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!