William Byrd's Three Masses on the BBC's "Listening Service"

We are celebrating the 400th anniversary of William Byrd's death on July 4, 1623 throughout this year. Of course, it's being celebrated mostly in England!

The BBC has published a Composer of the Month article on his life and times in their classical music magazine, Tom Service has commented particularly on his Three Masses on his BBC program, Stile Antico has released a new CD, his works were performed at the Proms in Londonderry, and the Latin Mass Society in England is sponsoring a Byrd Festival with his Masses and works from the Gradualia including in the celebration of Mass at Corpus Christi Maiden Lane and other churches, etc., etc.

What's so good about the Latin Mass Society's effort is described in their program for the Festival:

This year, 2023, witnesses the four hundredth anniversary of the death of William Byrd, one of England’s greatest Renaissance composers. The Latin Mass Society is marking the occasion with a Byrd 400 Festival ofsacred music. From September 2023 the Southwell Consort, under the direction of Dominic Bevan, will perform music from Byrd’s Masses, Cantiones Sacrae, and sacred motets, as well as his organ music. 

Byrd’s sacred music was composed for the Roman Catholic Mass during a time when English Catholics faced religious persecution. Despite the clandestine climate in which it was composed, much of Byrd’s polyphony is sumptuous. It represents the last artistic flowering of an English liturgical tradition almost stamped out at the Reformation. 

The words, chant and ritual actions of the traditional Latin Mass were ancient in Byrd’s own day, and they have remained essentially unchanged ever since. It is within this context that this festival of sacred music will take place, presenting Byrd’s work in the original liturgical context for which it was composed.

In his "Listening Service" program, Tom Service makes a suggestion about these three Masses--meaning the ordinary text of the Mass, the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus/Benedictus, and Angus Dei--were integrated into the celebration of the secret Masses for which the works were intended. He notes the presence of the "custos" mark at the end of each part, suggesting that it means that the Mass parts were sung as the Mass was being "spoken". Service suggests that the Masses lasted as long as the Byrd Mass settings, around 20 minutes.

But I wonder about that, because not all Masses include all the parts of the ordinary, depending on the feast or feria being celebrated. In the Traditional Latin Mass, a Missa Cantata is sung/chanted by the priest, not spoken, and not all parts of the Mass, like the Roman Canon, are audible to the congregation even at a Missa Cantata; a Low Mass is a mostly silent Mass and usually these parts of the Mass are not sung. (That's assuming that the Mass revisions that Pope Pius V approved in 1570 for the Roman Missal, the Masses Catholic missionary priests were offering in England at the time Byrd was a Catholic and wrote these three Masses, are comparable to the Missa Cantatas and Low Masses I attend today.)

The Masses Byrd attended in Stondon Massey in Essex were celebrated under duress because it was illegal to say or attend Mass and everyone there, especially the priest, was in great danger, and so Service thinks these 20 minute Masses would have been practical, safe, and even politic, under the circumstances--to sum it up, serviceable.

As John Milsom wrote in the cover notes to the 2013/2014 CD of Byrd's Three Masses and the Ave Verum Corpus depicted above:

. . . In the 1590s, when his Masses were composed, there were no Catholic church choirs in England, and he never imagined them being sung proudly and publicly in cathedrals for all to hear. Few hard facts survive about the kinds of performances Byrd’s Catholic works received in his lifetime, but we can speculate with a fair degree of confidence. In the age of the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, England’s Roman Catholic community celebrated Mass covertly behind closed doors, taking pains not to be found out and punished or fined. Their secret services took place in rooms hastily converted into chapels, led by priests who led surreptitious lives. If music was used, then it was sung and played by whoever came safely to hand: family members, invited guests and trusted servants. By definition, then, Byrd’s Masses are really chamber music, not choral repertory, and it was never Byrd’s intention that they should be sung in the resonant ambience of a great church by a choir such as that of Westminster Cathedral. . . .

Milsom comments on Byrd's Court career and the Anglican service music he wrote there and then states:

In private, he moved in the network of England’s Catholic community, whose religious beliefs he shared, and for whom he also wrote music—initially motets, but latterly also works for liturgical use, such as the three Masses and, later, the impressive cycle called Gradualia. As Byrd grew older his allegiances shifted, and he spent less time in London and more time with the Catholics in rural Essex, where he set up home. But his retreat never became a rift. Up to his death Byrd remained loyal to his queen [and king: James I from 1603 to 1623!] and his country, and he was tolerated at court even by those who knew of his double life.

He continues the discussion by contrasting the differences between the way Byrd sets words to music in the Anglican and Catholic works, noting that Catholic works "savour their words more meditatively, and speak with a more personal voice." (Please read the rest there.)

When Charles Cole reviewed the CD from the Westminster Cathedral Choir for the New Liturgical Movement website, he noted that Martin Baker had departed from the usual method of recording the choir:

It was perhaps partly in deference to these original performances in Tudor times that Martin Baker, the Master of Music, decided to make quite a radical change to the way the choir was recorded. Most of the Cathedral Choir’s recordings are made in the Apse, the usual liturgical singing position of the choir, however for this recording, the choir stood on the Sanctuary in a large square facing inwards towards Martin Baker, who stood at the centre. The effect is very different, both intimate and powerful, with a noticeable change in the acoustics. There is a heightened sense of dynamic range, with diminuendi of extraordinary control which taper into nothingness. And although this music will be very familiar to anyone in regular proximity to a traditional Catholic choir, there is a real sense of a new experience when listening to this recording.

