virtual unknown today.

He was born in Avalon in southern France around 1135. His father was the local lord and a soldier, who later retired to a monastery near Grenoble. Hugh’s mother died when he was sent to boarding school, becoming a religious novice at 15 and a deacon four years later.

In 1159, Hugh was sent to a nearby Benedictine monastery in Saint-Maximin, after which he left the order to enter the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery of the Carthusian order, just outside Grenoble.

In this famously austere environment he rose to become procurator, before being sent to Witham Charterhouse priory in Somerset, the first of the Carthusian houses in England. . . .

Then, in 1186, he was chosen as Bishop of Lincoln, a role in which he excelled. Generous and kind to his flock, he was also firm in standing up to the Crown. He also helped to improve education in the country and protected the Jews of Lincoln during the persecutions that begun during the Lionheart’s reign.

He also rebuilt Lincoln Cathedral, which had been damaged in 1186, and consecrated St Giles’s in Oxford in 1200. But he was also overworked, taking on the thankless task of being a diplomat for the new king, Richard’s appalling brother, John, and he died on November 16 1200.

Canonised 20 years later, St Hugh was very well known in the later medieval period but became less so after the Reformation.

He is the patron of sick children, shoemakers and swans.

David Farmer's 1985 biography is still probably the most reliable source. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

A magnificent golden shrine contained his relics, and Lincoln became the most celebrated centre of pilgrimage in the north of England. It is not known what became of St. Hugh's relics at the Reformation; the shrine and its wealth were a tempting bait to Henry VIII, who confiscated all its gold, silver and precious stones, "with which all the simple people be moch deceaved and broughte into greate supersticion and idolatrye". . . . In the Carthusian Order he is second only to St. Bruno, and the great modern Charterhouse at Parkminster, in Sussex, is dedicated to him.

St. Hugh of Lincoln, pray for us!

St. Hugh of Lincoln, Carthusian and Bishop

Except that this is Sunday, today, November 17 is the feast of St Hugh of Lincoln. According to this site:

Hugh of Lincoln was the son of William, Lord of Avalon. He was born at Avalon Castle in Burgundy and was raised and educated at a convent at Villard-Benoit after his mother died when he was eight. He was professed at fifteen, ordained a deacon at nineteen, and was made prior of a monastery at Saint-Maxim. While visiting the Grande Chartreuse with his prior in 1160. It was then he decided to become a Carthusian there and was ordained. After ten years, he was named procurator and in 1175 became Abbot of the first Carthusian monastery in England. This had been built by King Henry II as part of his penance for the murder of Thomas Becket.

His reputation for holiness and sanctity spread all over England and attracted many to the monastery. He admonished Henry for keeping Sees vacant to enrich the royal coffers. Income from the vacant Sees went to the royal treasury. He was then named bishop of the eighteen year old vacant See of Lincoln in 1186 - a post he accepted only when ordered to do so by the prior of the Grande Chartreuse. Hugh quickly restored clerical discipline, labored to restore religion to the diocese, and became known for his wisdom and justice.

He was one of the leaders in denouncing the persecution of the Jews that swept England, 1190-91, repeatedly facing down armed mobs and making them release their victims. He went on a diplomatic mission to France for King John in 1199, visiting the Grande Chartreuse, Cluny, and Citeaux, and returned from the trip in poor health. A few months later, while attending a national council in London, he was stricken and died two months later at the Old Temple in London on November 16. He was canonized twenty years later, in 1220, the first Carthusian to be so honored.

