Father Corapi's Biography

Sancti Nahum Prophétæ, in Bégabar quiescéntis. The prophet Nahum, who was buried in Bagabar.

Nahum
    The Book of Nahum opens with a psalm on the wrath of Yahweh against the wicked and with short prophetic passages contrasting the punishment of Assyria with the salvation of Judah, 1:2-2:3. But its main theme, stated in the heading of the book, is the destruction of Nineveh, which Nahum foretells and describes with a power that reveals him as one of the great poets of Israel, 2:4-3:19.
  There is no reason to deny his authorship to the opening psalm and oracles, which form an excellent prologue to this terrifying picture. The prophecy is dated shortly before the capture of Nineveh in 612. The book pulsates with the hatred of Israel against the people of Assyria, the traditional enemy, and also with the hopes that the fall of Assyria arouses. But through this violent nationalism, where there is no anticipation of the gospel whatever, or even of the worldwide outlook of the second part of Isaiah, run the ideals of justice and faith; the fall of Nineveh is a judgement of God, who punishes those who oppose his holy purpose, 1:11; 2:1, the oppressors of Israel, 1:12-13, and of all the nations, 3:1-7.
 The Book of Nahum must have raised the human hopes of Israel in 612, but the joy was short-lived: the fall of Jerusalem followed close on the fall of Nineveh. After this, the scope of the message grows wider and deeper; Is 52:7 borrows the image of Na 2:1 to apply it to a universal and more spiritual salvation.

304 St. Ansanus Martyr patron youth of Siena

Evidence seems to be entirely lacking for any early cultus of St Ansanus. His so-called passio, two different texts of which have been printed in Baluze-Mansi, Miscellanea (vol. iv, pp. 60—63), amounts to no more than a double set of breviary lessons which betray their date by their very form. Cf. also the Bollandist Catalogus cod. hagiog. Bruxel., vol. i, pp. 129—132. See B. G. Gardner, Story of Siena,  p. 187 and passim; and V. Lusini, Il San Giovanni di Siena, who states that a little church, the remains of which still exist, can be shown by documents to have been dedicated to St Ansanus as early as 881. It is supposed to have served as the first baptistery of Siena.

ST AGERICUS was born at or near Verdun, perhaps at Harville, about the year 521. He became one of the clergy of the church of SS Peter and Paul at Verdun, and when he was thirty-three was appointed bishop of that city in succession to St Desiderius. He was visited there by St Gregory of Tours and St Venantius Fortunatus, both of whom write in his praise: “The poor receive relief, the despairing hope, the naked clothing; whatever you have, all have”, says Fortuna­tus. St Agericus enjoyed the favour also of King Sigebert I, whose son, Childebert, he baptized, and counseled after he came to the throne. But he was not able to obtain mercy for Bertefroi and other revolting nobles who came to him for sanctuary and protection. Bertefroi was murdered in the bishop’s own chapel by the royal officers. A more pleasing association between Agericus and Childebert was when the whole of the court was billeted on the bishop; there were so many of them and they were so thirsty that the supply of drink was stretched to its limit. St Agericus had the last cask of wine set in the hall, blessed it, and it proved to have a miraculous and never-ending flow. Another miracle attributed to him was the delivery of a condemned malefactor at Laon, for whom he obtained pardon. St Agericus died in 588, it is said of a broken heart because he had failed to save Bertefroi. He was buried in the church of SS Andrew and Martin which he had built at Verdun. Here an abbey was established early in the eleventh century and dedicated in his honour.

Besides the information furnished by St Gregory of Tours and St Venantius Fortunatus, Hugh of Flavigny in his chronicle has gathered up the data scattered in these same sources and produced some sort of biography (see Migne, PL., vol. cliv, cc. 126—131). Two Latin lives of late date are printed in the Bollandist Catalogus cod. hagiog. Lat. Bib. Nat. Paris, vol. i, pp. 479—482 and vol. iii, pp. 78-92 neither, however, contains any material of value. See also DHG., vol. i, cc. 1223—1224.

