Blessed Nicholas Horner, Tailor and Martyr

While we're focusing on St. Thomas More's "A Godly Meditation" on the Son Rise Morning Show, I did not want to miss some of the great martyrs' and confessors' stories in Father Bowden's Mementoes this Lent. This one today, Blessed Nicholas Horner, is particularly affecting, as he suffered so much in prison and at the scaffold because of his loyalty to The Faith. And yet, he received many consolations:

A native of York, a tailor by trade and a zealous Catholic, he endeavoured, according to his ability, to persuade others to embrace the faith. Having come up to London to be cured of a wound in his leg, he was committed to Newgate for harbouring priests. There the heavy fetter on his leg and the deprivation of all medical aid rendered an amputation necessary. During the operation he sat upon a form, unbound, in silence, a priest the while ([Blessed John] Hewett [or Hewitt], who was afterwards himself a Martyr) holding his head, and he was further comforted by such a vivid apprehension of Christ bearing His Cross that he seemed to see it on His shoulders. Freed at the earnest suit of his friends, he worked at his trade at some lodgings at Smithfield. Again cast into Bridewell for harbouring priests, he was hung up by the wrists till he nearly died. At length condemned solely for making a jerkin for a priest, he was hanged in front of his lodging in Smithfield, 3 March 1590. On the night before his execution, finding him self overwhelmed with anguish, he betook him self to prayer, and perceived a bright crown of glory hanging over his head. Assured of its reality, he said: “O Lord, Thy will be mine,” and died with extraordinary signs of joy.

Father Bowden uses the title "The Vestments of Salvation" for this entry on March 4, and the Bible verse, "He hath clothed me with the garments of salvation" (Isaiah 61:10)

According to England's laws he was accused of two great offenses: encouraging others to become Catholic and assisting priests. The only thing he could be guilty of was making a jerkin (a kind of vest) for a priest! When Father Bowden wrote about him, Horner had been declared Venerable; Pope St. John Paul II beatified him with 84 other martyrs of England and Wales in 1987.

Blessed Nicholas Horner, pray for us!

Image Credit: (With Permission): Detail of a stained glass window in Tyburn Convent by Margaret Agnes Rope 

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!

Preview: Saints John Rigby and Anne Line

After our Labor Day holiday hiatus, I'll be back on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, September 14 (the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross) to talk about two more of the 40 Martyrs of England Wales, Saint John Rigby (1600) and Saint Anne Line (1601). Both of these lay martyrs had returned to the Catholic Church: Rigby was born and raised a Catholic and had attended Church of England services for a time but then stopped and went back to the practice of his Catholic faith--he would be called a revert. Line was a convert (along with her husband and brother) and had been denounced and renounced by her family.

St. John Rigby was martyred on June 21, 1600, was found guilty of being a convert to Catholicism. He denied that he was a convert, however, maintaining that he had been born and raised a Catholic. For a time he went to Church of England services to avoid paying the recusancy fines. He had been admonished by the Franciscan missionary priest, John Jones, had confessed, and been reconciled, so that was enough for the authorities:

Rigby was born circa 1570 at Harrock Hall, Eccleston, near Chorley, Lancashire, the fifth or sixth son of Nicholas Rigby, by his wife Mary (née Breres). In 1600 Rigby was working for Sir Edmund Huddleston, whose daughter Mrs. Fortescue was summoned to the Old Bailey for recusancy. Because she was ill, Rigby appeared for her, was compelled to confess his Catholicism, and sent to Newgate. The next day, the feast day of St Valentine, he signed a confession saying that since he had been reconciled to the Roman Catholic faith by Saint John Jones, a Franciscan priest, he had not attended Anglican services. He was sent back to Newgate and later transferred to the White Lion. Twice he was given the chance to recant, but twice refused. His sentence was carried out. He gave the executioner who helped him up to the cart a piece of gold, saying, "Take this in token that I freely forgive thee and others that have been accessory to my death." Rigby was executed by hanging [drawing and quartering] at St Thomas Waterings on June 21, 1600.

Saint John Jones, the priest who had reconciled Rigby, had suffered execution at the same place Rigby had died, St Thomas Waterings, two years earlier, on July 12, 1598.

As the Diocese of Shrewsbury reports his execution, it was brutal:

He kissed the rope as it was put around his neck and turned to address the crowd a final time. He was interrupted by the Sheriff’s deputy who asked him: “What traitors does thou know in England?”

“God is my witness, I know none,” was the saint’s reply.

The cart was sharply drawn away and the deputy ordered the hangman to cut down St John just moments later.

A young and healthy man, St John stood upright on his feet, startled but fully conscious. He was then thrown to the floor by his executioners, and was heard to say aloud: “God forgive you. Jesus receive my soul.”

The brutality with which he was butchered shocked many in a crowd inured to spectacles of cruelty. St John was held down by his arms and legs and a man, described as a porter, stood on his throat while he was disembowelled in full consciousness. As one of the executioners reached for his heart, he thrust off the others with his arms. They cut off his head and quartered him, disposing of the parts of his body throughout Southwark.

“The people, going away, complained very much of the barbarity of the execution,” wrote Bishop Challoner, in Memoirs of Missionary Priests, “and generally all sorts bewailed his death.”

Anne Heigham Line was a convert to Catholicism; she and her brother William Heigham were disinherited and disowned by their Calvinist father. In 1586 she married Roger Line, another disinherited convert. Not long after Anne and Roger married, he and her brother William were arrested for attending Mass and were exiled from England. Roger lived in Flanders and died in 1594.