The Charterhouse St. Hugh of Lincoln led was at Witham in Somerset and this site provides details of St. Hugh's founding, really of the priory, since so little had been done when he arrived:

It was probably in 1179 (fn. 83) that at the request of Henry II a few Carthusian monks, how many we do not know, left their home near Grenoble to found in England the first house of their order. Norbert (fn. 84) came as the leader of the band and the first prior of the new house and with him Aynard and one Gerard of Nevers. But no preparations had been made for them, the villein tenants did not welcome them, for they were foreigners, nor did they agree, except after compensation, to be removed from their houses and lands. For the monks themselves no shelter had been provided. So very soon Prior Norbert gave up in despair and returned to Carthusia, regarding it as impossible to establish a house there unless they had more support than the king seemed disposed to give. In succession to him another, whose name is not given, was sent forth, and he died soon after from exposure and the severity of the climate. Then it was that Henry II took up the matter with some earnestness. He was arranging a marriage for his son John with Agnes the daughter of Humbert III Count of Maurienne and he asked the latter's advice concerning the difficulties at Witham. Count Humbert mentioned Hugh of Avalon, already the foremost of the monks of Carthusia, as the man most likely to succeed, though he warned Henry how he was valued, and how difficult it would be to get him to leave his monastery and come to England. Henry nevertheless persevered and sent Reginald, Bishop of Bath, and others on the errand to the monastery to ask definitely for Hugh of Avalon. At first the prior was unwilling to part with him, (fn. 85) for he was procurator of the house and much valued, and Hugh on his part regarding himself as unfit to undertake the task, definitely refused his consent; but the Bishop of Grenoble, John de Sassenage, had been won over, probably by Bishop Reginald, and at his entreaty the prior gave way and Hugh of Avalon started for England. On his arrival, which seems to have been in 1180, he found that nothing had been done at Witham and all practically had to be begun towards the new foundation. He stipulated that the tillers of the soil, the poor villein tenants, should receive no loss in being compelled to change their abode, and he endeavoured to persuade the king to indemnify them for the houses they had built, which now had to be pulled down. Certainly he seems to have set about the work in earnest, obtaining only after constant pressure on Henry II the necessary means. He is said to have built houses for the monks and the lay brethren, and the metrical life of St. Hugh records that he built the walls of the chapel and vaulted it in stone. The existing church at Witham is generally regarded as the church of the Conversi or lay brethren. The walls seem older than the time of Hugh, and apparently had buttresses attached to them for the purpose of strengthening them to carry the weight of the stone roof.

The last prior and 12 monks surrendered Witham on the 15th of March in 1539, received their pensions--and avoided the fate of many of the Carthusians of the Charterhouse of London, and the priories at Beauvale and Axholme.

St. Bruno and the Carthusian Order

I have often posted about the Carthusian Order and its English Reformation martyrs on this blog. Today we celebrate the feast of the order's founder, St. Bruno of Cologne:

Born in Cologne around 1030, he begins studying at the school of the Cathedral of Reims at an early age. Made a "doctor", Canon of the Cathedral Chapter, he is made the Rector of the University in 1056. He was one of the most remarkable scholars and teacher of his time "a prudent man whose word was rich in meaning."

He finds himself less and less at ease in a city where scandal has little affect towards the clergy and the Bishop himself. After having fought, not without success, against this disorder, Bruno feels the desire of a life more completely given to God alone.

After an attempt at a solitary life of short duration, he enters the region of Grenoble, of which the Bishop, the future Saint Hugues, offers him a solitary site in the mountains of his diocese. In June 1084, the Bishop himself leads Bruno and six of his companions in the primitive valley of Chartreuse, where the Order eventually gets its name from. They build a hermitage, consisting of a few log cabins opening towards a gallery which allows them access to the communal areas of the community -- church, refectory, and chapter room -- without having to suffer too much from intemperate conditions.

After six years of a pleasant solitary life, Bruno is called by Pope Urban II to the service of the Holy See. Not thinking of being able to continue without him, his community first thinks of separating, but it allows itself to be convinced to follow in the life that he first formed. Advisor to the Pope, Bruno is ill at ease a the Pontifical Court. He only lives in Rome for a few short months. With the Pope's blessing, he establishes a new hermitage in the forests of Calabria, in the south of Italy, with a few new companions. There he dies 6 October 1101.

