Catholic Martyrs of Gloucestershire by Michael Bergin and Margaret and Patrick Gethen

Home , John Sandys (priest), Richard Sergeant, Robert Ludlam, Thomas Ford (martyr), William Allen (cardinal), William Lampley (martyr)

St Peter's Church, Gloucester

Acknowledgements

In November 1987, to commemorate the beatification of five Gloucestershire Catholic martyrs, the Gloucestershire Catholic History Society published a booklet written by Patrick and Margaret Gethen. This recounted what is known of Blessed Richard Sargeant, John Sandys, Stephen Rowsham, William Lampley and Henry Webley. The booklet was republished in 2005.

Journal No 53 of the Gloucestershire Catholic History Society, published in October 2010, reproduced the original 1987 booklet with the addition of articles by Michael Bergen on Blessed Thomas Alfield and the Venerable Thomas Webley.

Thank you to Debbie Cottam who in 2013 re-typed the original text.

Statutes under which the martyrs were charged

The Statute of Treasons of 1351 (Edward III Stat.5, Cap.2)

The basic treason law of England. Compassing or attempting the death of the King, or his heirs, is high treason according to this law.

Act to retain the Queen’s Majesty’s subject in due obedience (23 Eliz. I. Cap.1. 1581)

This Act made it high treason to reconcile or be reconciled to the Catholic Church or to induce others to be so reconciled, (persuading to popery).

Act against Jesuits, seminary priests and other such like disobedient persons (27 Eliz. I. Cap.2 1585)

This act made it high treason for a Catholic priest ordained abroad to come into or remain in the realm after 24th June 1559. It made it felony for anyone to harbour or assist him. The sentence for a priest was that he should be hanged, drawn and quartered, for a layman that he should be hanged. Other charges were sometimes added.

Two other Martyrs with local connections

Blessed John Pibush was arrested in Moreton-in-Marsh. He was tried and imprisoned at Gloucester and later escaped from Gloucester on 19th February 1594. He was (re) arrested during the following day at Matson. Martyred at Southwark on 18th February 1601.

St Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was a close friend of Richard Cheyney, Bishop of Gloucester, and he wrote to him - ‘so often was I with you at Gloucester so often in your private chambers, so many hours have I spent in your study and library’. Campion was also associated with the Alfield and Webley Families of Gloucestershire. When he was arrested at Lyford Grange, Berkshire, he was in company with William Webley, a yeoman, probably from Brockworth and Thomas Alfield reported the martyrdom of Campion at Tyburn on 1st December 1581.

Edmund Campion was beatified on 29th December 1886 by Pope Leo XIII and canonized as one of the Forty Martyrs of England in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.

Thomas Alfield and Thomas Weobley

Thomas Alfield was born in Gloucester in 1552. His father, Robert, had been an undermaster at Eton but moved to the then recently established Cathedral school, now Kings School, at Gloucester and had become Master there by 1558. Thomas was educated at Eton, where he was a Kings scholar, until 1568. In September 1568 he was admitted as a scholar at King’s College Cambridge. He graduated B.A. and held a fellowship at the College until he relinquished it in 1575.

When, where and by whom Thomas was received into the Catholic Church is as yet not known. What is known is that on the 8th September 1576 he was admitted as a student at the English College, Douai, in the Spanish Netherlands. However, at the time Thomas entered Douai college the continuance of that institution was in danger due to the political situation in Flanders. He had to leave the College two months after his admittance at a time when a raid by Nationalists was expected.

Thomas was living in Gloucester in 1577. His name is included in the return of recusants made by Bishop Cheyney of Gloucester in November 1577 by demand of the Privy Council. Thomas is recorded as one of three recusants living in Holy Trinity Parish, Gloucester.

It is evident that Thomas Alfield still intended to become a priest. Sometime in July or August 1580 he met Father Robert Persons who had landed in England in June of that year as leader of the first Jesuit missionaries to arrive in the country. Thomas requested that Father Persons take his brother Robert Alfield as a servant. Thomas was concerned for the welfare of his brother and wanted to make arrangements for him before he himself returned to the English College which by then had been relocated from Douai to Rheims. Thomas arrived at the college on 18th September 1580 and he studied there under the pseudonym ‘Badger’. He was ordained priest at Chalon-sur-Marne on 4th March 1581.

At the end of March 1581 he was sent on the English Mission using the same alias of ‘Badger’. One of his companions on the journey, John Adams, was also to be a future martyr. It is known that between his arrival in the country and when he was first arrested in April 1582 he ministered much in the north of England, including Yorkshire. Information obtained by the Government during 1582 and up to six years after his death verifies this. It was during his first three months in England that he reconciled another future martyr, William Dean, to the Church. William Dean was at that time a Church of England curate in the Diocese of York.

