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