6^th v. ST TUDWAL, BISHOP

According to Breton tradition St Tudwal (Tutwal, Tugdual) was a Briton front Wales who crossed over to Brittany with his mother, his sister, some monks, and others, where the king of Dumnonia, Deroc, was his cousin. He settled at Lan Pabu in Leon (Tudwal was called Palm, i.e. Father, in Brittany) and made several other monastic foundations. He went to Paris to have his grants of land confirmed by King Childebert I and was consecrated bishop, and ended his days in the monastery of Treher, now Tréguier, of which city he is accounted the first bishop. His appellation, Pabu, led to the legend that he became pope under the name of Leo, a fable richly embroidered by Breton hagiographers.

St Tudwal does not figure in any Welsh calendars, but the name occurs in three places in the Lleyn peninsula, the northern arm of Cardigan Bay. The chief of these, a small-uninhabited island off Abersoch, is called Ynys Tudwal, and has ruins of an ancient chapel. It was here that, from May to December 1887, the holy Henry Hughes, a Welsh priest of the diocese of Shrewsbury and tertiary of the Order of Preachers, began to lead a heroic missionary life cut short by an untimely death. The feast of St Tudwal is kept in Brittany, and the Catholic Church at Barmouth is dedicated in his honour.

The three separate accounts of St Tudwal preserved to us are late (one may be of the ninth century), conflicting and unreliable. The Latin texts may best be consulted in A. de la Borderie, Les trois anciennes Vies de S. Tudwal (1887), pp. 12—45 and cf. the Analecta Bollandiana, vol. viii (1889), pp. 158-163. St Tudwal is invoked in the tenth century Breton litany originally printed by Mabillon and reproduced by Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, vol. ii, p. 82. See also LBS., vol. iv, pp. 271—274; Duine, Memento, p. 61 A. Oheix, Études hagiographiques (1919), no. 8 Mgr Duchesne in the Bulletin Critique, vol. x (1889), pp. 228-229 and, regarding the reputed relics of the saint, A. de Barthélemy in the Revue de Bretagne, vol. xxv (1901), pp. 401—413. Dom Gougaud was of the opinion that Tudwal was a native of insular Dumnonia, i.e. Devon or Cornwall.

1232 BENTVOGLIA great charity; zeal for souls; inspiring earnestness of his sermons;  levitating

BENTVOGLIA a native of San Severino in the Marches, joined the Franciscan Order in the lifetime of the founder, and though his family was well-to-do a number of his near relatives subsequently followed his example. The imperfect records preserved to us do not seem to supply anything very characteristic or personal regarding this beatus. He, no doubt, shared in full measure the love of poverty and simplicity which was so conspicuous in the first generation of the Friars Minor. We are told of his great charity, his zeal for souls and of the inspiring earnestness of his sermons. The parish priest of San Severino is said in the Fioretti to have been brought to the order by witnessing a rapture of Bd Bentivoglia when praying in a wood, in the course of which he saw this holy brother raised for a long time high above the ground. In the same source we read how, “while sojourning once alone at Trave Bonanti in order to take charge of and serve a certain leper, he (Bentivoglia) received commandment from his superior to depart thence and go unto another place, which was about fifteen miles distant, and, not willing to abandon the leper, he took him with him with great fervour of charity, and placed him on his shoulders, and carried him from the dawn till the rising of the sun all the fifteen miles of the way, even to the place where he was sent, which was called Monte San Vicino, which journey, if he had been an eagle, he could not have flown in so short a time, and this divine miracle put the whole country round in amazement and admiration”. He died, where he was born, at San Severino on Christmas day, 1232.

See Mazzara, Leggendario Francescano (168o), vol. i, pp. 239—240 Leon, Auréole Séraphique (Eng. trans.), vol. ii, pp. 31-33; and Actus B. Francisci et sociorum ejus, edited by Paul Sabatier, p. 160 In deference to the reading of Sabatier’s manuscripts I have spelt the name Bentivoglia rather than Bentivoglio.