Thomas was present at the execution of Edmund Campion S.J. at Tyburn, London, on 1st December 1581. A member of the Dolman family of Pocklington, Yorkshire, in whose house Thomas had celebrated Mass, and who was then at Gray’s Inn, London, accompanied Thomas to witness Campion’s martyrdom. Mr Dolman and Thomas were associates in writing an account of the death of Campion and of those who died with him, and then having it printed at the secret press of Richard Verstegan (alias Rowlands) in Smithfield, London early in 1582. It was not long after the publication of this account that Verstegan’s press was discovered by the Government, and the arrest of Thomas Alfield soon followed in April 1582.

On his arrest Thomas was held in the Tower of London. At the end of April the Privy Council authorised that he be examined and, if necessary, tortured by being put on the rack. This is indeed

3 what happened, but as far as is known, Thomas did not reveal anything on the matters that were put to him. At the end of May 1582, the Privy Council considered sending William Dean (who had also been arrested early in 1582) and Thomas to the north of England to be made an example of, by suffering among the people in whose midst they had ministered. However, this proposal was not carried out. Thomas, between the end of June and the beginning of September, agreed to attend services in the Church of England. He was discharged from the Tower of London ‘upon bondes’. Dr William Allen, the founder of the English College, noted in a letter that ‘Fr Alfield ….. has lapsed to some extent for fear of the torture, and having gone once or twice to the heretical church has been set free’.

Thomas, within some months of his release, returned to Rheims, was reconciled to the Church, and resumed his priestly ministry.

During 1583 and into 1584 Thomas travelled between the European mainland and England. In this period he acted as an agent for Dr William Allen who, it should be noted, had been drawn into Pope Gregory XIII’s attempts to urge Phillip II of Spain to actively endeavour to restore the Catholic faith in England. In April 1584, for example, Allen sent Thomas Alfield to the Apostolic Nuncio in Paris, about a matter of great consequence, relating to a recent convert Captain john Davis, the explorer. In his letter introducing Thomas to the Nuncio, Allen praises Alfield as ‘very diligent and skilful in the transaction of business’. Allen adds, however, that ‘though specially sent to me from the Island concerning a secret matter, which he will unfold to you but to no one else in these parts, he ought to know nothing about the great affair’ i.e. the contemplated invasion of England.

Thomas was involved in a matter whereby consideration was given to Captain John Davis handing over three English ships, filling them with Catholic sailors, and giving them to the Pope or Phillip II. A patron of John Davis was Sir Francis Walsingham, one of Elizabeth I’s Secretaries of State and spymaster. It would appear that Davis was acting as an agent provocateur through this matter. Suffice it to state though that Thomas appeared prepared to be connected to such a plan.

In 1583 and 1584 there are also references to his involvement with the Catholic Pauncefoote family of Hasfield, Gloucestershire. He has been recorded as being with the Pauncefootes, John and his wife Dorothy, at their home in Hasfield and in London. What the elements of this involvement were are not entirely clear but, in part it seems to have been associated with the Pauncefootes’ decision making about whether or not they should leave England because of the situation catholics found themselves in. Thomas also helped facilitate the conveying of the Pauncefoote’s son to the European mainland.

During 1584 Dr William Allen published his True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics that suffer for their Faith, a work written in response to a pamphlet written by Lord Burghley in the previous year and entitled The Execution of Justice in England. Burghley’s pamphlet was concerned with promoting the argument that the Catholics who had suffered for their faith since Elizabeth I’s coming to the throne had done so for treason and not their faith. Allen’s work refuted what Burghley’s was promoting. To import and distribute Dr Allen’s book in England was an enterprise fraught with danger but this is what Thomas Alfield became engaged in. Involved with Thomas Alfield in the distribution of Allen’s work was Thomas Webley.

Thomas Webley was a young man with Gloucester connections who was apprenticed to a dyer in London. In March 1585 both Alfield and Webley were arrested and by the end of April enough was known, even though neither of the two men had given any information away under interrogation, for further arrests to be made in Oxford. Some people in Oxford had provided a staging point for the conveyance of the books to Gloucester and thence distribution.

There is a suggestion that Captain John Davis, the navigator, continued to have an association with Thomas Alfield which contributed to the latter’s arrest. Richard Young, one of the justices who tried Alfield, some years after Thomas’s death wrote to Sir Robert Cecil referring to Davis’s effort in pursuing Thomas to the extent of Davis involving himself in taking books into the west country.

Sit Francis Walsingham, Davis’s patron, had wanted to apprehend Thomas again since late 1583 when he suspected that Thomas was acting as a link between Catholics in England and some of those in exile on the continent. Walsingham had prepared a list of questions to be put to him should he be arrested. Questions on this list related to the activities of the Duke of Guise in France (the Duke was uncle to Mary Queen of Scots), possible alliances between the Duke, Phillip II of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII to aid the catholics in England, plots with regard to delivering Mary Queen of Scots, and catholic exiles both clerical and lay. These questions were put to Thomas following his arrest but nothing incriminating was forthcoming.

