Preview: Blessed John Slade and "The Voice of the People"

We'll return to our weekly discussion of an English martyr on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, October 30. I'll be on at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern, the last segment in the second national hour on EWTN Radio. Please listen live here and/or catch the podcast later here.

Monday's martyr from Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors For Every Day in the Year was hanged, drawn, and quartered on October 30, 1583. Blessed John Slade, a layman, had been founded guilty of denying Queen Elizabeth's spiritual authority over the Church in England and thus had committed High Treason.

John Slade was born in Dorsetshire and left England after being expelled from New College in Oxford for his recusancy/Catholicism to study Civil and Canon Law at the English College at Douai. As Bishop Richard Challoner describes his return to England, where he worked as a schoolmaster, he was "so zealous in maintaining the old religion" that he was "apprehended on that account."

When he and John Bodey, another Canon and Civil lawyer trained at Douai, were tried for their zealous Catholicism, the main charge against them was that they would not recognize Queen Elizabeth as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, with spiritual authority. Thus they were violating the Act of Supremacy of 1558. They were imprisoned together at Winchester, tried and convicted together, but were not executed together. Blessed John Bodey suffered the execution of a traitor on November 2, 1583. Both Slade and Bodey were beatified by Pope Pius XI on December 15, 1929, among a large group of priests and laity (136).

As John Hungerford Pollen, who gathered the information about the English martyrs beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI, recounts, when John Slade was drawn to the gallows in Winchester on October 30. 1583, he was questioned again about Papal Supremacy and why he denied the religious supremacy of Elizabeth I.

He replied "the Supremacy hath and doth belong to the Pope by right from Peter, and the Pope hath received it as by divine providence. Therefore, we must not give those things belonging to God to any other than him alone. And because I will not do otherwise, I may say with the three children in the fiery oven, and the first of the widow's seven sons in the Maccabees: "Paraii sumus mori magis quam pairias Dei leges pravaricari." [we are ready to die rather than to transgress the laws of God, received from our fathers." 2 Macc 7:2]

Asked about Pope Pius V's excommunication of Elizabeth I, Slade replied with similar boldness:

"Sir," answered Slade, " you are very busy in words: if the Pope hath done so, I think he hath done no more than he may, and than he ought to do. I will acknowledge no other head of the Church, but only the Pope: and her Majesty hath no authority in temporal causes likewise, but only what he shall think good to allow her." At these words the people cried, "Away with the traitor. Hang him. Hang him."

Father Bowden quotes these replies in his entry for Blessed John Slade, citing the verse from the Gospel according to St. Luke: "But they cried again, saying: Crucify him, crucify him." (23:21) as the "Voice of the People" who urged his bloody execution.

It's rather unusual for a layman to be convicted of High Treason for his religion, but after Pope Pius V had excommunicated Elizabeth I and declared that Catholics were not bound to be loyal to her religious or temporal supremacy--and in the midst of the investigation of the Throckmorton Plot to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots and place her on the throne of England--this was an essential issue for Elizabethan authorities. 

We may also be astonished that Blessed John Slade invoked the pope granting permission to Elizabeth I to rule England as Queen in the temporal sense, but the combination of temporal and religious authority in the monarch created the tension of loyalties for her Catholic subjects. I wonder how many in the Church of England--until the Tractarian Movement of the 1830's in Oxford--ever thought that perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most senior Church of England cleric, should have the spiritual authority, and that the Church of England should not be an Erastian church with the monarch having such control over worship, doctrine, and other ecclesiastical matters. (Note that of Henry VIII's heirs, only Mary I did not claim that authority, leaving it to the Pope and his representative in England, the Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole.) 

Not many, or at least not many would speak such thoughts out loud. T'would be Treason!

Blessed John Slade, pray for us!