Prepared to Serve: Blesseds Robert Anderton and William Marsden

Some missionary priests survived for a relatively long time in the English mission, some were arrested soon after beginning their mission, some were never able to begin their mission of service to the hidden Catholics of England at all--St. Henry Walpole, for example, was arrested during the night on the same day he arrived in Yorkshire. Today's martyrs, however, never even reached their intended landfall to begin their mission: Blesseds Robert Anderton and William Marsden. After growing up together, they had left England together to study for the priesthood and as this website explains, they returned to England together to begin their mission:

The two young priests were then given permission to return to England. Early in the morning of 4th Feb. 1586 they each offered Mass in the seminary chapel before bidding farewell to their professors and fellow students. Together they set off for England to preach the Faith that once prospered within its shores. Little did they realise that the Mass which they offered to Almighty God that morning would be their last Mass.

They managed to board a ship for England. After a few hours a storm developed. The two priests were caught as they prayed for calm on board ship in the English Channel. A spy on board heard their words: “O Lord thy Will be done! But if we are to die, suffer us to die for Thy cause in our own country. Let us not be remembered as the first seminarians who have perished in the waters“. They were betrayed by the words and manner of their own prayer and taken ashore at Cowes on the Isle of Wight where they were brutally treated.

The Governor of the Isle of Wight was Captain George Carey, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth I and he was keen to ingratiate himself with the authorities and accept the reward for capturing “Romish priests”. So the two young men were sent to the assizes at Winchester and then on to the London Prison at Marshalsea, having been found guilty of Treason under the new Act (27 Elizabeth) which made it illegal to return to England having been ordained as a priest overseas. They were the first two to be sentenced under this Act of Parliament. The authorities were keen to demonstrate to the local people the consequences for those who harboured priests or supported them, so they were sent back to the Isle of Wight for execution. The two young priests who had become almost inseparable from the time that they met at school, were to die together on the scaffold. They were hung (sic), drawn and quartered on 25th April, 1586. We do not know the exact spot of their execution. The records state that it was on “high ground in sight of the moaning sea”. This was probably on the hill above Cowes where they were caught.

George Carey was the eldest son of Henry Carey, William Carey and Mary Boleyn's son and Elizabeth I's first cousin. His mother was the former Anne Morgan and he was born in 1547. This portrait, by Nicholas Hilliard, dates from 1601, two years before his death on September 9, 1603. He served as governor on the Isle of Wight for about 20 years, posted there especially because of the Spanish Armada threat.

You may read more about them here. They were beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929.

For St. Cecilia's Day

There is a Benedictine Abbey of nuns on the Isle of Wight named for St. Cecilia; the abbey is part of the Solesme community of Dom Prosper Gueranger, who revived Benedictine monasticism in France after the French Revolution. He wrote a life of St. Cecilia which is available from Loreto Publications:

In the nineteenth century there was a concerted effort on the part of liberal revisionists to undermine the Church’s history by challenging the veracity of the Acts of the Martyrs. Some miraculous events associated with the lives of very popular saints, whose names were canonized in the Roman Missal, were treated with ridicule by scholars more concerned with documents than the living evidence of common tradition. 

It was righteous indignation that moved Abbot Dom Guéranger to defend the cause of Saint Cecilia, whose holy celebrity had spanned fifteen centuries. The abbot’s strategy was to validate the traditional accounts of all the martyrs’ lives by exonerating just one. He achieved this in the holy virgin Cecilia’s case by presenting in book form every morsel of factual evidence available, especially that which modern archeological excavations offered. As a result of his labor, there arose a refreshing new devotion to the young martyr, and – at least for a time — the cynical scoffs of the proud were silenced. This particular biography was written in response to the request of his co-reformer and friend, the Benedictine Abbess Cécile Bruyère.

Prospér Louis Pascal Guéranger was born in France, in 1805, at Sablé-sur-Sarthe. In the Napoleonic era, 1827, during the continued anti-clerical aftermath of the French Revolution, he was ordained a parish priest. As a young curé he authored several works on church-state relations. In 1836, having purchased an abandoned priory that was for sale in Solesmes, he and five other parish priests took solemn vows as Benedictines, with the intention of restoring the monastic life in France according to the ancient rule of Saint Benedict. Until his death there in 1875, Abbot Dom Guéranger devoted himself to restoring the cenobitical life as originally cultured thirteen centuries earlier by the father of western monasticism. He did much by his writings and prayers to keep the church in France loyal to the person of the Sovereign Pontiff and away from the dangers of both Gallicanism and Jansenism.

You may also find an online version here.

I see the Benedictines of St. Cecilia's Abbey listed often as translators of various Latin hymns in the monthly Magnificat liturgical prayer book/magazine. For example, for the feast of St. Elizabeth of Hungary last week (November 17) they have translated "Fortem virili pectore" by Silvio Cardinal Antoniano (1540-1603).

Martyrs on the Isle of Wight

The Catholic Church of St. Mary's, Ride, on the Isle of Wight notes that 2004 "mark[ed] the 75th anniversary of the Beatification of the 136 English and Welsh martyrs [by Pope Pius XI in 1929]who gave their lives so heroically at the time of the Reformation and in the subsequent penal days. Two of the martyrs are particularly remembered on the Isle of Wight where they were executed in 1586. Blessed Robert Anderton and Blessed William Marsden had never intended to set foot on the Island. It was only by a freak storm at sea that their ship took shelter at Cowes. They were betrayed when they were heard praying, "O Lord thy Will be done! But if we are to die, suffer us to die for Thy cause in our own country. Let us not be remembered as the first seminarians who have perished in the waters". Of all the iniquitous laws against Catholics, Statute "27 Elizabeth" was the most ferocious as it made it high treason for a priest ordained abroad to set foot in England. There was generous financial reward for reporting papists so it was no surprise when on disembarking at Cowes they were immediately arrested and sent to Winchester for trial at the Spring Assizes.

Their story however starts when they first met at Rivington Grammer School near Chorley in Lancashire. The two young men immediately became friends. They became almost inseparable. They were to pray, study, travel and ultimate die together as martyrs for Christ. From Lancashire they went to Oxford to continue their education and were enrolled at Brasenose College in 1578. It is recorded that both were "unassuming but full of life and spirits and they were remarkable for their piety, devotion and zeal for all things sacred." (Pollen, Acts 82) They set off together in July 1580 for Douai College near Rheims and offered themselves to Almighty God in the Holy Priesthood. This seminary in France was the venue for many young Englishmen (such as Robert Anderton and William Marsden) who wished to study for the priesthood and return to offer Mass and spread the Faith in their native homeland. It was founded in 1568 by Cardinal William Allen. English Catholics liked to think of Douai as an "Oxford over the water" until happier days should return to the Dowry of Mary. . . .Read the rest here.

Note that there is an Ordinariate group based at St. Mary's Ride, with a former Anglican minister, now an ordained Catholic priest!