Father John Gerard SJ, author of the famous book Autobiography of an Elizabethan Priest, asked Anne to manage two different safe houses for Jesuits, even though she was ill, but because she was destitute, surviving on teaching and sewing. She was arrested on the Feast of the Presentation, February 2, 1601, when Father Francis Page was celebrating Mass; he escaped with her help. She was tried on February 26, carried to court in a chair, where she admitted joyfully that she had helped Father Page escape and only regretted that she had not been able to help even more priests escape!

She was hanged to death at Tyburn in London on February 27 and repeated her statement from court before her execution: "I am sentenced to die for harboring a Catholic priest, and so far I am from repenting for having so done, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand." Two priests, Father Roger Filcock and Father Mark Barkworth, paid tribute to her before their own executions, drawn, hung, and quartered. Father Filcock kissed her dead hand and the hem of her dress as she still hung from the gibbet and proclaimed, “You have gotten the start of us, sister, but we will follow you as quickly as we may.”

Saint John Rigby, pray for us!

Saint Anne Line, pray for us!

This Morning: St. Swithun Wells on the Son Rise Morning Show

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. Anna Mitchell and I will discuss Saint Swithun Wells, a recusant Catholic known to authorities who was executed on December 10, 1591 for NOT attending Mass in his home on All Saints Day.

Please listen live here on the Sacred Heart Radio website; the podcast will be archived here. 

His execution by hanging, with two other laymen, and two priests, who were meted out the full agony of hanging, drawing, and quartering, must have been remarkable scene. On Friday this week I'll preview the stories of the two priests who suffered with him that day on Gray's Inn Road. As remarkable at Saint Swithun's interaction with Topcliffe was, Saints Edmund Gennings and Polydore Plasden had even more extraordinary conversations with Sir Walter Raleigh and Topcliffe--all while preparing themselves to suffer excruciating executions!

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

Preview: St. Swithun Wells, Recusant Layman

On Monday, August 3, Anna Mitchell and I will talk about Saint Swithun Wells in our series on the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales on the Son Rise Morning Show (about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central on Sacred Heart Radio).

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

The layman Saint Swithun Wells was hanged to death on December 10, 1591--a bloody day in the history of Catholic Recusancy in Elizabethan England. Seven English Catholics suffered brutal execution on December 10, 1591: three priests and four laymen, including Wells. One of the priests, Saint Eustace White and a layman, Blessed Brian Lacey were executed at Tyburn Tree. The other five suffered near Gray's Inn.

Wells was known to authorities as a recusant and they were probably watching his London house. According to the Oxford Reference website, Wells was

Born at Bambridge (Hants.) of a wealthy country family, Swithun Wells, a well-educated and travelled man, who was also poet, musician, and sportsman, lived a quiet country life until middle age. At one time he was tutor to the household of the earl of Southampton, later he married and then founded his own school at Monkton Farleigh (Wilts.). In 1582 he came under suspicion for his popish sympathies and gave up his school. He actively supported priests, organizing their often dangerous journeys from one safe and friendly house to another. He and his wife, though impoverished, moved to Gray's Inn Fields in 1586 and made their house a centre of hospitality to recusants. Wells was twice arrested and interrogated, but released for lack of evidence.

The Catholic Encyclopedia adds some details about his previous arrests:

On 4 July, 1586, he was discharged from Newgate on bail given by his nephew, Francis Parkins of "Weton", Berkshire. On 9 August, 1586, he was examined for supposed complicity in the Babington plot, and on 30 November, 1586, he was discharged from the Fleet prison. He was again examined 5 March, 1587, and on this occasion speaks of the well known recusant, George Cotton of Warblington, Hampshire, as his cousin.

He was indeed fortunate to have survived being questioned about the Babington Plot in 1586. The first executions of those convicted in that plot to replace Elizabeth I with Mary, Queen of Scots (who was her prisoner) were so brutal that authorities toned down the cruel gore the next day. 

In 1591, however, St. Swithun Wells was hanged for NOT attending a Catholic Mass in Elizabethan England. His wife Alice attended the Mass held in his house near Gray's Inn in London on November 1, 1591 (All Saints Day!), but he wasn't there when the priest hunters burst in during the Mass celebrated by Father Edmund Gennings. Those attending held the pursuivants off. His wife, Fathers Gennings and Polydore Plasden, and two other laymen, John Mason and Sidney Hodgson were arrested at the end of the Mass. Swithun was arrested when he came home. At his trial, he said he wished he could have attended that Mass and that was enough for the Elizabethan authorities. All of those arrested on November 1 were found guilty under 27 Elizabeth Cap 2 (Act Against Jesuits, Seminary Priests and Other Such Disobedient Subjects) and sentenced to death. Authorities then built a scaffold right outside his house for the executions.

Gray's Inn, at the intersection of High Holborn and Gray's Inn Road, by the way, is one of the four Inns of Court in London, where future barristers studied and trained. Recusant Catholics secretly studied there, so the Well's house was well situated for helping priests and hosting Mass. The scaffold outside his house and the presence of dignitaries at his execution and that of the two priests and two other laymen--more about that next week--would have been a powerful warning to the recusants in the area. We're watching you and we will punish you.

The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that Wells was an admirer and follower of Saint Thomas More, and he displayed some of that saint's sense of humor on the way to the scaffold and as he contended with Richard Topcliffe and a Church of England minister:

As he was led to the scaffold, Wells saw an old friend in the crowd and called out to him: "Farewell, dear friend, farewell to all hawking, hunting, and old pastimes. I am now going a better way"!" After he had climbed the ladder, Topcliffe called for a minister, who attempted to persuade Wells to confess to following false doctrine and traitorous priests. Wells turned and responded, "although I heard you say somewhat, yet it is but one doctor's opinion, and he also a very young one." The young minister was so daunted that he had no reply. Topcliffe then baited Wells, saying that "Dog-bolt Papists! you follow the Pope and his Bulls; believe me, I think some bulls begot you".Wells responded in kind: "if we have bulls to our fathers, thou hast a cow to thy mother".  He then immediately begged pardon and asked Topcliffe not to provoke him when he was trying to focus on other matters, hoping that this persecutor and torturer of Catholics would convert. He said, "I pray God make you a Paul of a Saul, of a bloody persecutor one of the Catholic Church's children."

