Catholic Martyrs of the English Reformation

The Angelus - July 1978



While the lives of mighty churchmen and the deeds of heroic saints attract our attention naturally, it is still well worth while to try to understand the condition of ordinary Catholics, especially during a time of crisis. Saint Cuthbert Mayne, although his death was spectacular, was in fact a rather simple and ordinary man who lived up to his vocation as a priest.

Before following his story, let us have a look at what life was like in England four hundred years ago. Here is a contemporary account:

These events were not cases of the lawlessness of petty officials or outbreaks of popular religious intolerance. These were, rather, the enforcement of laws designed to wipe out the Catholic faith in England. The persecution of Catholics was an essential and prominent part of Queen Elizabeth's official policy to establish the Church of England. Englishmen did not simply change their religion in the sixteenth century. It was changed for them, by intimidation at first, then by brute force.

During the short reign of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558), most Englishmen thought they had seen the end of the madness of Henry VIII and the fanaticism of Edward VI's protectors. But Mary's return of sanity in religion was not done well, and the disease of heresy had spread further than most people seemed ready to acknowledge.

Elizabeth reversed Mary's policies and far exceeded the novelties of her father and her half-brother. She plundered Church properties as her father had done, she asserted her supreme authority in the Church, she replaced the Mass with a communion service (Cranmer's, though he was dead now), and she provided heavy fines both for those who resisted the innovations and for those who urged resistance.

For example, to encourage a priest to say the old Mass earned a fine of 100 marks (about $500.00) for the first offense, quadruple that for the second, and loss of all goods and chattels and life imprisonment for the third. The penalty for the priest who said a Mass—or for just being a priest within the realm—was death. Even failure to attend the new services was punished, at first rather haphazardly, but ferociously later on.

The English people in general, even thirty years after the events for which More and Fisher gave their lives, could still be called Catholics, but their reaction to the new religion which Elizabeth was fashioning was deficient. Because the prescribed homilies, the new doctrinal formulations, and the new rites of worship were deliberately ambiguous and equivocal in key points, and because the sanctions were not imposed spectacularly at first, men found it easy to temporize, to compromise, to suspend judgment, to postpone decisions, and to imagine that they could cherish the traditional faith interiorly while they conformed exteriorly to the new requirements.

Nearly all the bishops, to their everlasting honor, refused to take Elizabeth's Oath of Supremacy, having learned a lesson from their predecessors a quarter century earlier under Henry VIII, but those who refused were replaced by new men zealous to stamp out the old practices. For instance, the new Archbishop of York, Edmund Grimbal, ordered that:

Meanwhile the faithful shepherds, deposed from their sees, languished in exile, or they suffered in prison where many died of disease or starvation.

Thus those who wished to resist the reformation in England were rendered leaderless. Is it a sin to attend the new communion service? Since the bread is only bread, what can be the harm? On these and similar issues good men were divided, but most of all no one spoke with authority. Thus the years rolled by, and thus most men and women came by stages to accept what they had at first only tolerated, their beliefs gradually clouded, their wills progressively weakened. Their outward conformity begot by degrees an inward assent, or a cynical indifference to religious matters.

This part of Queen Elizabeth's persecution, while not the bloodiest, is yet in a way the most vile, because it succeeded in destroying the faith and moral character of millions.

Into this arid wasteland came, like a bolt of lightening, the 'seminary priests' and the Jesuits—splendid men burning with charity, spiritually formed, liberally educated, learned in Scripture, prudent in spiritual counselling, skilled in preaching and disputation, and determined to root out from their native land the choking weed of heresy.

Cuthbert Mayne was the proto-martyr of the seminary priests. Seminaries were a new idea born of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, promoted by Pope Saint Pius V and decreed by the Council of Trent. The first one was founded at Douai, France, by William Allen (later Cardinal) of Lancashire, and it was staffed by scholars from Oxford and Cambridge, for many of the best university men had chosen to flee their homeland rather than acquiesce in the new religion.

Born in 1544, Cuthbert was raised according to the reformed religion. His uncle was a comfortably beneficed cleric, and he intended his nephew to succeed him. Accordingly Cuthbert was sent to Oxford to prepare for Anglican ordination, which he received, and he began his pastoral duties in that city. However, at Oxford he came under the influence of men who were still staunchly Catholic, particularly Edmund Campion, who later became the epitome of the new Catholic missionaries, and Gregory Martin, who was later the main author of the Douai-Rheims translation of the Bible.