I note this on the website: "Liturgical celebration does not have any pastoral intent. This explains why those outside the Order are not admitted to participate at the offices or the Mass celebrated in the churches of our monasteries. Because of our call to solitude, visits are limited to the family members of the monk (2 days a year) and to those who feel called to our life, whom we call retreatants."--so when St. Thomas More spent any time with the Carthusians of the Charterhouse of London, it would have been as a retreatant. Note also how much Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley, at al, were interrupting the solitude of the Carthusians.

There is a Charterhouse in England today: St. Hugh at Parkminster (make sure you have the sound turned on your computer; the site comes with chant!) It was founded in 1873 and the house originally had two houses from the Continent to accommodate. Their site includes a gift shop, with this book about the Beauvale martyrs of the English Reformation.

The Carthusian Martyrs' Story in 1535, Continued

On June 19, 1535, the second group of Carthusians were executed: St. Humphrey Middlemore, St. William Exmew and St. Sebastian Newdigate. Arrested on May 25, they had been imprisoned in Marshalea for about a fortnight before their trial at Westminster on June 11. The three were taken before the Privy Council before their trial, refused again to swear Henry's oaths and were condemned to death. While in prison, they were chained at the neck and hand and foot against pillars, unable to move. Thus Sebastian Newdigate reportedly received Henry VIII, who offered him riches and preferment if he would swear the oaths. The outcome of the trial on June 11 was certain, of course, and they were found guilty of treason and sentenced to being hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Reports indicate that they went to their deaths as to a feast, with eagerness and joy!

As I mentioned before on the post about St. Robert Southwell, in this case, it is rather difficult not to unleash an attack of opprobrium against Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Bedyll.

You are Henry VIII, a powerful king and yet just a man. Can you imagine standing before a man you know (Sebastian Newdigate) bound to a pillar hand and foot? He is thirsty, hungry, and weak. Can you see yourself offering him freedom and honor if he does what you want him to do?

If you can, tremble.

Image source: a plaque near the site of the High Altar in the Charterhouse in London.

Second Round of Deaths Among the Carthusians in Newgate Prison

On June 15, 1537, the second group of those Carthusians held in Newgate Prison, without charge, or trial, or sentence, or any other mark of justice except for the will of Henry VIII, began to die. Brothers Thomas Scryven and Thomas Redyng died on June 15 and June 16--Dom Richard Bere did not die till August 9, and the priest Thomas Johnson not until September 20, so they must have received some nutrition, according to the King's great mercy.
One survived this starvation ordeal: Brother William Horne. He was finally attainted by Parliament in 1540 and executed at Tyburn on August 4, 1540.

In his book Saints and Scholars, David Knowles eulogizes the Newgate prison group:

The third and most numerous band was denied even the dignity of a formal trial and execution. They had asked to live as hidden servants of Christ; they died, silent witnesses to his words, hidden from the eyes of all . . .

Rarely indeed in the annals of the Church have any confessors of the faith endured trials longer, more varied or more bitter then these unknown monks. They had left the world, as they hoped, for good; but the children of the world, to gain their private ends, had violated their solitude . . . When bishops and theologians paltered or denied they were not ashamed to confess the Son of Man. They died faithful witnesses to the Catholic teaching that Christ had built his Church upon a rock.

The Carthusians in Newgate Begin to Die

On June 6 in 1537, the slow agonizing deaths of the Carthusians held in Newgate Prison began with the laybrother, William Greenwood.  On June 8, deacon and choir monk John Davy died, on June 9 and 10, two more laybrothers, Robert Salt and Walter Pierson died, while choir monk Thomas Green died on the 10th--and then there is a gap until June 15.