John Hungerford Pollen's book Acts of English Martyrs Hitherto Unpublished, is the source of this dialogue. More and Wells must have "met merrily in heaven"!

St. Swithun's wife Alice received a reprieve from her death sentence, but died in prison in 1602.

Saint Swithun Wells, pray for us!

Image Credit: Statue of Saint Swithun Wells in Saint Etheldreda's, Ely Place in London.

This Morning: Saints Margaret Clitherow and Margaret Ward

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 (or Anna Mitchell) and I will discuss Saints Margaret Clitherow and Margaret Ward, two laywomen who suffered martyrdom because they sheltered and protected priests.

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ composed this unfinished poem in honor of Saint Margaret Clitherow; at the end of the poem he alludes to Margaret possibly being pregnant when she was executed:

GOD’S counsel cólumnar-severe
But chaptered in the chief of bliss
Had always doomed her down to this –
Pressed to death. He plants the year;
The weighty weeks without hands grow,
Heaved drum on drum; but hands also
Must deal with Margaret Clitheroe.

The very victim would prepare.
Like water soon to be sucked in
Will crisp itself or settle or spin
So she; one sees that here and there
She mends the ways she means to go.
The last thing Margaret’s fingers sew
Is a shroud for Margaret Clitheroe.

The Christ-ed beauty of her mind
Her mould of features mated well.
She was admired. The spirit of hell
Being to her virtue clinching-blind
No wonder therefore was not slow
To the bargain of its hate to throw
The body of Margaret Clitheroe.

Great Thecla, the plumed passionflower,
Next Mary mother of maid and nun
– – – – – – – – – – – – – –
And every saint of bloody hour
And breath immortal thronged that show;
Heaven turned its starlight eyes below
To the murder of Margaret Clitheroe.

She was a woman, upright, outright;
Her will was bent at God. For that
Word went she should be crushed out flat
– – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Fawning fawning crocodiles
Days and days came round about
With tears to put her candle out;
They wound their winch of wicked smiles
To take her; while their tongues would go
God lighten your dark heart – but no,
Christ lived in Margaret Clitheroe.

She held her hands to, like in prayer;
They had them out and laid them wide
(Just like Jesus crucified);
They brought their hundredweights to bear.
Jews killed Jesus long ago
God’s son; these (they did not know)
God’s daughter Margaret Clitheroe.

When she felt the kill-weights crush
She told His name times-over three;
I suffer this she said for Thee.
After that in perfect hush
For a quarter of an hour or so
She was with the choke of woe. –
It is over, Margaret Clitheroe.

She caught the crying of those Three,
The Immortals of the eternal ring,
The Utterer, Utterèd, Uttering,
And witness in her place would she.
She not considered whether or no
She pleased the Queen and Council. So
To the death with Margaret Clitheroe!

Within her womb the child was quick.
Small matter of that then! Let him smother
And wreck in ruins of his mother. . . .

The repetition of "Margaret Clitheroe" at the end of each stanza is quite effective. Perhaps when Hopkins got to the point of the baby in her womb being crushed, he could go no further?

Hopkins did not write a poem about St. Margaret Ward, but the Diocese of Shrewsbury honors her among the saints and martyrs of the area:

St Margaret is today honoured in the Diocese of Shrewsbury. The saint is depicted in panels in St Joseph’s, Sale (above left), and St Alban’s, Wallasey. There was a wooden statue of her in St Laurence’s Church, Birkenhead, and in Sale a school and a church bear her name, as does another in Holmes Chapel.

Large statues of St Margaret and Blessed John Roche still stand today in St Etheldreda’s Church in Holborn, London.

St. Margaret Clitherow, pray for us!
St. Margaret Ward, pray for us!

Preview: Two Martyrs Named Margaret

On Monday, July 27, we'll continue our series on the Son Rise Morning Show with two more lay martyrs, Saint Margaret Clitherow and Saint Margaret Ward, two magnificent Catholic heroines who suffered during the reign of "Good Queen Bess" because they defended Catholic priests.

Saint Margaret Clitherow, The Pearl of York, was pressed or crushed to death on Good Friday (according to the Old Calendar, since England had not accepted the Catholic Gregorian reforms), March 25, 1586. Because she had refused to enter any plea when brought to trial--not cooperating with authorities--she was condemned to this unusual method of execution.

Clitherow was laid supine on the ground, a small stone placed beneath her back. She was naked, except for the shift placed on top of her. Her arms were outstretched like Jesus’ on the cross and tied to stakes, and the executioners placed a door on top of her. Then the executioners placed nearly 700 pounds of rocks on top of the door. She was crushed to death in about 15 minutes, speaking the name of Jesus as her ribs broke: “Jesu! Jesu! Jesu! Have mercy on me!”

She was born Margaret Middleton in 1556, married John Clitherow, a wealthy butcher and widower, when she was 18; at age 21, she became a Catholic. Her husband paid her fines when she refused to attend Church of England services, but he could not prevent her from being arrested and jailed for what authorities considered obstinate “popery” (her refusal to conform to the official national church). While she was in prison, however, she learned how to read and write.