I guess the only way we could come closer to hearing this music as Byrd and the congregation heard it would be to record an amateur choir in a small space!

Finally, I do have to make one comment about the "Composer of the Month" article from the June issue of BBC Music Magazine: Andrew Stewart writes that "Byrd risked punishment to compose sublime settings of outlawed Latin texts, especially during the 1580s when Jesuit missionaries from the continent were being burned at the stake . . ." (p. 60) 

No, they were being hanged, drawn, and quartered!

Preview: Blesseds Duckett and Corby in "Holy Rivalry" and with "The Kiss of Peace"

On Monday, September 18, we'll continue our series on the Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors by Father Henry Sebastian Bowden on the Son Rise Morning Show. 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.

As of today, the book is still on sale for $10.00! You cannot say I haven't told often enough!

Father Bowden offers four mementoes of Blessed John Duckett and three of Blessed Ralph Corby, SJ during the month of September. The two martyrs share three mementoes, because although they came to England as missionary priests by separate paths, served in the missionary field in vastly different durations (Duckett for about a year; Corby for 14 years), and were arrested separately, they shared imprisonment in London and went to Tyburn together for execution on September 7, 1644--during the English Civil War. They were both arrested and executed under Parliamentary authority.

For Blessed (then Venerable) John Duckett, on page 300 (September 20) in the book, Father Bowden offers an example of a Catholic priest as an Alter Christus (Another Christ), echoing the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus says "If therefore ye seek Me, let these go their way." (John 13:8) in a memory explaining how Father Duckett admitted he was a Catholic priest "To Save Others":

He was taken, in company with two Catholic laymen, as he was going to baptize two children on the Feast of the Visitation, July 2. His captors, the Parliament soldiers, carried him before a committee of the Sequestrators at Sunderland. He declined to answer as to his priesthood and demanded proof, but was committed to prison by reason of the Holy oils and books found on him. Again examined, and again refusing to inculpate himself, he was threatened with lighted matches placed between his fingers to make him confess what he was. This availing nothing he was sent back to prison. After an hour he was again called, and found his two companions on the point of being shipped and sent away, merely because he would not confess who he was. "Seeing this," he says, "and also fearing that the Catholics of the neighbourhood who knew me might suffer, and especially those with whom I lived, I confessed myself to free them and the country." His self-sacrifice was successful, and seemed an inspiration from Heaven. No more inquiry was made after his friends, but Father Duckett was sent up to London in company with Father Corby, a Jesuit, who was taken in these parts as he was going up to the altar to say Mass.

So Father Duckett did not admit immediately to his priesthood, even enduring some torture, but when the two laymen were threatened and he also became concerned for others in the Durham area where he was captured--especially the family or families of the children who were to be baptized--he confessed to save their lives.

The Catholic Encyclopedia offers some details about his life before his arrest, imprisonment, and execution: He was probably a grandson of Venerable [Blessed] James Duckett [a layman executed on April 19, 1601, also at Tyburn], born at Underwinder, in the parish of Sedbergh, Yorkshire, in 1603; died 7 September, 1644. He was ordained priest in 1639 and afterwards went to Paris where he studied three years in the College of Arras. He had an extraordinary gift of prayer, and while yet a student would spend whole nights in contemplation. On his way to the English mission, he spent two months in spiritual exercises, under the direction of his uncle, the Carthusian prior at Nieuport.

Then, when Fathers Duckett and Corby are in prison and are offered an opportunity for one of them to escape, Father Bowden offers the story of their "Holy Rivalry":

RALPH CORBY, alias Darlington, was born near Dublin of English parents, natives of Durham, who had gone over to Ireland for the free exercise of their religion. The piety of the family is sufficiently attested by the fact that both parents and children entered into religion: the father and his three sons into the Society of Jesus, the mother and her daughters into the Order of St. Benedict. After twelve years' hard work, notwithstanding continuous ill-health, among the poorer Catholics in Durham, he was arrested and sent up to London with Father Duckett. They were escorted from Westminster to Newgate by a company of Parliament soldiers, with a captain at their head, beating drums and firing off their muskets through the crowded streets, as if they had been the enemy's generals taken in war as in the old Roman battles. In prison the life of one of them could have been saved by an exchange made for a prisoner in the hand of the Emperor of Germany. The offer was first made to Father Corby, who declined it on the ground that Father Duckett, being younger, could do more work than himself; but he in his turn refused it with thanks, as Father Corby's life, on account of his experience, was of greater value.

He cites a verse from the First Letter of John for this scene: "Behold what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed upon us." (3:1) I wonder what the Puritan authorities thought of them, both rejectiing a chance to be freed, in exile of course (but probably to return).

In describing their executions at Tyburn Tree, Father Bowden offers these details ("The Kiss of Peace"):

They went out to suffer with their tonsures shaved, the one in his Jesuit's habit, the other in his priest's cassock. At the gallows Father Duckett made no speech, but told an heretical minister that he had not come hither to be taught his religion, but to die for it. After a short discourse from Father Corby, the two confessors turned to each other. Together they had been arrested, supported each other by their mutual courage and self-sacrifice, and with a last most loving embrace they together received their eternal crown. ("Salute one another in a holy kiss; all the saints salute you." 2 Cor. 13:12)

With these three mementoes, Father Bowden offers poignant examples of these martyrs' camaraderie in the midst of danger and suffering as they prepared for their executions. They were both beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI.