What a sad duty their jailers had, checking each of the Carthusians daily for death from dehydration and starvation, taking one or two bodies away each day. The monks and laybrothers were bound to pillars, hand, foot and at the neck. As this website notes, they had survived for a time because of assistance from one of St. Thomas More's wards:

But Henry was bothered. He feared more rebellion from his intransigently Catholic people. Although he had not yet allowed the country to drift too far into heresy, the sensus catholicus of the people was outraged by his actions. He could not inflame such rage by another display of martyrdom. And so the Carthusians remained in Newgate. They remained, unfed and unattended. They were left to rot, and rot they did. Their names? John Davy, Thomas Green, Thomas Johnston and Richard Bere (choir monks) and William Greenwood, Robert Salt, Walter Peerson, Thomas Scryven, Thomas Reding, and Willam Horne (conversi, or brothers). Bound hand and foot, iron collars about their throats, they were chained to posts in a single cell and abandoned. Margaret Clement, the adopted daughter of St Thomas More, for a while managed to gain entrance to the cell (largely on account of the fact that her husband was physician to the King — and due to her disguise, as a milk-maid), and there fed them what food and water she could, and cleaned them for their own filth. This was discovered and she then attempted to find a way in from above, breaking through the roof of their cell and lowering food to their mouths. Eventually, too, this was not possible.

And so the good fathers and brothers died together in that dark and fetid place, one by one in prayerful silence, abandoned by Man but not by God. Greenwood, then Davy, then Salt; Peerson and Green upon the same day, mid-June; Scryven and Reding some days later. Somehow, Richard Bere (the nephew of a former Abbot of Glastonbury) survived until August 9th. Astonishingly, Thomas Johnson was still alive by September 20th, some sixteen weeks after his incarceration. He was removed to the Tower of London where he languished for a further two-and-a-half years before being martyred at Tyburn in the company of St Thomas More's son-in-law, Giles Heron, on 4th August 1540. These are all accounted Blessed by the Church. May they all pray for us who are unworthy of them.

The reason we know so much detail about their suffering at Newgate is that one of their fellow Carthusians, Maurice Chauncy, had taken the Oath of Supremacy and was still at large in England, although he soon went to Bruges.

He regretted taking the Oath and wrote several works on the fate of those who refused the oath--works that made the usually anti-Catholic James Anthony Froude sympathetic to them. Those works include: Historia aliquot nostri saeculi Martyrum in Anglia, etc. (Mainz, 1550, and Bruges, 1583); Commentariolus de vitae ratione et martyrio octodecim Cartusianorum qui in Anglia sub rege trucidati sunt (Ghent, 1608), a portion of which was reprinted; Vitae Martyrum Cartusianorum aliquot, qui Londini pro Unitate Ecclesiae adversus haereticos, etc. (Milan, 1606); see Historia aliquot martyrum Anglorum maxime octodecim Cartusianorum: sub Rege Henrico Octavo ob fidei confessionem et summi pontificis jura vindicanda interemptorum a V. Patre Domno Mauritio Chauncy conscripta; nunc ad exemplar primae editionis Moguntinae anno 1550 excusae a monachis Cartusiae S. Hugonis in Anglia denuo edita, Londini, 1888; G.W.S. Curtis (ed.), Maurice Chauncy, The Passion and Martyrdom of the Holy English Carthusian Fathers: A Short Narrative, SPCK, London, 1935.

Chauncy returned to England during the reign of Mary I and briefly revived the Carthusian Priory of Sheen, which had been surrendered in 1539. Upon Elizabeth I's accession, Chancy and the others fled to Louvain. Chauncy died on July 2, 1581, about age 72. He might have agreed with the line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Cowards die many times before their deaths;/The valiant never taste of death but once."

The Benedictines, Carmelites and the Carthusians at the Charterhouse

I don't want to let May get away without mentioning again the commemoration of the Carthusian Martyrs at the Charterhouse in London on May 4. According to the Independent Catholic News site,
Members of the Carmelite Family in Britain to part in events in London to commemorate the Carthusian Martyrs of the Reformation, and reflected together on the spirituality of the Carthusian Order last week.

On 4 May 1535 the prior of Charterhouse, John Houghton, was executed at Tyburn for refusing to accept Henry VIII's claim to be supreme governor of the Church in England. Houghton was killed alongside two fellow Carthusian monks, and two other Catholic clerics. Over the following five years a further 15 Carthusians were executed in London and in York, as well as many other Catholics who refused to accept King Henry's break with the Roman Catholic Church. The Carthusian monastery in London, and all other communities of religious orders in England and wales, were dissolved as part of the English Reformation.

