Cuthbert Mayne (1544-77) was the first seminary priest to be martyred in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
A farmer’s son, Mayne was baptised into the Elizabethan church at Youlton, near Barnstable in Devon. The date was March 20, the feast of St Cuthbert.
At first his life ran in the smooth path of worldly success. Educated at Barnstable Grammar School, Cuthbert was installed as rector of Huntsham at the age of 17. This promotion he owed to the good offices of his father’s employer, Sir John Chichester.
At this stage, as Mayne admitted, he did not know what religion and ministry meant. Subsequently ordained, he studied at Oxford, first at St Alban’s Hall (on the site of Merton), and then at St John’s, where he became chaplain.
He also, however, fell under the influence of Edmund Campion and Gregory Martin, who persuaded him that the claims of the Catholic Church were irresistible.
Now a marked man, Mayne in 1573 fled to the English College at Douai in France. There he was ordained a Catholic priest and became a Bachelor of Theology.
In 1577 he returned to England, posing as a steward at Golden Manor, the house of Francis Tregian in Cornwall, while in fact ministering to the Catholics of the region.
Unfortunately, however, Richard Grenville became High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1577. Grenville would achieve immortality through the poet Tennyson, who turned his crazed action as commander of the Revenge, in 1591, into an episode of national mythology.
In reality, Grenville was a psychopathic thug, who had stabbed a man to death in his youth and who subsequently emerged as “undeviatingly Protestant” in religion.
On Corpus Christi Day, June 8 1577, Grenville appeared at Golden Manor with 100 men, arrested Mayne, and cast him into a filthy dungeon in Launceston for three months.
Though the Bishop of Exeter was determined to proceed against Mayne, there was precious little evidence to support any charge, merely a wax disc imprinted with the Lamb of God, and a copy of a papal bull.
Grenville, though, bullied the jury into bringing in a guilty verdict. It made no difference that one of the judges, unsatisfied, sent a critical report of the proceedings to the Privy Council. The councillors decided that Mayne must be executed “as a terror to the papists”.
To his last day (November 30 1577) the prisoner refused to endorse Queen Elizabeth’s ecclesiastical supremacy. “The Queen,” he declared on the scaffold, “neither ever was, nor is, nor ever shall be, the head of the Church of England.”
And so Mayne was duly slaughtered with all the revolting accompaniments of hanging, drawing and quartering.
The crown of his skull is preserved at the Carmelite monastery of Lanherne. There are also relics in Launceston.
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