John had children from his first marriage, Henry and Thomas; John had also allowed her to raise them as Catholics, as well as her children Anne and William. She hired a Catholic tutor named Stapleton to teach the children the faith. One of their sons, Henry, left York to attend a Catholic school on the Continent.

John Clitherow became a chamberlain of the city of York and was outraged when the authorities questioned him about his family’s faith and his son’s absence. John’s own brother William was a Catholic priest, so he was vulnerable, in spite of his public conformity to the Anglican church, especially when his wife refused to conform.

On March 10, 1586, the authorities raided the Clitherow household and found the tutor, Anne, William and neighborhood children doing their lessons. One little boy, from Flanders, after being threatened with torture, told the authorities about the priests who visited the household and showed them where the vestments were hidden. They arrested Margaret and accused her of breaking the laws against attending Mass and harboring Catholic priests.

Most of the sources I've read indicate that Clitherow refused to enter at plea at trial because she knew that her husband and her children would be called as witnesses and might be threatened with or even suffer torture; also her husband's standing in the community meant that his friends and colleagues would be on the jury to cast the verdict against her.

Being sentenced to peine forte et dure (“hard and forceful punishment”) was usually a three-day process: the first two days the prisoner would be laid down on the ground with as much weight laid upon her as she was able to bear and left thus without food or drink. If she entered her plea during the first two days, the weights would be removed and her trial would continue. If she still wouldn't enter a plea under this torture, she would be crushed to death on the third day. Saint Margaret Clitherow did not undergo the torture of three days: she was crushed to death on the first day. They left her body under the weights for another six hours and then buried her secretly. Her right hand was retrieved as a relic; it is kept at the Bar Convent in York. Her body was also found and decently buried.

Before sentence was carried out she sent her stockings and shoes to her daughter, conveying the message of following in her footsteps of faithfulness to the Church and the Sacraments. Anne left England to become a nun in Louvain, now Belgium. Both William and Henry became priests; and Thomas died in Hull prison in 1604, imprisoned for recusancy. John Clitherow remarried.

Father John Mush, her confessor, wrote her story in 1586, The Life and Death of Mistress Margaret Clitherow; he was arrested and sentenced to death in October that year but escaped.

Saint Margaret Ward was part of the second group of martyrs to suffer in 1588 after the failure of the Spanish Armada. She is a virgin martyr: she helped Father Richard Watson escape from Bridewell Prison. She visited him often enough that the jailer finally allowed her to enter without searching her, so she was able to smuggle in a rope. Father Watson unfortunately injured himself while escaping and was unable to retrieve the rope. Margaret found John Roche to help the injured priest once out of prison and both she and John were arrested; John because he had exchanged clothing with the priest and Margaret because the jailer figured out that she was the last person to visit Father Watson before he escaped. She was held in chains, hung up by her hands and scourged as the authorities attempted to force her to tell them where Father Watson went after escaping Bridewell prison. She refused, even though she acknowledged that she helped him. Offered a pardon for attending Church of England services, she again refused. The torture inflicted upon her over eight days left her partially paralyzed and she had to be carried to Tyburn for hanging. On August 30, 1588, she and Blessed John Roche, who had helped rescue Father Richard Watson, Blesseds Richard Lloyd, Richard Martin, and Edward Shelley, and one priest, Blessed Richard Leigh suffered martyrdom. The regime was certainly sending a message about laity who assisted Catholic priests.

These two saints share a separate feast day on August 30 with the other female martyr among the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales, St. Anne Line. In the triptych featured above, they are depicted in the right hand panel. Anne Line, a widow, is dressed in black; Margaret Ward holds a rope; Margaret Clitherow kneels on a door. The painting is by Geoffrey Webb.

St. Margaret Clitherow, pray for us!
St. Margaret Ward, pray for us!

Blessed Richard Langley, Executed in York

John Hungerford Pollen, SJ writes about today's martyr in his Acts of the English Martyrs:

Richard Longley [Langley], Esq., was taken about the 21st of September in his own house by officers and a large band of soldiers, who had invested it. Among them was a certain Archdeacon (after the manner of the heretics) named Ramesdell, with some magistrates, Gayes, Vaughan, and Bethel, and there were taken with him two priests, who afterwards escaped out of prison. Mr. Longley was of such pleasant manners that he won the friendship of the gaoler, who in spite of his being a malicious heretic could scarcely refrain from tears when he was led out to execution. He was moreover of good family and fortune, yet he despised all these things, and declared before the Judges, that if he had greater riches and a hundred lives, he would willingly spend them all in that cause. 

The accusation against him was that he had relieved the enemies of the Queen (for so they styled God’s priests), whereupon he was urged to beg pardon for his crime of God and of the Queen. He answered with constancy that he had received them as messengers sent by God, and that therefore while he considered he had done an action pleasing to God, he could not admit that he had thereby done any injury to the Queen. This answer so irritated the Judges that they thought him unworthy of any grace, not even was the favour of an honourable burial allowed him, however much his friends begged for it. Permission was even refused for his corpse to be wrapped in the linen shroud he had prepared, and after his body had been thrown into the pit, the bodies of ten thieves were cast in over him. He died by hanging. 

During the whole time of his imprisonment, he was so merry that many wondered at him, for he had always been shy at home, yet when brought out for execution he showed such alacrity of mind as to go to the scaffold even before the Sheriff, as if he were a bridegroom going to his nuptials. He suffered on December the 1st, 1586.

