In England, today is the collective feast of all the martyrs of the English College, a seminary located in the town of Douay in France, which trained men to for the priesthood, and sent them to minister to the few remaining Catholics in their native land. Our friend Mr Sean Pilcher has very kindly shared with us this article he wrote about one of this holy company, numbering one-hundred and fifty-eight, St John Southworth, who was martyred at Tyburn in 1654. It was previously published in a slightly different version at The Lamp, and is here reproduced by the kind permission of the editors. Mr Pilcher is the director of Sacra: Relics of the Saints (sacrarelics.org), an apostolate that promotes education about relics, and works to repair, research, and document relics for religious houses and dioceses.
The relics of the saints have a kind of long-sightedness, a way of hanging on in times of difficulty, and of resurfacing when they are needed again. There are, unfortunately, horror stories of the mistreatment or disposal of relics in the last century, but here is one of triumph, the kind of humble, unassuming victory of the saints, worked out in centuries of grace-filled struggle.
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| The crystal urn which contains the relics of St John Southworth, now regularly kept in one of the side chapels of Westminster Cathedral. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Gryffindor, CC BY-SA 3.0) |
The political tensions provoked by the reign of Charles I saw a nation in civil war, and favourable public opinion of Catholics waned. Charles married a Catholic and was rumoured to be sympathetic to the Roman Church. Parliament pressed harder for mandatory oaths that would exclude Catholics from political offices, impose restrictions on travel, and Catholics could not even own a horse valued above £5 – all while Charles secretly sought French aid against his own opposing ministers. The yet nascent Established Church had spent much time fighting against an increasing Puritan minority with even more force.
Men who enter at Douay, the English seminary established in France to educate priests to be sent back to England, knew that they were being prepared for a lonely ministry, and one very often fraught with difficulties, whose only real reprieve would be martyrdom. One such man was John Southworth, a Lancashireman who had been instructed in the Faith at home in secret. Being from the north, a kind of heartland of recusancy, he would have felt very keenly the greater restrictions on Catholics, and valued the faith of the Apostles more than anything. He knew that labourers were needed in the vineyard; resolving to enter Douay, he left home for France at age twenty-one.
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| The English College was one of several colleges within the university which King Philip II founded in 1559 at Douay, then part of the Spanish Netherlands. In 1886, it was merged with two other universities to form the University of Lille. This image made between 1590 and 1611 shows three of the colleges; the Royal College, the Jesuit, and the college of the nearby town of Marchiennes. |
After at least one return to England because of poor health, he was ordained priest six years later by the Archbishop of Cambrai and sent back to England. The Diary at Douay read: ‘John Southworth (here known as Lee), alumnus and priest of this College, with the usual faculties for the winning of souls, was chosen for the vineyard of England.’ Southworth operated in London for a time and later in his native Lancashire. There is record of his being arrested and imprisoned, and being narrowly rescued from a death-sentence at the insistence of Queen Henrietta Maria, who arranged for him and others to be deported to France.
Southworth made little of this upset and returned to his work in England. He was arrested another four times, spending three years in the London prison auspiciously named The Clink. On three occasions his release was negotiated by the Secretary of State, Windebank, at the Queen’s direction. At his fourth arrest, he managed his own escape. Here was a man undaunted by the threat of imprisonment, whose resolve was little disturbed by discomforts and failures which his work necessarily included. His mission was to attend to souls, and this he did wherever he found himself. When there was an outbreak of plague in London, he visited those who had lapsed from the Faith out of convenience or fear of the new regime. He was by all accounts a likeable and agreeable man, even among those who did not share his religion or cause. It was during this time also that he earned the nickname ‘Parish Priest of Westminster.
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| A portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria of England (1609-69), the Catholic wife of King Charles I of England; 1636-68, by the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), or his workshop. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) |
By the end of 1640, King Charles had lost the governance of the country in all but name. Sympathy with the rising Puritan faction had grown immensely. Secretary Windebank was summoned to Parliament to be reprimanded for his friendly actions toward Catholics, and he was forced to flee to France where he was received into the Church. There too went the Queen, who feared for her safety, leaving Catholics without allies in any position of great authority. The regicide of Charles I and the seizure of power by Cromwell in 1649 put Catholics definitively on the losing side of the Civil War. Parliament directed the expulsion of all recusant families, but these directives could hardly occupy the attention of anyone with executive authority. The country was everywhere divided. England did not yet have a standing army, and Parliament found it difficult to enforce its laws; the legitimacy of the Established Church was questioned because of its popish trappings and monarchical support, while Cromwell’s officers lived in domineering, if irreproachable, austerity. Nevertheless, house priests enjoyed relative freedom to continue their work for souls, if they kept out of sight. Southworth carried on, but was caught while lodging in Westminster. He was found with ‘all the requisites for the celebration of Mass,’ and taken prisoner. The arresting officer was one of Cromwell’s more zealous followers, which led to harsh treatment and an unusually fast indictment.
Despite this, Southworth’s good nature won the pity of his judges. He openly confessed that he was a priest, but the judge cut him off, and his testimony was delayed. The judges wanted Southworth to plead ‘not guilty,’ since his only crime was being a priest, and for this there was no proof. He had only been found near the Mass kit, but was not caught administering the sacraments. This suggestion, it seems, was even made in court while the magistrate implored him to deny his charges. Southworth was unmoved, and the magistrate was ‘so drowned in tears,’ that he could barely pass the sentence.
John Southworth was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn, beheaded, and quartered on 28 June 1654. The other men executed with him were charged with forging currency; Southworth’s only crime was being a priest. He was the last to face the executioner, and after a brief address to the crowd there gathered, he prayed in silence and went to his reward. An onlooking royalist found his vocation, and entered the Society of Jesus in Rome the same year. As was the custom of the house when it was graced with a new martyrdom, the English College at Douay sang the Te Deum and a Mass of thanksgiving when they received the news of his death.