Blessed John Duckett, pray for us!

Blessed Ralph Corby, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman's Political Thought

Earlier this summer I taught a Graduate level course on "Saint John Henry Newman and the New Evangelization" at Newman University. It's not a class on Newman's life and works exclusively, but a class applying some of Newman's ideas for reviving the Church of England when he was an Anglican minister at the University of Oxford, and his efforts to teach and defend the teachings of the Catholic Church as an Oratorian after his conversion in 1845.

We read many of Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons, The Dream of Gerontius, excerpts from other works, like the Grammar of Assent, his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, etc., and various articles and chapters analyzing his life and works.

Several times the students asked me about some aspect of Newman's life and works that didn't immediately touch on the topic of the New Evangelization, focused on the revival of Catholic life and practice among Catholics or those falling or fallen away from the Church in previously Christian or Catholic cultures. I had to tell them that Newman did not write a comprehensive fundamental theological work on Catholic doctrine, moral, sacramental, or spiritual, etc. 

Although we rightly often speak of Newman as a theologian, he was not a systematic theologian--he was consistent, but not systematic. He addressed certain themes and topics when he thought they need defending, on certain occasions, like Gladstone's contention that Catholics couldn't follow their (English) consciences after the doctrine of Papal Infallibility was proclaimed, or Pusey's not-so-peaceful discussion of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, or the position of the Catholic laity in the Church, particularly regarding practical matters but also regarding the sensus fidelium (the sense of the faithful), etc.

And, as this article by Austin Walker shows, Newman was not a systematic writer about political philosophy, either: 

Newman was an occasional and unsystematic writer who never authored a formal treatise on political philosophy. Nor did he often weigh in on the political issues of the day—in fact, the only time he addressed a contemporary issue was when he wrote a series of pseudonymous letters on the Crimean War to chastise an intemperate British public for expecting too much from political life. [Sic: one might argue that Newman's Tamworth Reading Room letters should be included, as they chastised Sir Robert Peel for dictating a “fundamental rule, that no works of controversial divinity shall enter into the library” Peel was establishing for those who could not benefit from a university education at Oxford with the goal of improving their intellects and morals.]  However, one can find the key to Newman’s political insights in his treatment of the political status of the church.

Newman’s real political concern was the independence and vitality of the church, as viewed through the eyes of the Alexandrian Fathers. As an Anglican, Newman saw the independence of the church most immediately in its relation to the English state. As a Catholic, the same fundamental concerns remained, but they were inflected in a new valence. If Anglican Newman worried about the oppression of the church by the state, Catholic Newman was concerned about the oppression of the church by the predominating philosophy of the day. Liberalism promised an illusory liberty by positing a new mode of human organization, anthropology, and history. Newman’s political project, as both an Anglican and a Catholic, was to reassert a biblical and ecclesial reality that the age was forgetting how to see: the church itself as “an object of veneration and loyalty.”

Walker then unpacks Newman's concerns for the Church of England during his Anglican years, especially as a leader of the Tractarian Movement, and as a Catholic after 1845. 

With all the links to the various works throughout the article, it demonstrates one of the great advantages we do have in this technological age: the reader can both appreciate Professor Walker's analysis and read the entire work he cites without reaching for a book on the shelf, thanks to the newmanreader.org website!

Image: bust of Saint John Henry Newman in the garden of the College in Littlemore (c) Stephanie A. Mann (2023)

Preview: Blessed Adrian Fortescue and His Maxims

Blessed Adrian Fortescue, another one of Henry VIII's best friends (like St. Thomas More), was executed sometime in early July, 1539 (either July 8 or 9 or 10). He was a Knight of the Realm, a Knight of Malta, and a Dominican Tertiary. On Monday, September 11, we'll continue our series of Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors gathered by Father Henry Sebastian Bowden. Please note that the book is still available--as of today--for only $10.00 from the publisher!

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.

The website of the Dominican Friars of England, Ireland, and Scotland provides this background of his life and times:

Like his forebears, Adrian served King Henry VIII in his ambitious military campaigns. He helped to rout the French the Battle of Spurs in 1513, and fought again in 1523. King Henry rewarded his support and in 1520 invited him to the splendorous Field of the Cloth of Gold where Henry famously wrestled with the King of France. Closer to home, Sir Adrian was made a Justice of the Peace of the county of Oxfordshire. In this period of history, royal favour could also take more peculiar forms. Sir Adrian had the dubious honour of being made a Gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber, forerunner to the august body now known as the Privy Council.

In addition to being an assiduous servant of the Crown, Sir Adrian was evidently also a man of strong religious conviction and charity. His accounts reveal a number of benefactions to clergy and religious foundations. In 1532, he became a Knight of Devotion in the Order of Malta. The following year in July of 1533, he was admitted as a Dominican Tertiary at Blackfriars, Oxford, which he would visit from Stonor. But he also had a strong association with the Dominican Priory in London. His lodgings in the capital were in the precincts of the Blackfriars, close to the present eponymous tube station.

Sir Adrian was married twice and had children, so like St. Thomas More, he lived an active life as a Catholic layman, as a family man, with great devotion to his faith.