John Hungerford Pollen, SJ was also known as John Hungerford Pollen, Jr. because he was the son of John Hungerford Pollen, Sr.! Pollen, Sr. was a Catholic convert and associate of Blessed John Henry Newman. Pollen, Sr. worked on the church for the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin and on the Birmingham Oratory. Father Pollen was one of ten children and was ordained in 1891; he wrote several books about the English martyrs, including A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion's Debates at the Tower of London in 1581 and The English Catholics in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth and died in 1925. He also wrote for the Catholic Encyclopedia, including this substantial article on the Counter-Reformation. More about Father Pollen here from the Jesuits in Britain.

Pope Pius XI beatified Richard Langley among many others in 1929.

Blessed Richard Langhorne

Blessed Richard Langhorne (c. 1624 – 14 July 1679) was a barrister executed as part of the Popish Plot. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in May 1647 and called to the bar in November 1654. He provided legal and financial advice for the Jesuits.

His wife, Dorothy, was a Protestant from Havering in Essex. His sons Charles and Francis were both priests. When, in October 1677, Titus Oates was expelled from the English College at St Omer "for serious moral lapses", Charles Langhorne entrusted Oates with a letter to his father. Oates returned to St Omer with a letter from Richard thanking the Jesuits for all they had done for his sons.

When Oates and Israel Tonge unleashed their Popish Plot in September 1678, three Jesuits and a Benedictine were arrested. Langhorne was arrested a week later, imprisoned at Newgate and charged with Treason. Oates claimed, corroborated by William Bedloe, that Langhorne's earlier correspondence dealt with treason.

He was found guilty of High Treason. As the result of a petition by his wife, a ‘true Protestant’, he received a month's reprieve to tidy the affairs of his clients. He was executed at Tyburn, London, on 14 July 1679. According to the Benedictines at Tyburn Convent, "He declared on the scaffold at Tyburn, that not only a pardon, but many preferments and estates had been offered to him if he would for sake his religion. As the hangman was placing the rope round his neck, he took it into his hands and kissed it."

This notice from The Tablet archives has this additional detail about his execution from a contemporary account:

"He then said, 'Pray God bless his Majesty and this kingdom, and defend him from all his enemies '; and then prayed that there might be no more blood shed, and that God would forgive them that designed or rejoyced in his death, and suddenly added, 'I shall say no more in publick.' And presently applyed himself to his private devotions, and by some words which he spake lowder than ordinary it appeared that some of his prayers were in Latin and some in English. One near him saying, the Lord have mercy on his soul,' he, turning to him, said, I thank you for your charity.' Having continued about a quarter of an hour in his private ejaculations (though the sheriff told him he might take half an hour if he pleased), he asked whether the rope were right. A while after he said, You need stay no longer for me.' Upon which the cart was immediately drawn away, and the hangman, having struck him on the breast and pull'd his legs to dispatch him, he was stripp'd, and being quite dead, was cut down and the sentence executed upon him. . . .

"After his bowels were burnt and his body quartered according to his sentence, his corps was, by his Majesty's most gracious order, delivered to his friends, who put it into a hearse, with escutcheons about it, and was afterwards interred in the Temple church, in which place he was once a student of the laws."

On 15 December 1929, he was beatified by Pope Pius XI.

As I've noted before on this blog when discussing the Popish Plot, England's justice system benefited the accuser and gave little leeway to a defendant trying to prove a negative: Langhorne could not prove their interpretation of his letters was wrong. Samuel Pepys and other defendants finally received some measure of justice because Judge Scrogg figured out Oates' and his confreres' perjury. Samuel Pepys was accused that same year of giving naval secrets to the French and of being a Catholic, just because of his loyalty to James, the Duke of York. He spent six months in the Tower of London and eventually established, not his innocence per se, but his accuser's guilt. Pepys was cleared of charges and reinstated as Secretary to the Admirality--in 1684!

Blessed Richard Langhorne, pray for us!

No April Fool Here: Blessed John Bretton, Recusant Martyr

According to this tremendous account of his life and death, the layman Blessed John Bretton was executed on April 1, 1598 after years of recusancy "For words spoken out of Catholic Zeal" "because he was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church," he "urged others to embrace the same religion" and he "denied the spiritual primacy of the Queen." His wife, Frances, survived him and continued their recusancy. 

Just some highlights: 

John Bretton was executed at York on 1st April 1598 because of his faith, the culmination of many, many years of courage and steadfastness in the face of persecution, by both John Bretton and Frances, his wife. . . .

The earliest reference to the Recusancy of John and Frances Bretton occurs in Archbishop Sandys’ List of Yorkshire Recusants returned to the Privy Council in 1577, wherein they are stated to have “no Habilities (Wealth)” “and yet are the most obstinate and perverse”. This list was sent five years after the Earl of Huntingdon had begun his intense investigation and persecution of Catholics in Yorkshire, four years before the passing of the Act 23 Eliz. c1 which made “reconciliation” to the Catholic Church a capital crime. For many years, because of the persecution he was suffering through his Recusancy, John Bretton was forced to flee and hide. Altogether he seems to have been a fugitive from 1577 to 1593, when the Act 35 Eliz. c2 forced all recusants to return home and stay within five miles thereof on pain of the loss of all property. . . .

That the Brettons were regarded as amongst the more notorious recusants is shown by the fact that on 12th February, 1589, within a year of their first conviction, the Exchequer issued a Commission for the assessment and seizure to the use of the Queen of two thirds of their lands and all their goods and chattels in accordance with the Statute of 1586. The Memoranda Roll recording this Commission and the subsequent enquiries gives the text of the patent, signed for the Queen by Burghley, and the names of the Yorkshire Gentry thereby empowered. They included “John, Lord Darcye: Sir Thomas Fairfax: Sir Richard Malliverer: Sir George Savell, and eleven others” In fact only six people, Richard Wortley, William Wentworth, Thomas Wentworth, Robert Bradford, Henry Farrer and Michael Kaie did the work and had produced before them on 8th April 1589, not only details of John Bretton’s property, but also that of forty five other recusants whose names were included in the schedule, including Maud (Matilda) Wentworth, widow, who was Frances’ aunt by marriage and lived over the way at Bretton Hall, and Dorothy Wentworth, the wife of Maud’s son, Matthew, also living there. . . .

