On Monday, September 28, Matt Swaim and I will profile the next two of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales in our Son Rise Morning Show series: another of the six martyrs from Wales, Saint John Roberts, OSB, and Saint John Almond. Saint John Roberts was hanged, drawn, and quartered on December 10, 1610; Saint John Almond on December 5, 1612, both during the reign of King James I and both at Tyburn Tree.
Saint John Roberts was born in 1577 and raised in a Protestant family in Trawsfynydd, Snowdonia, Wales; he attended St. John's College in Oxford and then studied law at Furnivall's Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery in London. Then he went to Europe and, after visiting the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and meeting English Catholics in exile, became a Catholic and as John Hungerford Pollen reports in his 1891 Acts of the English Martyrs, Roberts studied for the priesthood at the English College at Valladolid and
thence joined the Spanish congregation of the Venerable Order of St. Benedict, was professed in the Abbey of St. Martin of Compostella, and after his ordination in 1600, was sent to England. There the ancient Order still lived on at least in the person of Dom Sigebert Buckley, and there, too, others, such as the Venerable [Blessed] Mark Barkworth, had obtained admission to its privileges; but Father Roberts is said to have been the first, who left a Benedictine monastery, to labour on that dangerous mission. In England he displayed a devotion and constancy worthy of his Order. With the examples of the great Benedictine missionaries who first converted this nation ever before his eyes, he strove heroically to emulate their virtues. Four times was he arrested, imprisoned, and banished, and he returned as often to post of danger ; nor was he more chary of exposing his life to danger when a severe out break of the "plague" devastated London. His success was commensurate with his labours and sufferings, which were becomingly closed by his apprehension in the act of celebrating Mass, when a trial on the charge of priesthood and a death bravely faced, were turned, as only a skilful missioner could turn them, into a notable occasion of bearing witness to the Faith.As the Catholic Encyclopedia describes his time in England, however, he endured capture, imprisonment, release, and exile more than once, twice, or thrice after returning to England as a missionary, including an arrest and examination in connection with the Gunpowder Plot:
He stayed on Continent more than a year:
Roberts was indeed captured again, on December 2, 1610; he was tried and convicted on December 5, sentenced on December 8, and executed at Tyburn with Blessed Thomas Somers.
Saint John Almond was born circa 1577 and raised a Catholic and lived in Ireland before he left England to study for the priesthood. As the Catholic Encyclopedia briefly describes his life:
Pollen adds the detail that Saint John Almond said "Jesu, Jesu, Jesu, esto mihi, Jesus" before he suffered hanging, drawing, and quartering.
Saint John Roberts, pray for us!
Saint John Almond, pray for us!
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