In the Catholic Encyclopedia, J.H. Pollen demonstrates the injustice of his martyrdom, as he was arrested, imprisoned, and included in a Bill of Attainder, without trial or evidence:

All of a sudden this quiet, worthy gentleman was overwhelmed by some unexplained whim of the Tudor tyrant. On 29 August, 1534, he was put under arrest, no one knows why, but released after some months. On 3 February, 1539, he was arrested a second time and sent to the Tower. In April he was condemned untried by an act of attainder; in July he was beheaded. No specific act of treason was alleged against him, but only in general "sedition and refusing allegiance". The attainder, however, went on to decree death against Cardinal Pole and several others because they "adhered themselves to the Bishop of Rome". Catholic tradition was always held that Sir Adrian died for the same cause, and modern Protestant critics have come to the same conclusion. His cultus has always flourished among the Knights of St. John, and he was beatified by Leo XIII in 1895.

Father Bowden does not highlight Blessed Adrian Fortescue's martyrdom, but instead provides a series of maxims he collected. (Pollen describes them thus: "He collected and signed several lists of proverbs and wise saws, which, though not very brilliant, are never offensive or coarse, always sane, and sometimes rise to a high moral or religious level.") Bowden uses the titles "A Martyr's Maxims (1) and (2)" with the verses, "She conducted the just, when he fled from his brother's wrath, through the right ways" (Wisdom 10:10) and "But the wisdom, that is from above, first indeed is chaste." (James 3:17).

Among the maxims:

Above all things love God with all thy heart.

Desire His honour more than the health of thine own soul.

Take heed with all diligence to purge and cleanse thy mind with oft Confession, and raise thy desire or lust from earthly things.

Be you houseled (that is receive Holy Communion) with entire devotion.

Pray often.

Also enforce thee to set thy house at quietness.

Resort to God every hour.

Advance not thy words or deeds by any pride.

Be pitiful to poor folk and help them to thy power, for then thou shalt greatly please God.

Give fair language to all persons, and especially to the poor and needy.

Also be diligent in giving of alms.

In prosperity be meek of heart, and in adversity patient.

And pray continually to God that you may do what is His pleasure.

Neither Father Bowden nor J.H. Pollen indicate where Blessed Adrian Fortescue wrote down these maxims, but this website indicates it was in his Book of Hours; further it notes that the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford has another book of Fortescue's containing proverbs which also includes a book written by his great-uncle John Fortescue, On Absolute and Limited Monarchy (dangerous reading while King Henry VIII was on the throne!), and passages from Langland's Piers Plowman!

The collection and use of these proverbs served as good preparation for the trials and martyrdom Blessed Adrian Fortescue would endure, imprisoned, found guilty without trial, and beheaded. Henry VIII also suppressed the Knights of St. John and seized their properties in England.

Blessed Adrian Fortescue, pray for us!

Preview: Blessed Thomas Holford, Convert and Martyr

August 28, 1588 was busy day for executioners throughout London, as several new gibbets had been constructed. With the defeat or failure of the Spanish Armada, government officials sought to make quite an example. 

The martyr whose mementoes we'll feature on Monday, August 28, was one of the martyrs who suffered that day, although Father Henry Sebastian Bowden highlights several successful escapes before his final capture, imprisonment, trial, and execution.

So on Monday, August 28, 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.

With the title "A Hunted Life" and verses from the Letter to the Hebrews, "They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being in want, distressed, afflicted: of whom the world was not worthy" (11:37-38), Father Bowden recounts Blessed Thomas Holford, who would be beatified in 1929, and his wanderings:

THE son of a Protestant minister in Cheshire, he was reconciled by Father Davis, and ordained, and his life as a priest seems to have been a fulfilment of the Gospel precept of flight under persecution. " He was first searched for," says Father Davis, "in the house where I lay, on All Souls' Day, but escaped. Again, after being nearly taken in the search for Babington, he repaired again to a house where I was staying, but we escaped to a hay-barn, through a secret place at the foot of the stairs. He then laboured for souls in his own county, Cheshire, was apprehended, sent to London, and lodged in an inn at Holborn. Then, rising early, he managed to pass the pursuivants, who had drunk hard and were asleep. On Holborn Viaduct he met a Catholic gentleman, who, seeing him half-dressed, thought him a madman. Pulling off his yellow stocking and white boot-hose, he walked barefoot by unfrequented paths till he arrived, late at night, at a house where I lay, about eight miles from London. He had eaten nothing, and his feet were bleeding and torn with briars and thorns. My hosts and their daughters tended him and put him to bed. The next year he was apprehended, and executed, August 28, at Clerkenwell." (p. 265, entry for August 17)

In his Memoirs of Missionary Priests and other Catholicks of both Sexes who suffered Death or Imprisonment in England on account of their Religion, from the year 1577 till the end of the reign of Charles II, Bishop Richard Challoner (from whom Father Bowden excerpted this memento) adds this detail about Blessed Thomas Holford's final capture:

After this escape, he avoided London for a time, but the next year, 1588, he came to London to buy him a suit of apparel. At which time, going to Mr. Swithin Well's house, near St. Andrew's church in Holborn, to serve God (i. e. to say Mass) Hodgkins the pursuivant espying him as he came forth, dogged him into his tailor's house, and there apprehended him.

