In his new book on the Douai Martyrs, Fr Gerard Skinner hopes the memory of their sacrifice inspires devotion.
Not for the first time, in the dead of night, Luisa de Carvajal was awaiting the arrival of her guests. The passages and stairs of this Spanish noblewoman’s house in Spitalfields, London, had been strewn with flowers, as had a red carpet laid before a house altar – for this was where de Carvajal’s guests were to rest. Meanwhile, near the gallows at Tyburn, her servants were racing against time to excavate a newly filled pit into which the bodies of those executed that day had been thrown.
It was not difficult to identify the quartered bodies of the Douai-trained Richard Newport and the Benedictine William Scott. They had been buried beneath the corpses of 16 or more criminals who had been hanged (but not quartered) after them. The felons’ executions followed those of the “traitors” precisely so that the whole bodies could be used to cover the quartered ones. It must have been grisly work, but the bodies of Newport and Scott were exhumed and then fitted into pouches made up of de Carvajal’s old bedsheets. Then, at great danger to all involved, they were transported to Spitalfields. “On bended knee,” recorded de Carvajal, “we offered up prayer.”
The next day, 31 May 1612, de Carvajal wiped clean the relics and coated them in strong-smelling spices before depositing them in leaden boxes, two of which were taken to the Spanish ambassador’s home at Gondomar in Galicia. Newport had been confessor to the Spanish embassy in London, hence the intrepid de Carvajal’s determination to rescue his remains. He was one of hundreds of Catholic priests willing to risk their lives by being ordained abroad during the years following the penal legislation of the mid-1580s which made it treasonable for “Jesuits, seminary priests and other such like disobedient persons” to be in England. Luisa de Carvajal represents the thousands of laypeople who risked their lives for the faith and enabled the priests to go about God’s work – both before and after death.
Many of the priests who were ultimately to be martyred found their way to Flanders, wherein lay the town of Douai. A part of the Spanish-controlled Low Countries, and not so far from the English Channel, it was the setting for William Allen’s pioneering English seminary which opened its doors on 29 September 1568. “Douai College”, as it became known, was forced to move to Rheims in March 1578 because of political troubles, but in June 1593 it was able to return and remain in the town of its birth until it was closed in 1792: a victim of the French Revolution. Ultimately, it lived on in its successor seminaries at Ushaw in County Durham and Allen Hall in London.
Between 1577 and 1680, 159 former students of the English College at Douai suffered barbaric deaths – most being hanged, drawn and quartered. Beatifying many of the Douai martyrs in 1987, Pope St John Paul II declared that, with St Thomas More, “each of them chose to be ‘God’s servant first’. They consciously and willingly embraced death for love of Christ and the Church. They too chose the Kingdom above all else. If the price had to be death they would pay it with courage and joy… For them this price was small compared to the riches they could bring to their people in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.”
Given the hidden ministry of the priests, little is known of not a few of them beyond their time at Douai College and the dates of their trial and death. Some of the priests’ names are familiar: the academically brilliant St Edmund Campion or the “parish priest of Westminster”, St John Southworth. Others are less well known: Blessed Robert Middleton has not, until recently, been listed among the Douai martyrs. He was the nephew of St Margaret Clitherow and had been thought of as a student of the English College of St Gregory in Seville by Bishop Richard Challoner, whose Memoirs of Missionary Priests formed the basis of the list of Douai College martyrs.
Not all the 159 martyrs were priests – some studied at Douai but not with ordination in view. Spies threatened the lives of them all from seminary onwards: some managed to elude the authorities for years; others were caught as soon as they reached England; some were exiled but soon returned to the English mission. A few weakened under the stress of imprisonment yet ultimately were given the strength to persevere. Living on the run, bringing the life, joy and comfort of Christ in the sacraments to many, they knew they might endure dungeons, horrendous torture and a barbaric execution.
The martyrs also knew that the cross led to the martyrs’ crown. Blessed John Cornelius, executed in 1594, concluded his final letter with emphatic hope: “Yours, John, one about to die for a moment that he may live for ever.” In 1642, with the rope around his neck, the Venerable Edward Morgan’s good spirits were too much for an attending Protestant minister who rebuked him for his humour. The martyr declared: “Indeed this is no joking matter with me, but very serious; but why should anyone be offended at my going to heaven cheerfully? For God loves a cheerful giver.”
Luisa de Carvajal was not alone in her zeal to venerate the Douai martyrs. On the night of the execution of St John Almond in December 1612 she had to contend with another party of relic hunters – and she prevailed. True devotion to the English Martyrs seems so much weaker in Britain today. Locally, individual martyrs continue to be revered yet there seems to be a general forgetfulness of them. Lines written by Ronald Knox come to mind: “O English hearts, what heart can know how spent with labours long ago was England’s Church that bore you?” I hope The Douai Martyrs reveals many of their labours, the remembrance of which inspires greater faith and greater zeal.
Knox’s hymn concludes with a prayer: that through the martyrs’ intercession their lands of the martyrs might rise to “holier thoughts, sublimer prayer, and larger hopes awaking”. Surely this was the hope and prayer of Blessed Richard Newport, Blessed William Scott and all their brave companions who died so that the faith might live in England, and for whom to God be thanks.
Fr Gerard Skinner is parish priest of St Francis of Assisi, Pottery Lane, London. The Douai Martyrs is published by Gracewing.
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