Bd John of Vercelli was one of the early propagators of devotion to the name of Jesus, which the Council of Lyons prescribed in reparation for Albigensian blasphemies. Bd Gregory X selected John particularly, as head of a great body of preachers, to spread this devotion, and the master general at once addressed all his provincial priors accordingly. It was decided that there should be an altar of the Holy Name in every Dominican church and that confraternities against blasphemy and profanity should be formed. In 1278 Bd John sent a visitor into England, where some friars had been attacking the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, then lately dead, whom John had reappointed to the chair of theology at Paris after the refusal of St Albert the Great. Two years later John came himself to Oxford, where a general chapter was held. Like Humbert of Romans, his pre­decessor, he refused episcopacy and a curial office at Rome; but he was induced to withdraw his resignation of the generalate, which he retained until his death at Montpellier on November 30, 1283. The cultus of Bd John of Vercelli was approved in 1903.

A very full life was composed in French by P. Mothon and it has been translated into Italian, Vita del B. Giovanni da Vercelli (1903) naturally also Fr Mortier in his Histoire des Maîtres Généraux 0.P., vol. ii, pp. 1-170, gives much space to this important generalate. A careful account in briefer compass is that of M. de Waresquiel, Le bx Jean de Verceil (1903). See also Taurisano, Catalogus Hagiographicus 0.P.

1539 Bl. Richard Writing, Abbot of Glastonbury, and his companions, martyrs

The prestige conferred both by legend and history gives Glastonbury a literally unique place among the numerous great monasteries of ancient England, and, if it be impossible to accept the story of its foundation by St Joseph of Arimathaea (and several other stories about it), the very existence of such a legend testifies to the veneration in which our ancestors held the place. It is therefore fitting that, at a time when many ecclesiastics, secular and regular, and distinguished lay-people fell away lamentably front their calling as Catholic Christians, the last abbot of Glastonbury should have died for his faith at the hands of the civil power. Richard Whiting was born at Wrington in Somerset, probably soon after 1460, and was educated at Cambridge (Magdalene?), where he took his MA., in 1483, and returned for his S.T.D., in 1505. In all likelihood he was a monk before the first date. He was ordained priest at Wells in. 1501, and for some years held the office of chamber­lain in the monastery. Upon the death of Abbot Bere, in 1525, the community requested Cardinal Wolsey to name a successor. He chose Dom Richard Whiting “an upright and religious monk, a provident and discreet man, and a priest com­mendable for his life, virtues, and learning”. Among those who signed the commission was St Thomas More.

For ten years his rule was quiet and uneventful, till in 1534 came the summons to take the oath of supremacy, that the king was head of the Church in England. With the exception of More, Fisher, the Carthusian monks and the Franciscan Observants, there were few who stood out from the first against this. Abbot Whiting and his monks took the oath when it was tendered to them.

   In the following year the royal commissioners visited Glastonbury, and reported (with regret) that the brethren were kept in such good order that they could not offend and assured the monks that nothing was intended against them. A year later the lesser monasteries were suppressed, and by the time the greater ones were con­demned, in 1539, Glastonbury was the only religious house left in Somerset. Three commissioners arrived there in September. They impounded various incriminating documents (a book against the king’s divorce, copies of papal bulls, and a Life of St Thomas Becket) and questioned Abbot Whiting. But now he refused to surrender his charge and showed “his cankerous and traitorous mind against the King’s Majesty and his succession”. So they carried him off to London, to the Tower. Mr Commissioner Layton sent after him to Cromwell a book of evidences “of divers and sundry treasons” committed by the abbot, which is not extant and the contents are unknown. But in consequence of it Cromwell noted in his Remembrances:  Item, the Abbot of Glaston to be tried at Glaston, and also executed there”—a pretty anticipation of the course of in­justice. There is a good deal of uncertainty as to what actually took place whether Abbot Whiting was tried in London or in Wells or at both places; but he was condemned to death. The indictment was not allowed to survive, or even, apparently, to be made public, but there is general agreement that it was for high treason (in which case the abbot was entitled to be tried by his peers in the House of Lords), and the available evidence points to denial of the royal supremacy as having been the specific offence.