Just a little context: 

• After his conversion, Holford left England to study for the priesthood in Reims, arriving there on August 18, 1582; he was ordained in Laon on April 9, 1583, and returned to England on May 4 that same year.
• Fathers Davis and Holford were having to move around so much because of the discovery of the Babington Plot against Queen Elizabeth I, to replace her with the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots.
• Saint Swithun Wells is one of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales, executed on December 10, 1591 after another Mass was celebrated in his home on All Saints Day, a Mass he did not attend!
• Hebrews 11 is the chapter in which the faith of the Old Testament patriarchs is lauded from Abel to Moses and beyond! The full citation of verses 37 and 38 is:

They were stoned, they were cut asunder, they were tempted, they were put to death by the sword, they wandered about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being in want, distressed, afflicted:

Of whom the world was not worthy; wandering in deserts, in mountains, and in dens, and in caves of the earth.

The full list of those executed on August 28, 1588:

Blessed Hugh More or Moor, educated at Oxford
Blessed James Claxton
Blessed Robert Morton
Blessed Thomas Felton, whose father, John Felton was executed for posting the Papal Bull excommunicating Elizabeth I after the Northern Rebellion
Blessed Thomas Holford, formerly a Protestant schoolmaster
Blessed William Dean, a former Protestant minister, he had been arrested and exiled and returned to England
Blessed William Gunter or Guntei, from Wales
Blessed Henry Webley, a layman who had assisted Father William Dean

Blessed Thomas Holford, pray for us!

Preview: Blessed Thomas Percy's Mementoes

After an hiatus on Monday the 14th as the Son Rise Morning Show prepared for the Solemnity of the Assumption on August 15th, we're back with our series of highlights from Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors, remembering Blessed Thomas Percy, an early Elizabethan martyr.

So on Monday, August 21, 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.

[This Thomas Percy is not to be confused with the Sir Thomas Percy, his father, who participated in the Pilgrimage of Grace during the reign of King Henry VIII, who has not been beatified by the Church. Note from the Catholic Encyclopedia: "When Thomas was eight years old his father was executed at Tyburn (2 June, 1537) for having taken a leading part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and he also is considered a martyr by many."*]

Father Bowden focuses on the time when Blessed Thomas Percy was imprisoned in Scotland under the title "Friday Abstinence" with verses from the Second Book of Maccabees (6:18-19): 

Eleazar one of the chief of the scribes . . . was pressed to open his mouth to eat swine's flesh. But he, choosing rather a most glorious death than a hateful life, went forward voluntarily to the torment.

Some background from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

On Elizabeth's accession the earl, whose steadfast loyalty to the Catholic Church was known, was kept in the North while the anti-Catholic measures of Elizabeth's first Parliament were passed. Elizabeth continued to show him favour, and in 1563 gave him the Order of the Garter. He had then resigned the wardenship and was living in the South. But the systematic persecution of the Catholics rendered their position most difficult, and in the autumn of 1569 the Catholic gentry in the North, stirred up by rumours of the approaching excommunication of Elizabeth, were planning to liberate Mary, Queen of Scots, and obtain liberty of worship. Earl Thomas with the Earl of Westmoreland wrote to the pope asking for advice, but before their letter reached Rome circumstances hurried them into action against their better judgment. After a brief success the rising failed, and Thomas fled to Scotland, where he was captured and, after three years, sold to the English Government. He was conducted to York and beheaded, refusing to save his life by abandoning his religion. He was beatified by Leo XIII on 13 May, 1895, and his festival was appointed to be observed in the Dioceses of Hexham and Newcastle on 14 November. His daughter Mary founded the Benedictine convent at Brussels from which nearly all the existing houses of Benedictine nuns in England are descended.

According to the website for the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, his feast is still celebrated on that designated date:

His feast day is celebrated in our Diocese on 14 November.

A Chapel at Langley Castle (completed in 1914) has stained glass windows featuring Blessed Thomas Percy (Blessed Thomas Percy was a descendent (sic) of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who originally owned Langley Castle).

(BTW: Langley Castle is now a hotel. Sic transit gloria mundi!) 

While he was a prisoner in Scotland in Lochleven Castle (where Mary, Queen of Scots was also held for a time in 1567-1568), Blessed Thomas Percy was besieged with loneliness and temptations to deny his Catholicism, including his fast and abstinence:

TORN from his friends and followers, from his wife and his four little girls, and betrayed into the hands of a declared enemy, Bl. Thomas in his captivity at Lochleven had indeed "sunk into deep waters among them that hated him" (Ps 68:15). But he found strength from above in his continual fasts and watchings and pious meditations, and proved himself a true champion of the faith. His Calvinist keeper, the Lord of Lochleven [William Douglas, the Sixth Earl of Morton], brought many of his sect to try and persuade him, by cunning argument and speeches or by threats and promises, to embrace their errors, but he could never be persuaded to depart in the smallest matter from the Communion of the Catholic Church. When, as often happened, meat was brought to him on days which Catholics observe as a fast, he contented himself with bread alone ; and by his example moved some of those attending on him to repent of their apostasy. The fortitude he thus acquired found a witness in Lord Hunsdon [Thomas Carey, Mary's Boleyn's son, Elizabeth I's cousin, and one of Shakespeare's patrons], who reported "that he is readier to talk of hawks and hounds than anything else, though very sorrowful and fearing for his life." (p. 269)

There are other entries for Blessed Thomas Percy, including one on August 13, p. 261, which recounts the seizure of Durham Cathedral during the Northern Rebellion and the celebration of Holy Mass for the first time after the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII.

Blessed Thomas Percy was beheaded in York on August 22, 1572.

