The English Martyrs

A good article on an often overlooked group of faithful martyrs.  By Bess Twiston-Davies for This Rock magazine.  -cgf

Today it is London’s busiest shopping street, but it hides a dark history. On this site, more than a hundred martyrs were killed for their Catholic faith by the English government. Between 1534 and 1681, some of England’s most famous Catholics died at what is today the entrance to Oxford Street, a consumer mecca jam-packed with shops. But at the time of the martyrdoms, the area was an open field called Tyburn, in the center of which stood a distinctive triangular-shaped gallows called “the Tyburn Tree.” One hundred five martyrs died a slow and painful death there after being accused of treason against the state. “Hanging, drawing, and quartering” was the official sentence for traitors, which means that they were hanged as fire burned beneath them to boil their organs, then their bodies were slit open or “drawn,” and their hearts and other vital organs ripped out. Their corpses were slung ignominiously into a pit near the gallows.

Hanged for Hiding Priests
Although the English Catholic minority is familiar with the martyrdoms, these shameful events are largely unknown by the majority of English people. Their story forms part of England’s hidden religious history, of a centuries-long era when being a Catholic was considered incompatible with being loyal to the monarchy. During this time, the Mass was illegal, priests risked death, and lay Catholics could be fined for going to Mass and hanged for hiding priests.

The reasons lay in the English Reformation, the abrupt abandonment of Catholicism in the sixteenth century in favor of a hybrid of Catholicism and the new Protestant religion. But England’s Reformation had little to do with the Protestant reforms of Martin Luther in Germany. It was prompted entirely by the personal life of the King Henry VIII. In 1527, Henry VIII decided he wished to divorce his wife, Spanish Catherine of Aragon, because their union had not produced a male heir. He had also fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, a lady of the court, and wished to marry her. When the Pope refused Henry a divorce, the king began to wrest control of the Catholic Church in England from Rome. In 1534, he declared himself supreme head and sole protector of the church in England. Any Catholic who refused to accept Henry as head of the Church of England was breaking the law, and the punishment for this was death. The martyrdoms began.

Monk and Martyr
The first martyrs were Carthusian monks, who died in May 1534. John Houghton, the prior of the London Charterhouse, had celebrated a Mass to the Holy Spirit with other Carthusians, seeking enlightenment after Henry VIII asked them to acknowledge that he alone was supreme head of the English church.

An eyewitness wrote this account of the Mass: “Suddenly there came from heaven—all of us heard and wondered—a pleasant sound like the voice of a gentle breeze, charming our outward ears as with a sweet breath, and then gently striking them with a softly whispered murmur.” Interpreting this as a sign from God, Houghton and his companions told the king they could not obey him. They were condemned to death and hanged on May 4. Houghton’s arm was nailed to the gate of the London Charterhouse. Tyburn’s shrine includes a portrait of Houghton by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran depicting him holding his heart. The story goes that Houghton cried, “Good Jesus, what will you do with my heart?” as the hangman ripped it out. He and the other monks are also commemorated on a pane of stained glass at St. Etheldreda’s Church.

Defender of the Faith
Witnessing Houghton depart for the gallows was perhaps the most famous of all the martyrs, St. Thomas More, who was nearing the end of a fourteen-month imprisonment when he saw the Carthusians taken to Tyburn from the tower. More said to his daughter, “See how the blessed fathers go to their deaths as cheerfully as bridegrooms to a marriage.” Within months More, too, would die for his faith.

Only two years earlier, he had been at the pinnacle of worldly success. As lord chancellor to Henry VIII, he was one of the most powerful men in England. Indeed, his writings were well known throughout Europe, and he counted among his close friends the important German humanist Desiderius Erasmus. The king’s portrait painter, Hans Holbein, painted his portrait as well as a portrait of the entire More household. More was also renowned as a Catholic apologist; he anonymously wrote an “Answer to Luther” that attacked the ideas of the German Reformer. In 1521 he helped edit Henry VIII’s writing in opposition to Luther. In response, the Pope granted Henry the title “Defender of the Faith”—a name ironically retained by British monarchs today.

More became deeply troubled when Henry sought a divorce from his wife. When Henry’s brother Arthur died twenty years before, Henry had applied to the Pope for special permission to marry Catherine, Arthur’s widow. Twenty years later, he claimed that his marriage was unlawful and cited a passage from Leviticus that said no man should wed his brother’s wife. As he waited for the Pope to judge the case in Rome, a priest named Thomas Cranmer advised Henry to seek the advice of professors of divinity at Oxford and Cambridge universities on whether there were biblical grounds for his divorce. They voted narrowly in Henry’s favor, but the Pope refused to grant the divorce.

In 1533, Cranmer, now the archbishop of Canterbury, declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine void. The next week, Anne, who had secretly already wed Henry, was crowned queen. The Pope excommunicated Henry.

A spate of laws separating the church in England from Rome was introduced by the furious Henry. Priests were told to delete references to the pope from prayer books and to preach sermons against Rome. All England’s citizens were to understand that the king rather than the pope was now the head of England’s church. Thomas More resigned as lord chancellor the day after one of these laws was passed. His real fall from grace, though, came when he refused to take an oath to obey a new law that said that only Henry’s children with Anne were legitimate heirs to the throne.

More died at Tower Hill in London on July 6, 1535. At the last minute, Henry VIII changed his sentence from hanging, drawing and quartering to beheading. More has been a hero and role model for English Catholics ever since. The pressures on him to conform were immense. He sacrificed power, prestige, and wealth for his faith and has been called the “person of greatest virtue” ever to live in England. 

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by Bess Twiston-Davies, “This Rock”, Vol 17, No 6, July-Aug 2006