Mayne soon came to understand that he was in the wrong religion, and he was not left long in doubt what he should do about it. A letter to him on matters of the faith was intercepted by the authorities, who ordered his arrest. Cuthbert was out of town at the time, and when his friends got word to him that he was a wanted man, he fled the country. He became one of the earliest students at Dr. Allen's seminary at Douai, and when he finished the rigorous and exhilerating course of priestly formation, he was sent immediately into the vineyard in 1576.

Father Mayne began his ministry as the 'steward' at the country house of Francis Tregian in Cornwall. Here he said Mass, administered the sacraments, and reconciled to the Church many who had fallen into error. Word of his presence went round, but within a year the high sheriff of Cornwall conducted a raid on Mr. Tregian's house. His search was a success, for Catholics had not yet perfected their systems of lookouts and places of hiding for priests and their equipment. The incriminating evidence consisted of such things as an Agnus Dei (i.e., a small plaster disk embossed with the figure of the Lamb of God) and a copy of Gregory XIII's bull concerning indulgences for the Jubilee Year of 1575 (now expired). Mr. Tregian and several other laymen were charged with giving aid and comfort to a priest.

After a most irregular trial Saint Cuthbert Mayne was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. "Which sentence pronounced," a contemporary account records, "Cuthbert Mayne, with a most mild and gladsome countenance, lifting up his eyes and hands unto Heaven, only said, 'God be thanked.' "

The laymen were sentenced to forfeiture of goods and life imprisonment.

On the day before his execution,
Next day he was drawn roughly on a hurdle to the market place where the knives, the fire, and a very high gibbet were prepared. He was required to climb the ladder backwards and was allowed a short speech. He began with a plea for the innocence of his host, Francis Tregian, and the other laymen, but one of the justices quickly interrupted with an order to put the rope on his neck. "And then let him preach afterward." (The magistrate spoke better than he knew, for the execution became a powerful sermon in blood.)

Then he was turned off the ladder abruptly and cut down while his body still swung in wide arc.

He fell in such sort that his head first encountered the scaffold which was there prepared of purpose to divide the quarters, so that the one side of his face was sorely bruised and one of his eyes driven far out of his head.

After he was cut down, the hangman first spoiled him of his clothes . . . and then in a butcherly manner opening his belly, he rent up his bowels and after tore out his heart, the which as a plausible spectacle he held up aloft in his hand. Lastly his head was cut off and his body divided into four quarters, which afterwards were dispersed and set up on the castle at Launceston, one quarter sent unto a town called Bodmin, the most populous town in Cornwall, another to a town called Barnstaple in Devonshire whereabout [Mayne] was born, the third into a town called Tregony, not above a mile distant from Mr. Tregian's house, the fourth into Wadebridge, the most common travelled way in that county.

The holy death of this first of the new breed of priests was broadcast by the heretics themselves. And the government's harsh policy was further confirmed when the high sheriff was granted knighthood for his conduct of the affair (that is, for following the instructions from London on how to conduct it).

The Catholic faith had been well on the way to utter obliteration in England (as happened in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden), except for those champions of Christ led by Saint Cuthbert Mayne, because (in the words of Tertullian) "The more you mow us down, the more we grow: the blood of Christians is the seed."

Dr. Malcolm Brennan is Professor of English at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.


[Emphasis - The Catacombs]

The Angelus - December 1978



OLIVER PLUNKETT'S career provides glimpses of many things: the progress of the reformation heresies, the vitality of the counter-reformation Catholic Church, Ireland and the Church in Ireland devastated by persecution, and Plunkett's own career toward sanctity.

Oliver was born into the tight network of Anglo-Irish gentry in 1625, and he was educated by his kinsman, Patrick Plunkett, later bishop of Meath, whom Oliver venerated all his life. In his teens he was sent to Rome to complete his education. Upon ordination to the priesthood in 1654, when he would normally have returned to Ireland, he requested and received permission to remain in Rome because of the severe Cromwellian persecutions still raging at home.

He stayed in Rome fifteen more years, but not idly. An apt administrator and teacher, he was perfectly attuned to the extensive, canonically systematized bureaucracies of the Holy City, and he was moving comfortably up the ladder of ecclesiastical success. Outside of office hours he gave himself up to good works, especially at the hospital of Santo Spirito. It seemed for all the world that he would live out a useful and blameless life there.