Blessed Thomas Percy, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain): Portrait of Blessed Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland (1528-1570, at full length, kneeling on a cushion, wearing a black doublet with a fur trimmed cloak, a white ruff and the Order of the Garter collar and garter, reading a prayer book.

*Since both father and son took part in rebellions, it might be asked why the son is beatified and not the father: Blessed Thomas Percy was offered his life if he renounced his illegal Catholic faith (punishable by fines at that time if he did not attend the government sanctioned Church of England services). During the reign of Henry VIII, his father was not offered such a choice.

And, just to add to the confusion of similar names, there is another Thomas Percy, a Gunpowder Plot conspirator, who died of gunshot wounds on November 8, 1605. His body was exhumed and beheaded during the repercussions of the failed, murderous plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

Preview: The Attempted Poisoning of Palasor in Prison

In our series on the Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors based on Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's selections of their stories, we'll next look at the imprisonment of Blessed Thomas Palasor, who had been declared Venerable when the book was originally published, and his two lay companions, John Norton and John Talbot. While they were in prison, someone tried to poison them--with quite unintended consequences!

So on Monday, August 7, 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.

With the title "Poison Detected" and the verse from Mark's Gospel (16:18), "They shall take up serpents and, if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them", Father Bowden describes how Father Palasor, Mr. John Talbot, and Mr. John Norton, were captured together in Yorkshire in Norton's home and brought to prison in Durham. 

Father Palasor was served some broth for dinner and its appearance was startling: "the bone of mutton in the dish ran blood in the form of crosses and of O's in the broth" so he did not taste it or consume it. The maid took it back to the woman who had prepared it, who added some spices and sent it with the maid to the two laymen, who noticed the same phenomenon and did not taste the broth.

The maid, Mary Day, went to Father Palasor and "confessed that the broth had been poisoned by the malice of her mistress, the jailer's wife, and on her knees begged his forgiveness, and asked him to make her one of his Faith." 

So Mary was received into the Catholic Church and left the jail to serve in the household of a Catholic lady, Eleanor Forcer, "who bore testimony to the occurrence", which is included in Bishop Richard Challoner's Memoirs of Missionary Priests and other Catholicks of both Sexes who suffered Death or Imprisonment in England on account of their Religion.

As Bowden concludes this entry on the mementoes of Father Palasor and his companions: he was condemned to death for "returning to England as a priest, contrary to the statute" and they "received the same sentence for harboring and assisting him, and all three together were executed at Durham" on August 9, 1600. (p. 257)

The Catholic Encyclopedia provides some more detail about Blessed Thomas Palasor and his companions:

English martyr, born at Ellerton-upon-Swale, parish of Catterick, North Riding of Yorkshire; died at Durham 9 August, 1600. He arrived at Reims 24 July, 1592, whence he set out for Valladolid 24 August, 1592. There he was ordained priest in 1596. He was arrested in the house of John Norton, of Ravenswroth, nearly Lamesley, County Durham, who seems to have been the second son of Richard Norton, of Norton Conyers, attainted for his share in the Rebellion in 1569. Norton and his wife (if the above identification be correct, she was his second wife, Margaret, daughter of Christopher Redshaw of Owston) were arrested at the same time, and with them John Talbot, one of the Talbots of Thorton-le-Street, North Ridding of Yorkshire. All four were tried at Durham and condemned to death, Palasor for being a priest, and the others for assisting him. Another gentleman was condemned at the same time but saved his life by conforming, as they might have done. Mrs. Norton, being supposed to be with child, was reprieved. The others suffered together. Bishop Challoner tells how an attempt to poison Palasor and his companions made by the gaoler's wife resulted in the conversion of her maid-servant Mary Day.

I mentioned that at the time Bowden composed this book, Palasor had been declared Venerable, but in 1987 Pope John Paul II beatified him. Misters Norton and Talbot were also beatified among those 85 Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales. As Pope John Paul II said in his homily at the Mass of Beatification:

Among these eighty-five martyrs we find priests and laymen, scholars and craftsmen. The oldest was in his eighties, and the youngest no more than twenty-four. There were among them a printer, a bartender, a stable-hand, a tailor. What unites them all is the sacrifice of their lives in the service of Christ their Lord.

The priests among them wished only to feed their people with the Bread of Life and with the Word of the Gospel. To do so meant risking their lives. But for them this price was small compared to the riches they could bring to their people in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

The twenty-two laymen in this group of martyrs shared to the full the same love of the Eucharist. They, too, repeatedly risked their lives, working together with their priests, assisting, protecting and sheltering them. Laymen and priests worked together; together they stood on the scaffold and together welcomed death. Many women, too, not included today in this group of martyrs, suffered for their faith and died in prison. They have earned our undying admiration and remembrance.

And 25 years after their beatification, Vincent Cardinal Nichols celebrated a Mass at Westminster Cathedral on that anniversary and commented in his homily:

Of the eighty-five martyrs we remember and honour today, sixty-three were priests. They knew the risk they took in embarking on their priestly mission in these countries. They did so, above all, to bring the eternal riches of the Holy Mass to Catholics here. . . But it was the Mass that mattered. . . .

Twenty-two of these martyrs were laymen of different standings, professions and trades. They include married and family men. They were committed to the care and protection of their priests, for they too treasured the gift of the Mass above all other things. There are no women among this group of martyrs, for very few were ever put to death in that age. But many women, too, risked everything to play their part in the struggle for the faith.