Bd Richard arrived at Wells with his escort on Friday, November 14, 1539. The next day he was hurried to Glastonbury, was refused leave to make a farewell visit to his abbey (he apparently did not know it was deserted, the community scattered), and was dragged on a hurdle to the top of the Tor, a hill some 500 feet high overlooking the town. There, beneath the tower of St Michael’s chapel, the aged man, “very weak and sickly”, sustained barbarities of hanging and disembowelling. Before the evening his head was displayed above the gate of his monastery, and his quarters had been sent off to Wells, Bridgewater, Ilchester and Bath. * {* The Catholic church of St John built on the place where his limbs were exposed at Bath.}

After the abbot had been despatched, two of his monks suffered in a like manner. These were Bd JOHN THORNE, treasurer of the abbey church, and Bd ROGER JAMES, its sacristan. Their offence was called sacrilege, in that they had hidden various treasures of their church to save them from the king’s hands. It is likely that this was also one of the charges against Whiting.

The memory of the martyred abbot was long held in benediction by the people of Somerset, and he is not forgotten in Glastonbury and its neighbourhood today. It was probably on the evidence of Father William Good, S.J., a contemporary and a native of Glastonbury, that Pope Gregory XVI permitted his representation among the martyrs on the walls of the chapel of the Venerabile, and so led to his equipollent beatification with the others in 1895.

The feast of these three martyrs is observed in the diocese of Clifton on the day of their death, and in the archdiocese of Westminster and by the English Bene­dictine Congregation on December 1, together with the other two martyred abbots, Hugh Faringdon and John Beche.

The principal materials for this and the two following notices are to be found in the calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, edited for the Record Office by J. S. Brewer, James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie. The story of Richard Whiting is told in some detail by F. A. Gasquet in The Last Abbot of Glastonbury (1895), on which also consult Canon Dixon’s notice in the English Historical Review, vol. xii (1897), pp. 781—785. The most accurate account of the martyr is that furnished by Bede Camm In LEM., vol. (1904), pp. 327—412.

In 1539 the greater abbeys were suppressed. It was known that the abbot of Reading would not surrender his, and in the late summer he was consigned to the Tower of London, charged with treason. With him were tried Bd John Eynon and Bd John Rugg. Eynon was a priest of St Giles’s church at Reading, who had already been in trouble for writing and distributing a copy of Robert Aske’s proclamation of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. Rugg was a prebendary of Chichester living in retirement at Reading Abbey. Among the charges against him was that he had preserved a relic of the hand of St Anastasius, “knowing that his Majesty had sent visitors to the said abbey to put down such idolatry”. * {* It has been suggested by Dom Bede Camm that the hand preserved at the Catholic church of St Peter at Marlow, known to have been found in Reading, is this very relic. See LEM., vol. 1, p. 376, note.

 These two priests are generally accounted to have been monks, but it is not certain they were. As in the case of Bd Richard Whiting, the terms of the indictment are not known, but it was not doubted at the time that it was primarily for denying the royal supremacy, and Bd Hugh spoke clearly on the scaffold. The supremacy of the Holy See in spiritual matters was, he said, “ the common faith of those who had the best right to declare the true teaching of the English church”. The execution of all three took place outside Reading Abbey gateway, on the same day as that of the Glastonbury monks.

These martyrs were beatified by equipollence in 1895. Their feast is kept in the diocese of Portsmouth on November 14, and by Westminster and the English Benedictines with Bd. Richard Whiting and John Beche on December 1.

The books mentioned in the notice of Bd Richard Whiting also contain whatever in­formation is available concerning the Abbot of Reading; see in particular pp. 121-158 of Cardinal Gasquet’s book, and pp. 358—387 in that of Bede Camm.

