This Morning: Saint John Rigby and Saint Anne Line

Just a reminder that I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central to continue our series on the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. Matt Swaim and I will discuss Saint John Rigby and Saint Anne Line.

Please listen live here on the Sacred Heart Radio website; the podcast will be archived here; the segment will be repeated on Friday next week during the EWTN hour of the Son Rise Morning Show (from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. Eastern/5:00 to 6:00 a.m. Central).

Saints Rigby and Line are the last two martyrs from the reign of Elizabeth I among the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. Her reign ended in 1603.

Saint John Rigby was martyred, not at Tyburn, but at St. Thomas Waterings or St. Thomas-a-Watering on the Old Kent Road. The St. Thomas in the name is St. Thomas a Becket, and the Old Kent Road was on the way to Canterbury and St. Thomas a Becket's shrine. Chaucer's pilgrims stop at the spring. As this website explains:

Set on a former route for pilgrims visiting Canterbury, St Thomas-a-Watering on Old Kent Road gets its name from a spring that emerges at this spot dedicated to St Thomas a Becket.

St Thomas-a-Watering became a well-known site for the execution of Catholics and dissenters during the reformation.

In 1539, Griffith Clerke, Vicar of Wandsworth, along with three others, thought to be Catholic friars, were hanged and quartered on this site. Wales’s most famous Protestant martyr, John Penry was also executed at St Thomas-a-Watering in 1593, for doing little more than ‘issuing strong words of warning’ against the then Queen Elizabeth and her bishops.

Many more executions of common criminals took place right up until 1740, when a father and son were hanged for murder.

Note that the website leaves out St. John Jones, Rigby's confessor, Rigby, and Blessed John Pibush, also martyred at St. Thomas-a Waterings. Because of the site's location on the old route to the former shrine of a great Catholic saint, it must have seemed an appropriate place for executing Catholics.

Here's the mention of St. Thomas-a-Watering at the end of the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales:

Amorwe, whan that day gan for to sprynge,
Up roos oure Hoost and was oure aller cok,
And gadrede us togidre alle in a flok;
And forth we riden, a litel moore than paas,
Unto the wateryng of Seint Thomas;
And there oure Hoost bigan his hors areste,
And seyde, "Lordynges, herkneth, if yow leste:
Ye woot youre foreward and I it yow recorde. . . .

Saint Anne Line is also thought to have a literary connection: to William Shakespeare's poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle"(dove). Several critics have thought that Saint Anne Line and her husband Roger are being commemorated in the funeral for the lovers in that poem:

Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.

If Shakespeare remembered a Catholic martyr and her exiled Catholic husband in a poem, it lends credence to those who suggest that the Bard of Avon was, if not a practicing Recusant Catholic, at least a Church Papist, outwardly conforming while secretly remaining a Catholic.

Saint John Rigby, pray for us!

Saint Anne Line, pray for us!

Preview: Saints John Rigby and Anne Line

After our Labor Day holiday hiatus, I'll be back on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, September 14 (the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross) to talk about two more of the 40 Martyrs of England Wales, Saint John Rigby (1600) and Saint Anne Line (1601). Both of these lay martyrs had returned to the Catholic Church: Rigby was born and raised a Catholic and had attended Church of England services for a time but then stopped and went back to the practice of his Catholic faith--he would be called a revert. Line was a convert (along with her husband and brother) and had been denounced and renounced by her family.

St. John Rigby was martyred on June 21, 1600, was found guilty of being a convert to Catholicism. He denied that he was a convert, however, maintaining that he had been born and raised a Catholic. For a time he went to Church of England services to avoid paying the recusancy fines. He had been admonished by the Franciscan missionary priest, John Jones, had confessed, and been reconciled, so that was enough for the authorities:

Rigby was born circa 1570 at Harrock Hall, Eccleston, near Chorley, Lancashire, the fifth or sixth son of Nicholas Rigby, by his wife Mary (née Breres). In 1600 Rigby was working for Sir Edmund Huddleston, whose daughter Mrs. Fortescue was summoned to the Old Bailey for recusancy. Because she was ill, Rigby appeared for her, was compelled to confess his Catholicism, and sent to Newgate. The next day, the feast day of St Valentine, he signed a confession saying that since he had been reconciled to the Roman Catholic faith by Saint John Jones, a Franciscan priest, he had not attended Anglican services. He was sent back to Newgate and later transferred to the White Lion. Twice he was given the chance to recant, but twice refused. His sentence was carried out. He gave the executioner who helped him up to the cart a piece of gold, saying, "Take this in token that I freely forgive thee and others that have been accessory to my death." Rigby was executed by hanging [drawing and quartering] at St Thomas Waterings on June 21, 1600.

Saint John Jones, the priest who had reconciled Rigby, had suffered execution at the same place Rigby had died, St Thomas Waterings, two years earlier, on July 12, 1598.

As the Diocese of Shrewsbury reports his execution, it was brutal:

He kissed the rope as it was put around his neck and turned to address the crowd a final time. He was interrupted by the Sheriff’s deputy who asked him: “What traitors does thou know in England?”

“God is my witness, I know none,” was the saint’s reply.

The cart was sharply drawn away and the deputy ordered the hangman to cut down St John just moments later.

A young and healthy man, St John stood upright on his feet, startled but fully conscious. He was then thrown to the floor by his executioners, and was heard to say aloud: “God forgive you. Jesus receive my soul.”

The brutality with which he was butchered shocked many in a crowd inured to spectacles of cruelty. St John was held down by his arms and legs and a man, described as a porter, stood on his throat while he was disembowelled in full consciousness. As one of the executioners reached for his heart, he thrust off the others with his arms. They cut off his head and quartered him, disposing of the parts of his body throughout Southwark.

“The people, going away, complained very much of the barbarity of the execution,” wrote Bishop Challoner, in Memoirs of Missionary Priests, “and generally all sorts bewailed his death.”

Anne Heigham Line was a convert to Catholicism; she and her brother William Heigham were disinherited and disowned by their Calvinist father. In 1586 she married Roger Line, another disinherited convert. Not long after Anne and Roger married, he and her brother William were arrested for attending Mass and were exiled from England. Roger lived in Flanders and died in 1594.

Father John Gerard SJ, author of the famous book Autobiography of an Elizabethan Priest, asked Anne to manage two different safe houses for Jesuits, even though she was ill, but because she was destitute, surviving on teaching and sewing. She was arrested on the Feast of the Presentation, February 2, 1601, when Father Francis Page was celebrating Mass; he escaped with her help. She was tried on February 26, carried to court in a chair, where she admitted joyfully that she had helped Father Page escape and only regretted that she had not been able to help even more priests escape!

She was hanged to death at Tyburn in London on February 27 and repeated her statement from court before her execution: "I am sentenced to die for harboring a Catholic priest, and so far I am from repenting for having so done, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand." Two priests, Father Roger Filcock and Father Mark Barkworth, paid tribute to her before their own executions, drawn, hung, and quartered. Father Filcock kissed her dead hand and the hem of her dress as she still hung from the gibbet and proclaimed, “You have gotten the start of us, sister, but we will follow you as quickly as we may.”

Saint John Rigby, pray for us!

Saint Anne Line, pray for us!