The Carthusian monastery in London became an almshouse for elderly men, known as Sutton's Hospital in Charterhouse. To this day it remains an almshouse, mostly for retired Anglican clergy, known as the Brothers of Charterhouse. Since 2005 Sutton's Hospital in Charterhouse has commemorated the martyrdom of the Carthusian Martyrs on 4 May which is celebrated as the feast of the Martyrs of the English Reformation in both the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches.

Substantial portions of the former Carthusian monastery, including the cloister remain at Sutton's Hospital in Charterhouse. On the evening of 4 May several members of the Carmelite Family - mostly from the 'Carmel in the City' Carmelite Spirituality Group in London - attended this year's commemoration there, together with Benedictine sisters from Tyburn Convent where a shrine commemorates the martyrs executed at the Tyburn Tree by present-day Marble Arch. Anglican priests, clergy and laity from the Roman Catholic and Methodist Churches also took part in the commemorative service.

The service began in the chapel, where the Preacher of Charterhouse, Reverend Canon Hugh Williams, introduced the service by recalling the story of St. John Houghton and his companions. Hymns were sung and Psalms were prayed, and the Mother General of the Tyburn Nuns read an extract from a medieval Carthusian spiritual text.

The congregation then moved into Chapel Court where a stone slab marks the site of the high altar in the Carthusian monastery. On the slab was a miniature model of the Tyburn Tree. Here the 'Passion of the Carthusian Martyrs' - an account of the final days of the London Carthusians by Dom. Maurice Chauncy - was read aloud.

After a period of silence, Brothers of Charterhouse came forward and placed a rose in the model of the Tyburn Tree, as the preacher called out the names of the martyrs.

Brothers of the Charterhouse placed roses in the Tyburn Tree. The names of the martyrs are engraved on a memorial behind the site of the high altar. The service concluded with further prayers, including the Russian Orthodox Contakion of the Dead.

There are photos of the events here. Holy Martyrs of the Carthusians, pray for us!

May 11, 1537: Hanging in Chains

Two of the Carthusians of the Charterhouse of London began their agonizing and slow death by being hung in chains from the York city battlements: Blessed John Rochester and Blessed James Walworth. They were beatified by Pope Leo XIII on the 20th of December in 1886 or 1888 (I've found two sources with two dates!).

After the first three Carthusian priors were executed on May 4, 1535, the next three leaders in line, Humphrey Middlemore, William Exmew and Sebastian Newdigate, were executed on June 19 that same year and these two monks were taken from London to the Charterhouse of St. Michael in Hull.

In the wake of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Rochester and Walworth were tried in York by Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk and found guilty of treason.

The Catholic Encyclopedia offers this detail about Blessed John Rochester:

Priest and martyr, born probably at Terling, Essex, England, about 1498; died at York, 11 May, 1537. He was the third son of John Rochester, of Terling, and Grisold, daughter of Walter Writtle, of Bobbingworth. He joined the Carthusians, was a choir monk of the Charterhouse in London, and strenuously opposed the new doctrine of the royal supremacy. He was arrested and sent a prisoner to the Carthusian convent at Hull. From there he was removed to York, where he was hung in chains. With him there suffered one James Walworth (?Wannert; Walwerke), Carthusian priest and martyr, concerning whom little or nothing is known. He may have been the "Jacobus Walwerke" who signed the Oath of Succession of 1534. John Rochester was beatified in 1888 by Leo XIII.