1539 BD JOHN BECHE, ABBOT OF COLCHESTER, MARTYR

THE martyr who was equivalently beatified in 1895 as John Beche was also known as Thomas Marshall; the last seems to have been his proper surname, and Thomas was perhaps his name “in religion”. His birthplace and parentage are not known; he took his D.D. at Oxford in 1515 and for some years was abbot of St Werburgh’s at Chester. In 1533 he was elected abbot of St John’s, Colchester. He was a friend of More and Fisher and his new community was opposed to the ecclesiastical policy of Henry VIII, but in the following year the abbot and sixteen monks, like their fellows throughout the land, took the oath of royal supremacy. The writer of an early Life of St John Fisher, who refers to Dom John Beche as “excelling many of the abbots of his day in devotion, piety and learning”, states that he first came under suspicion owing to a “traitorous guest”, who encouraged him to speak against the execution of More and Fisher and then reported his words to the king’s advisers. In November 1538 commissioners were sent to dissolve Colchester Abbey, to whom Bd John said: “The king shall never have my house but against my will and my heart, for I know by my learning that he cannot take it by right and law. Wherefore in my conscience I cannot be content, nor shall he have it with my heart and will.”
Within a year the abbot was in the Tower, charged with treason, in the same way and for the same reason as his fellow-abbots, Richard Whiting and Hugh Faringdon.

During the first four days of November 1539 two commissioners were at Brentwood, in Essex, examining witnesses against Beche, and evidence was given that he had spoken against the suppression of the monasteries, against the king’s marriage with Anne Boleyn, against the royal supremacy, and in favour of the full prerogatives of the Holy See. When interrogated on these accusations the abbot, under duress of captivity and fear, tried to explain them away and affirmed the king’s supremacy as against the pope’s “usurped authority”, and asked Henry “to be good to me for the love of God” * {* The document to this effect, in Abbot Beche’s own handwriting, came to light only after his case had been examined at Rome. When his cause of canonization is brought forward it will be taken into consideration. A decree of equipollent beatification is only permissive. But he seems to have retracted all schismatical admissions at his trial.}

He was nevertheless sent back to Colchester to be tried. There is no record of the proceedings, but one of the judges reported to Cromwell that the prisoner” acknowledged himself in substance to be guilty according to the effect of the indictment “. He was duly sentenced, and was hanged, drawn and quartered at Colchester on December 1, 1539.
Westminster and the English Benedictines keep the feast of Bd John Beche in the diocese of Brentwood and, with the other two martyred abbots. An anonymous pamphleteer, of the king’s party, gave valuable testimony to the cause for which these martyrs died when he wrote scornfully: “It is not to be doubted but his Holiness will look upon their pains as upon Thomas Becket’s, seeing it is for like matter.”

He had taken the oath of royal supremacy and, although his allegiance to Protes­tantism was much shaken by his reading in the fathers, he was persuaded by Dr Cheney, Bishop of Gloucester, to receive the diaconate of the Anglican Church. At Oxford he was very popular (Dr Gregory Martin, with whom he was friendly, wrote from Rome warning him against ambition) and was the centre of a group of personal disciples, rather like Newman two hundred and fifty years later. But the taking of orders in a church about which he was doubtful began to trouble him and, at the end of his term as junior proctor of the university in 1569, the Grocers’ Company (whose exhibitioner he was) being restive about his papistical tendencies, he went to Dublin, where an attempt was being made to revive its university. While there he wrote a short history of the country.*{ * He said of the Irish “The people are thus inclined religious, frank; amorous, irefull, sufferable of paines infinite, very glorious, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with warres, great almes-givers, passing in hospitalitie the lewder sort both clarkes and laymen are sensuall and loose to leachery above measure. The same being vertuously bred up or reformed are such mirrours of holinesse and austeritie, that other nations retaine but a shewe or shadow of devotion in comparison of them.”}  The work was not well received in Ireland.

Campion had left Oxford “full of remorse of conscience and detestation of mind” for himself as an Anglican minister, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments. Accordingly, after the publication of Pope St Pius’s bull against Elizabeth, he was in danger as a suspected person.

In 1571 he returned to England in disguise, was present at the trial of Bd John Storey in Westminster Hall, and then made for Douay. He was stopped on the way for having no passport, but was allowed to escape on giving up his luggage and money. One of his first actions at Douay was to send a long and striking letter, a “vehement epistle”, to Dr Cheney, who had strong Catholic leanings. +{+  Cheney may have been reconciled secretly before his death, though Campion knew nothing of it. The only other Protestant bishop in England who may have died a Catholic was also of Gloucester Dr Godfrey Goodman (1582-1655).}

Campion took his B.D. and was ordained subdeacon at Douay, and then, in 1573, went to Rome and was admitted to the Society of Jesus. As there was yet no English province he was sent to that of Bohemia, and after his novitiate at Brno went to the college of Prague to teach.