But then, surprisingly, the legalistic and orderly minds of counter-reformation Rome selected Oliver, at the age of 44, to be Archbishop of Armagh, a position which also carries the title Primate of All Ireland. He was an administrator and a theologian almost totally without pastoral experience as even a parish priest much less as bishop and head of a national hierarchy. And, while he no doubt knew the intra-mural politics of the Curia and had kept in touch with events in Ireland, he had little experience of national and international affairs.

THE condition of the Church in Ireland when Archbishop Plunkett landed in 1670 was desolate. Besides the regular havoc wrought by the Reformation, the Irish had suffered centuries of oppression and abuse at the hands of the English. In addition, Ireland had been a main battleground between the royal armies of King Charles I and the Puritan Parliament's "army of saints" led by the fanatic Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell's final victories were followed by measures to suppress the Anglican church, and a fortiori, the Catholic. There were repeated bloody attempts to eradicate the Catholic clergy and to obliterate the Faith. Part of Cromwell's final solution to the Irish problem was to drive whole populations of native Irish from the lands of their fathers into the stark wildernesses of Connaght, west of the Shannon, populations already debilitated by war, famine, religious persecution, and plague, and to give their lands to those who had financed or fought for Cromwell. Thousands of the orphans thus produced, and others, were sold into slavery for plantation labor in the West Indies, not by a few enterprising renegades but by official policy of the Puritan conquerors.

When the Puritan extravaganza collapsed and a king was restored to England's throne, Ireland returned to the less consistent persecution of the English monarchy. The confused state of political affairs is indicated by the fact that while King Charles II was executing harsh laws against Catholics (under pressure from his Parliament), his Queen, Catherine, lived a full Catholic life with a numerous Catholic clergy in her retinue.

IT was into this state of affairs that Oliver returned to his homeland after an absence of 23 years. A good measure of the still inhospitable climate is that the Primate of All Ireland donned the disguise of a soldier for his first few months home. He was later criticized for this—dashing around the countryside on a fine horse and in a blond wig, stopping at a tavern, drinking the host's health, bussing a barmaid on the cheek, and clattering off again with swords and gear rattling. (Strange stuff these Roman bureaucrats were made of.)

After learning where he could operate safely—for, despite the policies of the central government, the hereditary aristocracy still exercised extensive rule in their own feudal domains—he got down to the serious business of building up the Church. First, and constantly through his career, there were confirmations, hundreds and thousands of them, for bishops had not operated freely for many decades. Next he established schools for boys and clergy. They were a great success obtained at enormous personal sacrifice, but the government shut them down in less than four years.

The clergy was numerous but mostly of very low calibre. Education was scant among them, strong drink a blight, concubinage common, and at least one pastor supplemented his income by highway robbery. Dominican and Franciscan friars were at each others' throats, sometimes literally and at the very altar. Archbishop Plunkett was necessarily severe in dealing with these matters, but never unfair. The interesting thing is not that he made bitter enemies in dealing with refractory clergy—one deposed cleric hired assassins to kill him—but that his orderly, clerical, canonically oriented, Romanized mind was adequate to the job . . . and more than adequate, because the results were immediate, solid and enduring.

BY 1673 the favorable winds—shifted again. All Catholic clergy were ordered to register and report to seaports for exile. Oliver Plunkett had long since learned the art of compromise, of making the best of a bad situation, but at this juncture he counselled resistance. He and his old friend from student days in Rome, John Brennan, now Bishop of Waterford, found a dilapidated shack in a remote district and endured a harsh winter in it, sick and near starvation. These events marked a major turning point in St. Oliver's spiritual development and are the true beginnings of his real saintliness.

Heretofore he had always worked for God and His Church, diplomatically adapting the circumstances before him to the cause of religion. But now he had taken a posture of defiance of the circumstances before him, abandoning diplomacy for a prophetic stance. Heretofore he had suffered willingly, as for his beloved schools, but now the sufferings were in a way absolute, uncompromising, because they could not be calculated as proportional to some worthwhile earthly project.

He had reached a new kind of battle ground and, thank God, he was equal to the struggle.

He knew that his present sufferings were not now for schools and synods and confirmation schedules but were rather in imitation of the Good Shepherd who lay down His life for His sheep—that somehow they worked for the glory of God and the salvation of souls in the purely spiritual order now that the ecclesiastical order was in ruins.