Read more here about how Frances struggled without her husband's constancy and loyalty to the Faith:

One might be forgiven for hoping that, having had so much suffering in her life, culminating in her husband’s execution Frances Bretton would now be left in peace - but this was not to be. Within a month the Escheator was on her track. His very presence was proof that the family fortunes were in great jeopardy. In the midst of her grief, therefore she had to remind herself that it now devolved on her alone, as legal owner, to safeguard the livelihood of her children. To whom could she turn for advice ?

Her own kinsfolk, the Wentworths, one of the most powerful families in Yorkshire, doubtless watched events with interest, if not with sympathy. But, with one exception, (Michael of Woolley), all her male relatives appear to have been, at best, "Church Papists". One or two were strong and active supporters of the new religion. Tenacious of this world’s goods they must, as a whole, have been highly impatient with her rigid adherence to Catholic principle. Even her aunt, Maud Wentworth of Bretton Hall, after maintaining her recusancy for many years had, in her old age, publically (sic) conformed three years previously and thus preserved her property intact for her son, Matthew. 

Although Frances herself finally submitted to the Archbishop of York and was pardoned of her previous recusancy for the sake of her own son, Luke, and his inheritance, she was was soon numberered among the recusants again, and died in the Catholic faith. Blessed John Bretton and Frances also had two other sons, Richard and Matthew, who became Catholic priests!

What remarkable steadfastness and love! In this Holy Week, the holiest time of the Christian year, it is indeed marvelous to meditate on men and women so willing to live their lives and give their lives for their Savior and His Church! John Bretton was beatified among the 85 Martyrs of England and Wales in 1987.

Blessed Richard Langley

From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Layman and martyr, b. probably at Grimthorpe, Yorks, England, date unknown; d. at York, 1 Dec., 1586. From his father, Richard Langley, of Rathorpe Hall, Walton, he probably inherited Rathorpe, but for the greater part of his life continued to reside on his estate at Ousethorpe, in the East Riding. His mother was Joan Beaumont of Mirfield. He married Agnes, daughter of Richard Hansby, New Malton, by whom he had one son, Christopher (b. 1565), and four daughters. (See "Visitation of Yorkshire", ed. Foster, London, 1875.) During the troublous times of the Elizabethan period Langley gave over his energies and a very considerable part of his fortune to assisting the oppressed clergy; his house was freely offered as an asylum to priests. He even constructed a subterranean retreat, perhaps beneath the Grimthorpe dwelling, which afforded them sanctuary. This refuge was betrayed to the President of the North, and on 28 Oct., 1586, a strong band of military was despatched, several justices and ministers of the new religion joining in the quest, to make a domiciliary visitation of the Grimthorpe and Ousethorpe houses. Two priests were found in hiding at the former; at the latter Langley himself was seized. All three were carried to York, committed to prison, and subsequently arraigned before the President of the North, the priests because of their office and Langley for harboring them.During the investigation Langley was steadfast in his adherence to the Faith. He would not take the oath of the queen's ecclesiastical supremacy, nor compromise his religious heritage by seeking to ingratiate himself with the lord president or Privy Council. It was feared that the jury which had first been empaneled to decide upon the case might return a verdict in accordance with the dictates of justice, it was therefore discharged and replaced by another of tried fidelity to the prosecutors. Langley was condemned to death, without any evidence being adduced to establish the fact that he had knowingly sheltered seminary priests, and was hanged, drawn, and quartered at York. His remains were refused honorable burial, despite the importunity of his friends.

This site (thanks to Christine Niles) offers illustrations to supplement the text. Langley clearly risked everything to protect priests and thus receive the Sacraments. But that was a felony, not an act of treason--so why he was hung, drawn, and quartered isn't so clear (perhaps he not only refused to swear the oath but named Elizabeth a heretic or schismatic). The detail about the jury is important--the prosecution did not really have the evidence to convict the martyr, so they had to find a more willing jury to convict the martyr! He still had friends who were brave enough to ask for his remains; this demonstrates again the strength of Catholicism in Yorkshire, which extends well into the reign of James I.

The identities of the priests captured with him is also unclear.

Pope Pius XI beatified him among many others in 1929.

16th Century Double Jeopardy: Blessed John Bodey

From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Martyr, b. at Wells, Somerset: 1549; d. at Andover, Wilts., 2 November, 1583. He studied at Winchester and New College, Oxford, of which he became a Fellow in 1568. In June, 1576, he was deprived, with seven other Fellows, by the Visitor, Horne, Protestant Bishop of Winchester. Next year he went to Douay College to study civil law, returned to England in February, 1578, and probably married. Arrested in 1580, he was kept in iron shackles in Winchester gaol, and was condemned in April, 1583, together with John Slade, a schoolmaster, for maintaining the old religion and denying the Royal Supremacy. There was apparently a feeling that this sentence was unjust and illegal, and they were actually tried and condemned again at Andover, 19 August, 1583, on the same indictment. Bodey had a controversy with Humphreys, Dean of Winchester, on the Nicene Council, and the martyr's notes from Eusebius still exist. After his second trial, he wrote from prison to Dr. Humphrey Ely, "We consider that iron for this cause borne on earth shall surmount gold and, precious stones in Heaven. That is our mark, that is our desire. In the mean season we are threatened daily, and do look still when the hurdle shall be brought to the door. I beseech you, for God's sake, that we want not the good prayers of you all for our strength, our joy, and our perseverance unto the end. . . . From our school of patience the 16th September, 1583."
At his martyrdom, Bodey kissed the halter, saying, "O blessed chain, the sweetest chain and richest that ever came about any man's neck", and when told he died for treason, exclaimed, "You may make the hearing of a blessed Mass treason, or the saying of an Ave Maria treason . . . but I have committed no treason, although, indeed, I suffer the punishment due to treason". He exhorted the people to obey Queen Elizabeth and died saying, "Jesu, Jesu, esto mihi Jesus". His mother made a great feast upon the occasion of her son's happy death, to which she invited her neighbours, rejoicing at his death as his marriage by which his soul was happily and eternally espoused to the Lamb.