In view of the great success of the Society among the Protestants of Germany, Bohemia and Poland, Dr Allen persuaded Pope Gregory XIII to send some Jesuits to England, and at the end of 1579 Father Edmund Campion and Father Robert Persons were chosen as the first to be sent. The night before he left Prague one of the fathers, by an irresistible impulse, wrote over the door of his cell the words: P. Edmundus Campianus, Martyr.

 He left Rome in the spring of one of the party whose adventures are so well described in Bd Ralph Sher­win’s letter to Ralph Bickley.  When they got to the Protestant stronghold of Geneva Campion pretended to be an Irish serving man called Patrick, and they all seem to have behaved with that reckless cheerfulness that makes more serious-minded people think the English mad. At the gate on leaving, after having had a discussion with Beza, Campion disputed with a minister, and then left the “poor shackerel” to be ragged by the rest.*{*When someone asked “Mr Patrick”: “Cujas es?” he replied, “Signor, no.” The questioner tried again: “Potesne loqui latine?” Whereupon the Latin orator and professor of rhetoric shrugged his shoulders with a puzzled expression and walked away.}

From Saint-Omer Persons set out for England disguised as a returning soldier from the Lowlands, followed by Campion as a jewel merchant, with his servant, a coadjutor-brother, Ralph Emerson.
The Jesuits were not welcomed by all the Catholics, many of whom feared what new troubles the arrival of representatives of the redoubtable Society might bring on their heads and it was necessary for the two to declare on oath that “their coming was only Apostolical, to treat of matters of religion in truth and simplicity, and to attend to the gaining of souls without any pretence or knowledge of matters of state”. Their coming was known to the government, and they soon had to leave London, Campion going to work in Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Northamp­tonshire, where he made some notable converts. He wrote to the father general in Rome: “I ride about some piece of the country every day. The harvest is wonderful great…I cannot long escape the hands of the heretics…I am in apparel to myself very ridiculous. I often change it and my name also. I read letters sometimes myself that, in the first front, tell news that Campion is taken, which roused in every place where I come so filleth my ears with the sound thereof that fear itself hath taken away all fear.”

After the publication of Decem Rationes it was judged prudent that Bd Edmund should retire to Norfolk, and on the way he stayed at the house of Mrs Yate at Lyford, near Wantage. On Sunday, July j6, some forty people assembled there to assist at Mass and hear him preach, but among them was a traitor. Within the next twelve hours the house was searched three times, and at the last Ed Edmund was found with two other priests concealed above the gateway. They were taken to the Tower, from Colnbrook onward being pinioned and Edmund labelled: “Cam­pion, the seditious Jesuit.” After three days in the ‘little-ease “ he was inter­viewed by the Earls of Bedford and Leicester and, it is said, the queen herself, who tried to bribe him into apostasy. Other attempts of the same sort having failed he was racked; and arrests were then made of some who had sheltered him, whose names had already been known to the government but which, it was lyingly said, Campion had betrayed. While still broken by torture he was four times confronted by Protestant dignitaries, whose questions, objections and insults he answered with spirit and effectiveness.* {* Among those present who were permanently affected by his words and bearing was Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, afterwards himself a martyr and now beatified.}
 He was then racked again, so fiercely that when asked the next day how he felt he could reply, “Not ill, because not at all.”