Yet he did not, thank God and thanks to his theological formation in Rome, adopt a silly Anabaptist or Lutheran aversion or condescension to the "institutional church." When the wave of persecution fizzled out and a sort of normalcy returned, Oliver resumed his episcopal ministry with customary zeal and busyness—but now with a fuller sensitivity to the supernatural and a more complete abandonment to Providence.

This temporary calm was broken by a fanatic outburst of anti-Catholic feeling cultivated in ill-disposed minds by the devilish imagination of Titus Gates and his patron, Lord Shaftsbury. Oates concocted an elaborate Popish Plot, a scheme supposedly engineered mainly by Jesuits to take over the whole country, replace the king with his Catholic brother, and massacre the Protestants. Oates suddenly became the "saviour of the nation," and his mere accusation was practically sufficient to send men to the gallows. He is conservatively credited with thirty-five such judicial murders.

An important part of the Plot was the Irish connection: a 40,000 (or sometimes 70,000) man army was supposedly waiting there to invade England. When Archbishop Plunkett, again in hiding, was arrested on orders from London in 1679, the prosecution strategy was to show him to be a leader in the Popish Plot. The course of his imprisonment and trial is a tale in itself—the trial's illegal removal from Ireland to London, the consequent impossibility of assembling defense witnesses, the testimony of Catholic clerics against him, the shameful scheming of politicians, the incredible gullibility of otherwise sober men, the fanaticism of Catholic-haters, and the like. But more cogent than that tale is the story of St. Oliver's growth in sanctity.

THE idea of dying for the Faith could never have been very far from the minds of Catholics in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But martyrdom is a good bit more than just being done in because one is Catholic—though that might fit some minimal definition of the term. Rather, it is a stupendous event in the supernatural order, an imitation of and an extension of and a participation in the redemptive passion of Christ. In some cases—like that of the innocents slaughtered by Herod—the victims seem unaware of their role as martyrs; nor even in retrospect can we fully understand why Our Lord's advent required their bloody sacrifice. In other cases, the victim is required over and over again to face agonies of decision to follow Our Lord. In either case, anguished or not, what seems to be essential is a total abandonment of oneself to God. But this emptying of oneself, this passivity, this passion like Our Lord's, is not finally obliteration, but it is, paradoxically, a highly personal act of heroic courage. Christ promised to his martyrs, "In patience you shall possess your souls" (Gospel, Second Mass of Several Martyrs, Roman Missal)— that is, to give the soul up to suffering is somehow to be pre-eminently self-possessed.

Oliver Plunkett was kept in solitary confinement from October to May in the very cold winter of 1680-81. Newgate Prison records call him "very ancient [he was 55] and subject to diverse infirmities," and they report his painful sufferings "by reason of his close confinement and want of assistance for the distemper of the stone and the gravel, which often afflicts him." He also suffered from filth and fetters. A fellow prisoner wrote:


This report comes from Father Maurus Corker, a Benedictine who had been found innocent of treason but was still imprisoned. The most extraordinary friendship developed between him and Saint Oliver. They met face to face only once, when they gave each other absolution, yet they carried on a lively correspondence between their cells. Father Maurus goes on:




ON the day of his death, Saint Oliver was allowed to say Mass with McKenna as his server, and then he awaited his execution with equanimity. Tied to a hurdle behind a horse, the Primate of All Ireland was dragged the two miles from Newgate Prison to Tyburn's 'triple tree.' He was permitted to address the crowds, which he did with a prepared speech asserting his innocence of treason. Afterwards, as he said some prayers in Latin, the cart was driven out from under him and he was left hanging. Though he may have been dead when they cut him down, the executioners proceeded with the full rigours of the traitor's death.

Archbishop Plunkett's words and his demeanor and his blood seem to have had an impact. The crowd treated him sympathetically, and throughout the country the frenzy of the Popish Plot soon abated. St. Oliver Plunkett was the last Catholic executed in England for his Faith. He died July 11, 1681, and was canonized on October 20,1975.



DR. MALCOLM BRENNAN is Professor of English at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He and the staff of THE ANGELUS are deeply grateful to those readers who have written about this column this year. We hoped, when it began last Spring, that it would be of benefit to you—and, judging from your many letters—it has, indeed!