Note that Mrs. Norton's supposed pregnancy prevented her from being executed by being hanged to death, which supports both the pope's and the cardinal's comments about how few women (the three canonized martyrs--Saints Margaret Clitherow, Margaret Ward, and Anne Line--being the exceptions) were martyred for the Faith in the Recusant/Penal era. But they endured great suffering, especially the loss, in Margaret Norton's case, of their husbands, and probably their homes and property, being seized by the state since their husbands were accounted traitors. Whether Margaret Norton died in prison or was released, I do not know.

Blessed Thomas Palasor, pray for us!

Blessed John Norton, pray for us!

Blessed John Talbot, pray for us!

Preview: "Those Boots are made for Martyrdom": Blessed Everard Hanse

I know that's a pun that not even Scott Hahn should get away with, but in my defense, Father Henry Sebastian Bowden makes a pair of boots the center of his memento of Blessed Everard Hanse, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered on July 31, 1581 at Tyburn Tree. With the title, "Shod for the Gospel", and the verse, "How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, of them that bring glad tidings of good things!" (Romans 10:15) Father Bowden emphasizes that Hanse's foreign made boots led to his imprisonment, trial, and martyrdom.

So on Monday, July 31, we'll discuss the mementoes of Blessed Everard Hanse on the Son Rise Morning Show. I'll be on the air 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!

Blessed Everard Hanse was born in an Anglican family in Northamptonshire, attended Cambridge University, and was ordained as a Church of England minister with a good living. His brother William had become a Catholic priest in Rheims and returned to England in 1579, hoping to bring Everard to the Catholic Church. As Father Bowden remarks, his brother's arguments weren't as persuasive as an illness Everard suffered: it "placed all things in a new light, and William had the consolation of receiving his brother into the Church." (p. 247)

Everard left England for Rheims, the seminary, and ordination and returned to England in 1581 as a missionary priest. Fatefully, only three months after returning to England, he visited some prisoners in the Marshalsea "when the jailer noticed the foreign make of his boots, and took him before a magistrate."

Father Hanse admitted that he was a Catholic priest and was imprisoned in Newgate. 

In 1581, it was not yet treasonous for an Englishman just to be a Catholic priest in England, so the authorities had to find him guilty of a serious crime to sentence him to death. They did so at his trial, interpreting his statements that the pope had spiritual supremacy over him in England (denying Queen Elizabeth I's spiritual authority over him) and that he wished "all believed the Catholic Faith, as he did himself" (seen as his intention to persuade others to deny the Queen's supremacy and authority in religion) as proof of his treason. So he was sentenced to death and suffered at Tyburn on July 31, 1581.

Father Bowden adds the detail that when Blessed Everard Hanse's heart, cut out of his chest, was cast into the fire, "it leapt repeatedly, as if marking God's approval of his constancy." Bishop Challoner notes that the martyr's last words were "O happy day!"

He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on December 29, 1886.

Blessed Everard Hanse, pray for us!

Image Credit (Stained glass from St Edmund's College Ware, used by permission).

Preview: A Welsh Martyr and His Companions in Prison

On Monday, July 24 on the Son Rise Morning Show we'll discuss the mementoes of Blessed William Davies, one of the Welsh martyrs beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987. I'll be on the air 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!

With the title "The Three Children in the Furnace" and the verse from the Book of Daniel describing Shadrach, Meshach, and Abegnego as "they walked in the midst of the flame, praising God and blessing the Lord" (3:34), Father Henry Sebastian Bowden describes the way that Father Davies and his flock in prison prepared for his martyrdom with prayer and praise.

They were imprisoned in Beaumaris Castle, in Beaumaris, Angelesey, Wales, for about six months before his execution on July 27, 1593. Father Bowden explains that Blessed Williams Davies and the young men arrested and imprisoned with him were allowed great freedom in prison. Although they'd been arrested because of their Catholic faith, they were allowed practice it! Here is the daily Rule they followed:

• 4:00 a.m.: Meditation
• 5:00 a.m.: Mass, following by chanting O Sacrum Convivium/O Sacred Banquet:

O sacred banquet!

in which Christ is received,

the memory of his Passion is renewed,

the mind is filled with grace,

and a pledge of future glory to us is given.

Alleluia.

• Time for reading, study, prayer; with the Imitation of Christ read aloud after meals; Instructions from Father Davies; praying the Rosary, the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Litany of the Saints everyday.

• Confession twice a week and receiving Holy Communion at Sunday and Holy Day Masses.

Since the four young men were destined for seminary formation, he was preparing them, even though they'd been sentenced to life imprisonment.

Blessed William Davies had been ordained at Reims in April of 1585 and had returned to Wales as a missionary priest. Nearly seven years later, in March 1592, he was arrested with those four students he was sending to the English College in Valladolid, Spain and confessed that he was a priest. Catholics visited him in prison and Protestant ministers came to dispute with him. Once he was taken to a church for a debate, but the ministers began to celebrate an Anglican service and Father Davies recited Vespers in Latin!

One of things he is most famous for before his arrest and imprisonment is his book Y Drych Christianogawl (The Christian Mirror), the first book printed in Wales. According to The National Library of Wales:

"Y Drych Cristianogawl" is a work of importance as an example of an early Welsh Catholic book and also for the fact that it is the first book to have been printed on Welsh soil. Welsh books of the pre-1586/87 years came off London presses, the one exception being Morys Clynnog's Milan volume. Four copies only are extant, three of which are imperfect. It has all the appearances of a book printed in Britain rather than in France. The story of its printing is a romantic one and one of bravery in the face of danger. . . . 