Sources: Account of the trial and execution of John Slade, schoolmaster, and John Body, M.A., by R. B. (London, 1583); Challoner, Memoirs; Sanders, Anglican Schism, ed. Lewis (London, 1877); Pollen, Acts of English Martyrs (London, 1891); Wainewright, Two English Martyrs: Body and Munden (London, Cath. Truth Soc.); Knox, Douay Diaries (London, 1878); Allen, A true, sincere, and modest defence of English Catholiques (Reims, 1584).

He was beatified on December 15, 1929 by Pope Pius XI.

Blessed George Swallowell, Layman

I posted earlier this week on St. John Boste and Blessed John Ingram--today is the anniversary of the death of Blessed George Swallowell on July 26, 1594 in Darlington. He was a layman and former Anglican minister and was condemned to death for the crime of becoming a Catholic, which was not just a felony punishable by hanging, but an act of treason--according to Parlimentary statute--punishable by drawing, hanging, and quartering.

This story provides some excellent background to the situation of Catholics in Durham, especially after the Northern Rebellion, when many showed themselves most ready and willing to return to the Catholic faith. About today's martyr, the author, Chris Lloyd notes:

George Swalwell - his name is often spelled Swallowell - was born in Darlington in 1564. He became a clerk at Trimdon in 1575 and, after he was ordained in 1577, became a curate there. A few years later he moved on to work and teach in the parish of Houghton-le-Spring.

In 1590, his work caused him to visit a Catholic languishing in Durham Jail because of his faith. They fell into argument during which George saw the light and converted to Catholicism. Rather than keep it hidden, he rushed to the pulpit in Houghton and announced that he had hitherto been in error, that there was "no true mission" in Protestantism and so he quit the church on the spot. He was arrested and thrown in Durham Jail.

He came to trial a year later and was reprieved. However, the authorities decided to have another go at him in 1594. They had lost the only witness, known as Willie, who had heard George's pulpit pronouncement, but a fellow called Finch testified that he had once heard Willie tell the story, and this was enough. On Tuesday, July 23, George was sentenced to death for treason. He stood in the dock with two other accused Catholics, Father John Ingram, of Warwickshire, and Father John Boste, of Penrith. Poor Mr Boste had already done time in the Tower of London, where he had been stretched on the rack at least four times "in a manner that rendered him a permanent cripple".

When the death sentence was announced, George immediately reconverted to Protestantism and promised to do whatever the judge said if he could keep his life. But Mr Boste fixed him with a steely stare and asked: "George Swalwell, what hast thou done?" George immediately converted back once more to Catholicism, and the judge ordered that he be hanged, drawn and quartered at Darlington.

On July 24, Mr Boste was executed at Durham; on July 25, Mr Ingram was executed at Gateshead; on July 26, it was George Swalwell's turn.

Here are some details of Blessed George Swallowell or Swalwell's execution, from the same article:

"Upon the day designed for execution, he was brought two miles off the place on foot, and then was put into a cart, where he lay on his back with his hands and eyes up to heaven, and so he was drawn to the gallows," records Bishop Richard Challoner in his 1741 book, Memoirs of the Missionary Priests.

The gallows had been erected on Bakehouse Hill, between the Market Square and Tubwell Row. "To terrify him the more, they led him by two great fires, the one made for burning his bowels, the other for boiling his quarters," says Challoner.

Four priests accompanied him on the walk across the Market Square to the gallows, beseeching him to reconvert yet again to the Protestant faith. He would not listen, and they became so fed up with him that they beat him with a rod to make him climb the ladder to his death more quickly.

The rope was put around his neck and "Mr Swalwell desired if there were any Catholics there they would say three paters, three aves and the creed for him, and so making the sign of the cross, he was turned off the ladder". He was cut down before he lost consciousness "and the hangman, who was but a boy, drew him along by the rope yet alive, and there dismembered and bowelled him, and cast his bowels into the fire". "Then the hangman cut off his head and held it up saying: 'Behold the head of a traitor!' His quarters, after they were boiled in the cauldron, were buried in the baker's dunghill."