When Rowan Williams, who is resigning at the end of this year as Archbishop of Canterbury, remembered the Carthusian martyrs at the Charterhouse in London in 2010, he quoted H.F.M. Prescott's The Man on a Donkey and her description of Robert Aske's sufferings while hanging in chains, dying slowly by hunger, thirst, and exposure:

And towards the end of that extraordinary novel, we watch and listen to Robert Aske, the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, in his last anguished moments, hanging in chains from the Keep of the Castle in York: "God did not now nor would in any furthest future prevail. Once he had come and died. If he came again, again he would die, and again and so forever, by his own will, rendered powerless against the free and evil wills of men. Then Aske met the full assault of darkness without reprieve of hoped for light, for God ultimately vanquished was no God at all. But yet, though God was not God, as the head of the dung worm turns, so his spirit turned blindly, gropingly, hopelessly loyal, towards that good, that holy, that merciful - which though not God, though vanquished - was still the last dear love of a vanquished and tortured man." . . . Robert Aske hangs in chains still, but (as Hilda Prescott's novel portrays it) a discovery has been made as he falls from level to level of despair and desire 'For now, yet with no greater fissure between then and now, and as a man's eyes are aware where no star was of the first star of night, now he was aware of One, vanquished God, Saviour who could as little save others as himself. But now, beside him and beyond, was nothing - and he was silence and light.'

Blessed martyrs of the Carthusians, pray for us!

May 4, Feast of the Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales

Today is the great feast honoring all of the Catholic Martyrs of the English Reformation--those canonized by Pope Paul VI and those beatified by Popes John Paul II, Pius XI, and Leo XIII--This feast was moved to this date in 2000 with a new liturgical calendar for the dioceses of England and Wales approved by the Vatican; then in 2010 it was elevated to a Feast (not just a Memorial). Moving it to May 4 meant that the feast is celebrated on the anniversary of the protomartyrs of the English Reformation, the Priors of the Carthusian order, a parish priest, and the confessor and chaplain of the Brigittine order at Syon Abbey. These five men, St. John Houghton, St. Augustine Webster, St. Robert Lawrence, Blessed John Haile, and St. Richard Reynolds, were brutally executed at Tyburn before a crowd of Court witnesses. Some sources even suggest that Henry VIII was there in disguise. Drawn on hurdles from the Tower of London (whence St. Thomas More saw them depart), they were hung and quartered while still alive.

Of the five, Blessed John Haile is much less known.This site, also the source of the icon depicted above, describes the circumstances of this parish priest's arrest and trial:

Blessed John Haile was the fourth Catholic who was murdered by Henry VIII in the year 1535, Vicar of Isleworth, or Thistleworth as it was then called, he was the first priest of the secular clergy who suffered in the cause of the Catholic religion. A fellow-priest named Feron or Fern, of Teddington, who was a young man, was his principal confidant. Haile complained to him in bitter terms of the King's cruelty in oppressing and spoiling the Church, declared that he was a heretic, compared him to the worst princes who had ever governed the country, and enlarged on the notorious vices of his private life, on his repudiation of Queen Catherine and his taking to himself " a wife of fornication."
All this was expressed by Haile in the most vehement and unmeasured language, and was taken down by Feron on paper. This memorandum was the so-called "slanderous bill" on which the martyr was tried and condemned to death.
Sentence of high treason was pronounced on both Haile and Feron. The latter received a pardon, and perhaps the same would have been extended to Haile, had his submission been deemed satisfactory by the Council. A more glorious end was before him, and he had the supreme honour of being numbered as the fourth of that holy company of martyrs who suffered for the Catholic Faith at Tyburn on the 4th of May, 1535.

I have posted about the Carthusians and St. Richard Reynolds before, and am glad to highlight this great martyr as well; he would not accept that his monarch could co-opt the position of Jesus Christ's Vicar on Earth--a position that Jesus Christ had founded and assigned to St. Peter and his successors! Remember that I am on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning and will talk about this feast of the Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales in the context of the great 20th century persecution of Catholicism in Mexico, which Graham Greene compared to the Elizabethan recusant era in England.