When Blessed William Davies was found guilty of the crime of being a Catholic priest and sentenced to death, he chanted the Te Deum Laudamus! According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

At the summer assizes it was decided that the priest must die as a traitor, though he was offered his life if he would go but once to church. In spite of the then open opposition of the people, who honoured him as a saint, the cruel sentence was carried out and he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Beaumaris. As he put the rope round his neck, the martyr said: " Thy yoke, O Lord is sweet and Thy burden is light." His cassock stained with his blood was brought by his companions and preserved as a relic. They, though condemned to imprisonment for life, managed in time to escape, and the youngest found his way at last to Valladolid, where he recounted the whole story to Bishop Yepes, who wrote it in his "Historia particular de la Persecucion en Inglaterra".

Like the printing of his book, his life and death is a story of bravery in the face of danger and the romance of Faith!

Blessed William Davies, pray for us!

Image Source (Public Domain); Fiery furnace by Toros Roslin, Mashtots, 1266 (MS No. 2027, Fol. 14 V.) (Armenian art)

Preview: A Priest and Layman in Warwick

Our last two martyrs were among the first of the English Reformation era in our Son Rise Morning Show series (Saints John Fisher and Thomas More). With these two martyrs, Blesseds John Sugar and Robert Grissold (Venerables at the time of Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's work) we skip ahead to the beginning of the Stuart Dynasty in England. They suffered martyrdom on July 16, 1604, in Warwick.

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time on Monday, July 17: about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern: please listen live here and/or listen to the podcast later here!

With the title "The Continuity Theory" and the verse from Ephesians 2:19-20 ("You are fellow citizens with the saints . . . built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone"), Father Bowden sketches out Father Sugar's career before he became a Catholic missionary priest: he was born and raised in a Staffordshire County family, attended Merton College at the University of Oxford and left without taking a degree because he would not swear the Oath of Supremacy during Queen Elizabeth I's reign. Nevertheless, he served as a Church of England minister in his native Midland county, preaching against the Catholic Church and the Papacy.

But something changed his mind and he left England to study for the Catholic priesthood at Douai, returning to the Midlands of England in 1601 as a missionary priest. 

He and Blessed Robert Grissold, a layman, were arrested on July 8, 1603 in Warwick. Father Sugar was accused merely of being a Catholic priest present in England under the "Jesuits, etc. Act 1584", (27 Eliz. 1. c. 2) and he was found guilty after being held in prison for a year on July 14, 1604.

Father Bowden includes a couple of details from the day of Blessed John Sugar's martyrdom: he practiced some Catholic apologetics before being hanged, drawn, and quartered, asking the Church of England minister who had brought the Christian Faith to England. When the minister would not reply, he credited the successor of St. Peter, Pope Eleutherius, who sent missionaries Damianus and Fugatius to King Lucian, and said the religion practiced in England in their time "had crept in" during the reign of Henry VIII! Pope Saint Eleutherius reigned from around 174 to 189 A.D. and was one of the Greek Popes. The Venerable Bede mentions this story of an early mission to England.

Before he suffered--and he was conscious when he was disemboweled and beheaded--Blessed Father Sugar proclaimed "My true birth in this world began with the sign of the cross, and with that sign I leave it again."

Blessed Robert Grissold, or Griswold, was arrested by his cousin Clement while accompanying Father Sugar and accused of aiding a priest. He was offered clemency throughout his imprisonment from July of 1603 until July of 1604, if he would just attend a Church of England service, but he refused. Saint Catherine of Alexandria was his patron saint. 

On the day of their execution, Grissold was warned not to follow behind Father Sugar who was being dragged on a sledge through the mud. He replied "I have not thus far followed him to leave him for a little mire." Although he was usually afraid of seeing blood, he "gazed unmoved at the quartering of Ven. Sugar's body" and even dipped the noose of the rope with which he would be hanged  in the priest's blood. He gave thanks that he was to die with him.

Father Bowden titled his entry "Zeal for Martyrdom" and cited Acts 21:13 as the verse to accompany his mementoes: "For I am ready not only to be bound, but to die also in Jerusalem, for the name of the Lord Jesus."

Their martyrdoms must have been a remarkable scene in Warwick on July 16, 1604: a priest and a layman witnessing to the Faith so bravely and boldly. They were beatified in 1987 by Pope St. John Paul II.

Blessed John Sugar, pray for us!

Blessed Robert Grissold, pray for us!

Blessed John Sugar Image Source: shared under permission under a Creative Commons Attribution.

Blessed Robert Grissold Image Source (Public Domain).

There is a painting of Grissold standing behind Sugar on the sledge in the mud on this website. The artist is Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen (1830?-1923) aka Rebecca Dering, one of The Quartet at Baddlesley Clinton in Warwickshire. Baddlesley Clinton had been known as recusant household in the 1590's and the nineteenth century Quartet (Rebecca, her husband Marmion Edward Ferrers, Lady Georgiana Chatterton and her husband Sir William) were converts to Catholicism. 

Icons of Blesseds John Sugar and Robert Grissold are also included in the frieze behind the main altar in St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Baddlesley Clinton.