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| This marker in a traffic island in central London, at one of the corners of Hyde Park, marks the site of the Tyburn Tree, as it was called, the public gallows on which many of the Catholic martyrs of England met their deaths. Photo by the author. |
Now we pick up the story of Southworth’s relics, one no less full of false starts, and no less unrelenting. The sentence prescribed that the four quarters of the body be placed at the four corners of London, but the Spanish Ambassador, Alonzo de Cardenas, bribed the gaoler with forty shillings, and took the body to be embalmed. The man ‘who embalmed ye body,’ was ‘Chirugeon James Clark,’ who removed a bone from the spine to be kept as a relic by the English clergy. The body was kept by the Ambassador until it could be safely returned to France in 1655. Bishop Challoner records in 1741 that it was interred at Douay in the church near St Augustine’s altar. The faithful gathered there to pray and venerate the body of the martyr, and the miraculous healing of a boy was recorded. A fever deemed incurable subsided after the sufferer’s family lay his head upon the cushion that supported Southworth’s head.
The French Revolution brought with it the destruction of countless sacred relics, precious works of precious art and church plate. The English clergy who had long had refuge and acceptance at Douay were now viewed with double suspicion. King Louis XVI was killed on 21 January 1793, and war declared on England. The Catholics of France had sided with the king, and the clergy who refused to swear the so-called Constitutional Oath were seen as enemies of the State. Fearing imprisonment, the residents of the College buried their plate and relics, carefully hidden and noted. Fr Thomas Stout, one of the priests involved in the burial, made a rough diagram, noting that Southworth was buried exactly six feet deep. Soon after, their fears were confirmed, and the clergy were taken prisoners by the National Guard. They were held in captivity in France until their return to Dover was negotiated in 1795.
Readers will be aware that France and England have long behaved like feuding siblings, now making war upon one another, now peace, here rallying together against a greater enemy. Some more crazed English minds saw potential in the French Revolution, but most saw another way forward. French nobility fled the country and devout commoners were forced into much the same conditions under which the English Catholic faithful had long suffered: Mass was offered in secret and the authorities rounded up priests for the guillotines. The fathers of Douay earnestly desired to return to their home of more than two hundred years, but the circumstances of neither country allowed for this a possibility.
Catholic Emancipation came to England in 1829, but the popular view of Catholics was little affected by these reforms. Clerics were no longer treated as capital offenders, but England’s Catholic hierarchy was not restored until 1850. Immigration from Ireland and an increasingly Catholicising wing of the Church of England gradually pushed the trappings of the Roman Church further into the public eye. Slowly the new hierarchy began to take stock of what could be done. Cardinal Manning acquired land for a cathedral in the City of Westminster (also the newly-created seat of the primate of England), where the first Catholic cathedral since the English Reformation would be built. This project would not see its beginning until Manning’s successor, Cardinal Vaughan, broke ground in 1895, but as soon as the land was bought in 1856, permissions were obtained to go and make a search of the grounds at Douay, in the hope of recovering what had been buried there for safe-keeping.
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| Westminster Cathedral. Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Frank Kovalchek, CC BY 2.0 |
The buildings of the College at Douay had been made into barracks, and their layout significantly altered, so that when the search party arrived, the sketch they had to follow made very little sense. Some of the church plate was found, but no Southworth; it was thought that after some seventy-five years, the coffin and its contents were likely to have disintegrated. The diocese of Westminster continued its recovery of hidden church furnishings which had survived the Reformation, but her martyred parish priest lay yet hidden in France.
In 1923, plans were made for the demolition of the barracks where the buildings of the College had stood, in order to level the ground for a new road. In 1927, as workmen were digging a cellar for a new building in the area, they uncovered a lead coffin, which was brought first to the local morgue for inspection, and then to the Institut Médico-Légal in Lille for detailed examination of the remains.
The investigation found a body whose form had been mostly preserved, though some water had entered through a hole in the coffin, presumably made by digging of the earlier search party, which had come painfully close to finding it. The physical description of the man fit that of Southworth, and x-rays of the body confirmed his identity by his sentence: beheading and quartering. After the body was recovered, the precise location could be again compared to Fr Stout’s sketch made in the eighteenth century, and now that the barracks were gone, other landmarks could be used to show that the location of the body corresponded exactly to the sketch.
On 1 May 1930 Westminster’s parish priest was brought in triumphant procession to the great cathedral. His return brought with it the whole weight of the restoration of England’s hierarchy, and was a turning point for the English faithful. Led by a papal legate, religious from the entire country turned up to greet their saint, flanked by a multitude of faithful carrying candles, banners, and singing hymns. Girls wearing their Easter best strew flowers in front of the ornate feretory which bore Southworth’s restored relics, vested in his priestly vestments and Canterbury cap behind the crystal.
Footage of the event (without soundtrack) from the archives of the newsreel company British Pathé.
He now keeps watch over the English Church from her capitol. Every year when the chosen men of Westminster lay on the pavement of the cathedral to receive priestly ordination, St John’s feretory is moved to the main aisle to lay next to them as they hear his name sung in the Litany.
The story of St John Southworth’s relics is a story of the triumph of the English martyrs, and of the unconquerable resolve of England’s Catholics, which continues to this day. It also reflects our sensibility toward the relics of the saints, one little shaken by chaos of these centuries past: to guard them with everything in us, to protect them in times of distress and to lean on their intercession, and to bring them out with all the pomp we can muster when a better day comes. “May their bones spring up out of their place: for they strengthened Jacob, and redeemed themselves by strong faith.” (Ecclesiasticus 49, 12).