Martyrs of Dorchester and Yorkshire

Two groups of Catholic martyrs in Elizabethan England, in 1594 in Dorchester and in 1597 in York--both comprised of a priest and the laymen who protected him:

Blessed John Cornelius, priest and martyr
Blessed Thomas Bosgrave, martyr
Blessed John Carey, martyr
Blessed Patrick Salmon, martyr

John, Thomas, John and Patrick were executed together at Dorchester on July 4, 1594: John Cornelius, who trained for the priesthood at Douai and Rome, was arrested in April; his companions were arrested for assisting him. John became a Jesuit while imprisoned in London. All of them were from Ireland:

Father John Cornelius, their leader, was born in 1557 to Irish parents who had moved to Great Britain. A Dorsetshire Catholic knight, Sir John Arundel, sent him to Oxford University to study. But John was too Catholic in his convictions to be pleased with the "new religion" that dominated the University. Feeling called rather to the Catholic priesthood, he crossed the Channel and enrolled at the English college in Rheims for holy orders. From Rheims he went on to the English College in Rome to complete his theology, and it was at Rome that he was ordained a priest.
Return to England as a Catholic priest was at that time forbidden under pain of death. But Father John, a man of prayer and zeal, saw in that law a challenge rather than a deterrent, as did the rest of the contemporary English priests who set service to persecuted Catholics as their top priority. His assignment was to the Catholics of Dorset. These priests' ministry was a "cloak-and-dagger" operation, since they were always in danger of discovery and arrest. Their capture could mean also the arrest and punishment of anybody who assisted them.

Naturally, the missionaries' terms of service were usually short, for the police were alert and aggressive. Cornelius (he also went by the alias of Mohun, although his real surname seems to have been O'Mahony) was finally seized by the sheriff of Dorset on April 24, 1594, at the Chideock Castle of Lady Arundel.

Having seized the priest by surprise, the Sheriff was about to hurry him off hatless. Now, in that hat-conscious age, to be hatless was to appear uncivilized. Thomas Bosgrave, a gallant young Cornish nephew of Sir John Arundel and a witness to the arrest, stepped forward and offered Father John his own hat. "The honor I owe to your function," he declared, "may not suffer me to see you go bareheaded!" It was a simple gesture of charity to a priest, but he was to pay for his piety. The Sheriff promptly arrested Bosgrave, too, for "aiding" a Catholic clergyman. He likewise arrested two serving-men of this Catholic household, Dubliners John Carey and Patrick Salmon. Content, no doubt, with the day's work, the county official then led his catch off to jail.

Cornelius, the most important of them, was taken to London to be examined by Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council. The Council had him stretched on the rack to force him to name all those who had given him shelter or assistance. Torture would not open his lips, however, so he was sent back to Dorchester for trial, along with the three lay captives. On July 2, the court declared the priest guilty of high treason under the law that forbade Catholic priests to enter England and remain there. Bosgrave, Carey and Salmon were pronounced guilty of felony for aiding and abetting Father John. The sentence was the same for all: hanging, drawing, and quartering.

After the court had published its judgment, it offered all four men a reprieve if they would give up their Catholic faith. All four refused.

The execution took place at Dorchester two days later. The three laymen were hanged first. Each made a Catholic profession of faith before the trap was sprung. Father John then kissed the feet of his hanging companions. He was not allowed to make any formal statement; but he did manage to state that he had been lately admitted into the Jesuits, and would have been en route to the Jesuit novitiate in Flanders had he not been arrested.

Blessed William Andleby, priest and martyr
Blessed Henry Abbot, martyr
Blessed Thomas Warcop, martyr
Blessed Edward Fulthorp, martyr

Fr Andleby served in Yorkshire, and Henry, Thomas and Edward were three laymen who assisted and sheltered him; they were executed together at York on July 4 in 1597 under Elizabeth I. Blessed William Andleby was a convert--he had thought to argue Doctor William Allen out of his Catholic faith and instead found himself argued into it:

He was born at Etton in Yorkshire of a well-known gentle family. At twenty-five he went abroad to take part in the religious wars in the Spanish Netherlands, and called at Douai to interview Dr. Allen, whom he attempted to confute in argument. Next day he recognized that Allen was right, was converted, and eventually became a priest. Mention is found of his having served at Mr. Tyrwhitt's, in Lincolnshire, and also of his having succoured the Catholic prisoners in Hull blockhouse. "His zeal for souls was such as to spare no pains and to fear no dangers. For the first four years of his mission he travelled always on foot, meanly attired, and carrying with him usually in a bag his vestments and other things for saying Mass; for his labours lay chiefly among the poor, who were not shocked with such things. Afterwards, humbly yielding to the advice of his brethren, he used a horse and went somewhat better clad. Wonderful was the austerity of his life in frequent watchings, fastings, and continual prayer, his soul so absorbed in God that he often took no notice of those he met; by which means he was sometimes exposed to suspicions and dangers from the enemies of his faith, into whose hands he at last fell after twenty years' labour in the vineyard of the Lord." (Challoner). He was condemned for his priestly character, and suffered with three laymen, John Abbot, Thomas Warcop, and Edward Fulthrop--Abbot and Fulthrop were also converts to Catholicism from the Church of England.

A Priest and a Layman at York

Blessed Robert Thorpe and Blessed Thomas Watkinson suffered martyrdom on the Ides of May in 1591:

Robert Thorpe: Priest and martyr, b. in Yorkshire; suffered at York, 15 May, 1591. He reached the English College at Reims 1 March, 1583-4, was ordained deacon in December following, and priest by Cardinal Guise in April, 1585. He was sent on the mission, 9 May, 1585, and laboured in Yorkshire. He was arrested in bed very early on Palm Sunday, 1595, at the house of his fellow-martyr, Thomas Watkinson, at Menthorpe in the East Riding of Yorkshire, someone having seen palms being gathered the night before, and having informed John Gates of Howden, the nearest justice of the peace. Watkinson, an old Catholic yeoman who lived a solitary life, is described by the treacherous priest John Cecil as a clerk, so it is possible he was in minor orders. Both, though naturally timorous, met their deaths with great fortitude. Thorpe, condemned as a traitor merely for being a priest, was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Watkinson, condemned as a felon merely for harbouring priests, was only hanged. He was offered his life if he would go to church.

Here is a source on Catholicism in York from the recusant era to the late 18th century.