No handle could be found against him, so on November 14 he was indicted in Westminster Hall, with Ralph Sherwin, Thomas Cottam, Luke Kirby and others, on the fabricated charge of having plotted at Rome and Rheims to raise a rebellion in England and coming into the realm for that purpose. When told to plead to the charge he was too weak to move his arms, and one of his companions, kissing his hand, held it up for him. Campion conducted the defence both of himself and the others with much ability, protesting their loyalty to the queen, demolishing the evidence, discrediting the witnesses, and showing that their only offence was their religion. The packed jury brought them in “guilty”, but it took them an hour to make up their minds to do it. Before sentence of death Ed Edmund addressed the court: “... In condemning us you condemn all your own an­cestors. . . . To be condemned with these old lights—not of England only, but of the world—by their degenerate descendants is both gladness and glory to us. God lives. Posterity will live. Their judgement is not so liable to corruption as that of those who now sentence us to death.”

Campion’s sister came to him with a message from 1-lopton, offering him a good benefice as the price of apostasy, and he also had a visit from Eliot, who had both betrayed and given evidence against him, and now went in fear of his life. Ed Edmund freely forgave him and gave him a letter of recommendation to a nobleman in Germany, where he would be safe. On December i, a wet, muddy day, Cam­pion, Sherwin, and Briant were drawn to Tyburn together, and there executed with the usual barbarities. On the scaffold Ed Edmund again refused to give an opinion of the pope’s bull against Elizabeth, and publicly prayed for her: “your queen and my queen, unto whom I wish a long reign with all prosperity”. Some of the blood of this man, “admirable, subtle, exact and of sweet disposition”, splashed on to a young gentleman, one Henry Walpole, who was present: he too became a Jesuit and a beatified martyr. +{+ Among the poems of Walpole on the life and death of Ed Edmund one lyric, “Why do I use my paper, ink and pen”, was beautifully set to music by William Byrd, who was himself frequently “presented” for recusancy. It was first published in his Psalms, Sonnets and Songs in Five Parts in 1588, among the “Songs of Sadness and Piety”.

The feast of Bd Edmund Campion is kept not only by the Society of Jesus but as well by the dioceses of Northampton, Portsmouth, Brno and Prague.

At Rheims the missionaries separated, and on August 1 Ralph Sherwin set out for England. In November he was arrested while preaching in the house of Nicholas Roscarrock in London, and was chained in the Marshalsea. Of his brief apostolate Father Persons wrote that he spent it preaching in various parts of the kingdom, in which work “he enjoyed a very special grace and ascendancy”.

From the prison he managed to write a cheerful note to Persons, referring to the bells, i.e. fetters, on his ankles, and after a month was removed to the Tower. Here he was severely racked on December 15, with the object of getting information about his fellow-missionaries, about a feared invasion of Ireland, etc. Afterwards he was left to lie out in the snow, and next day was tortured again. He told his brother that after he had been twice racked he lay five days and nights without any food or speaking to anybody, “as he thought in a sleep, before our Saviour on the cross. After which time he came to himself, not finding any distemper in his joints by the extremity of the torture.” He was offered a bishopric if he would apostatize. After more than a year’s imprisonment he was brought to trial with Edmund Campion and others, and convicted on the charge of entering the realm in order to raise a rebellion. “The plain reason of our standing here “, he observed, is religion, not treason.”

While awaiting death Ralph wrote several letters to friends, including one to his uncle in Rouen, who had formerly been rector of Ingatestone. In it he says, “Innocency is my only comfort against all the forged villainy which is fathered on my fellow priests and me…God forgive all injustice, and if it be His blessed will to convert our persecutors, that they may become professors of His truth…And so, my good old John, farewell.” On December 1, 1581, he was dragged to Tyburn on the same hurdle as Alexander Briant, and suffered immediately after Campion. On the scaffold he again protested his innocence of treason, professed the whole Catholic faith, and prayed for the Queen, and died amid the open prayers of the crowd. He was thirty-one years old.

Bd Ralph Sherwin was among the martyrs beatified in 1886, and his feast is observed in the diocese of Nottingham; he was the protomartyr of the English College at Rome.

A full account of this martyr has been contributed by E. S. Keogh to the second volume of Camm’s LEM., pp. 358—396. See also MMP., pp. 30-35. The earlier sources of information are indicated by Father Keogh on p. 396 of the first book, but to these should be added Cardinal Mien’s account of Fr Campion and his companions edited by J. H. Pollen in 1908, pp. 34—46.