Tomorrow at the Charterhouse

Tomorrow, on the grounds of the former Carthusian Charterhouse in Smithfield, London, the annual ecumenical commemoration of the martyrdoms of St. John Houghton, St. Robert Lawrence, St. Alexander Webster, Carthusians, and also Blessed John Haile, Vicar and St. Richard Reynolds of Syon Brigettine Abbey will be held. According to the Charterhouse website:

Friday 4 May 2012

5.30pm in the Chapel of Sutton’s Hospital and Chapel Court
The Annual Ecumenical Commemoration of the Carthusian Martyrs
This year the Brothers of Charterhouse have invited the Sisters (Order of St Benedict) of the Tyburn Convent to take part in the Service.

In 2008, a similar service was held and Christopher Howse of The Telegraph posted a story about the event:

The Brothers are the pensioners – a little like Chelsea Pensioners – who live in Sutton's Hospital, the Jacobean almshouse founded on the remains of the Charterhouse. The ceremony last Sunday marked the ending of that earlier foundation. Outdoors in the westering sunlight, in the grassy Chapel Court, one old man after another walked forward and placed a single red rose in a wooden stand representing the former gallows tree at Tyburn. Each rose stood for a monk or associate of the Charterhouse who lost his life in the 1430s. As the names of the dead men were read aloud a blackbird sang in a tree overhead, only emphasising the background peacefulness of the setting.
The monks who'd lived at the Charterhouse in the Middle Ages were Carthusians, and their house was an offshoot of the Grand Chartreuse. The order was founded in 1084 by St Bruno. It is not for wimps. The monks get up in the middle of the night to pray. They don't eat meat. They are solitary and silent. Their monastery is cold. But as the remarkable film Into Great Silence shows, it is a happy life for those cut out for it.
In the early 16th century in London, the three most impressive groups of dedicated religious men were the Bridgettines at Syon, near Isleworth; the Observant Franciscans at Greenwich and Sheen (Richmond, Surrey); and the Carthusians. All three groups were clobbered when Henry VIII launched the dissolution of the monasteries.
Last Sunday was May 4, and on May 4, 1535, Dom John Houghton, the Prior of the Charterhouse, was hanged, together with Dom Augustine Webster, Prior of the Charterhouse at Axeholme, who had been visiting London, Father Richard Reynolds, a Bridgettine monk of Syon, and Sir John Hale, the rector of nearby Isleworth, an honest clergyman. By 1540 all the monks of the Charterhouse were dead or had fled. Some starved in Newgate.
The impressive point of Sunday's ceremony, preceded by Anglican Evensong beautifully sung by the Thomas Sutton Singers, is that it did not shy away from this old and terrible event. As one of the Brothers told me, "We used to just keep quiet about the Carthusians who has once lived here. It's better to acknowledge how they lived and died."

The Charterhouse in London is now an almshouse (shades of Trollope's The Warden!):

Charterhouse is a former Carthusian monastery in London, to the north of what is now Charterhouse Square. The building is formally known as Sutton’s Hospital in Charterhouse, and is a registered charity (number 207773). Since the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century the house has served as private mansion, a boys’ school and an almshouse, which it remains to this day.

If you want to become a brother at the Charterhouse, you do have to meet some qualifications:

• single men – bachelors, widowers, divorced
• those over 60 and under 80 years of age
• those of sound mind and in reasonable health – a medical assessment may be required
• those of good standing – three independent referees are required
• those with limited capital and income – confirmed by an accountant or solicitor
• those suited to community life
• those prepared to attend Chapel

The photo above is from London Remembers:

The Great Cloister of The London Charterhouse, 1371 - 1538, once occupied this ground. After Charterhouse School, 1611 - 1872, and Merchant Taylors' School, 1875 - 1933, it became the home of The Medical College of St Bartholomew's Hospital, since 1995 St Bartholomew's and The Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Remember those who lived, studied and taught here, especially Saint John Houghton, Prior of the London Charterhouse, who was martyred on 4 May 1535, and the Monks and Lay Brothers who, soon after him, suffered death and persecution.

May the cause of healing inspire all who study and teach here today.

I will follow up on this year's ecumenical service as news becomes available.