The government then devised a second list of questions to attempt to get Thomas to entrap himself so that a matter of treason could be brought against him. These questions were put together by Sir John Popham, the Attorney General, and related to issues from correspondence of Dr Allen that had association with Thomas. Again the government failed to get the answer it wanted. Two attempts, including the use of torture, had now been made to try and establish a case of treason against Thomas Alfield.

The decision was then made to indict Thomas Alfield under the 1582 Act aimed at the Catholic ballad mongers who had caused trouble for the government by praising Edmund Campion following his martyrdom. Judges had ruled that to publish, sell, or give away a book in which fault was found with the Queen’s religion brought a person within the Act’s meaning. Distributing Allen’s book thus led to Thomas’s arraignment under this Act of Parliament. Thomas and two other priests who were implicated with him, Leonard Hyde and William Wiggs, were tried in London on 5th July 1585. Thomas was found guilty and was sentenced to be hanged. As the offence was felony and not treason he was spared drawing and quartering. The other two priests were sentenced to life imprisonment (they are recorded a being in Wisbech Castle in 1595).

Thomas was hanged at Tyburn, with Thomas Webley, on 6th July 1585 the day following his trial. He was thirty-three years of age. Thomas Alfield and Thomas Webley were offered their lives at Tyburn if they would renounce the Pope and agree with the queen but both refused.

Before the end of July 1585 a tract was published, at the behest of the government to deny that their deaths were for the sake of conscience, a sign that the government considered them to have been of significance.

Crudelitaits Calviniana exempla, published about the end of 1585, states that both men endured their punishment with the greatest patience and constancy, to the great edification of the people.

Thomas Alfield was declared Venerable by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929.

Reredos at the Church of the English Martyrs, Tuffley, by Hardmans of Birmingham depicting the armorial bearings of Sir Thomas More and John Fisher on its wings, the Tower of London and Tyburn, and figurative representations of Sir Thomas More, John Fisher, John Houghton, Cuthbert Mayne, Margaret Clitherow and Edmund Campion.

John Sandys

John Sandys was born between 1550-1555 in the diocese of Chester which at that time comprised Cheshire, Lancashire, Cumberland, Flintshire and parts of Yorkshire. At an examination of another priest, John Owen, in Winchester in 1585, the name of Sandys is mentioned and he is described as being a Lancashire man.

He studied at Oriel College where he obtained the degree of B.A. in 1573. One manuscript refers to him as a ‘poor scholar of Oriel college in Oxford’. Sandys then took a position as tutor to the children of Admiral Sir William Winter at Lydney in Gloucestershire. It is probable that at this time he conformed to the State religion as required by law. There is no record of the length of his service at Lydney, nor when he converted and decided to become a priest.

On June 4th 1583 he arrived at the English College in Rheims and, after comparatively brief studies, was ordained priest on 31st March 1584 in the chapel of the Holy Cross in Rheims Cathedral by Cardinal de Guise, the Archbishop. in October of the same year he was sent on the mission to England. It would appear that most of his apostolate was exercised in Gloucestershire. One report mentions that ‘after he was a priest he returned thither again in layman’s apparel and resorted to his old friends of those quarters’.

In the summer of 1586 Sandys was arrested in the house of the Dean at Lydney who had known him when he was a tutor to Sir William Winter’s family and who seems to have been friendly with him. some of the Dean’s enemies discovered that the man being entertained by him was a Catholic priest. They laid information against the Dean and Sandys was apprehended. The Dean, charged with harbouring a priest, replied that ‘he had known him to be an honest gentleman in Sir William Winter’s house but never dreamed he was a priest and had therefore given him entertainment’. The answer to the charge was accepted and the Dean was cleared. Later, when Sandys was in prison and under sentence of death, his betrayers came to visit him and, protesting that they had only wanted to be revenged on the Dean, begged his forgiveness. We do not know what grudge these informers held against the Dean but it must of [have] been something of weight for, had their charge been successful, the Dean would have gone to the scaffold.

A document of c.1587 mentions that John Sandys, tried at the Gloucester Summer assizes in 1586, was condemned to death by Sir Roger Manwood. There are no Assize Records for the Oxford Circuit, to which Gloucester belonged, prior to 1627 but it is clear that Sandys was charged under the Statute of 1585 ‘against Jesuits and seminary priests and such other disobedient persons’. This made it an offence for an Englishman ordained abroad to come into, or remain in, England. Found guilty, he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

The sentence was carried out at Gloucester on April 11th 1586. In the morning he was able to celebrate Mass and he made ‘a very fervent and forcible exhortation to many Catholics there present in secret, for their perseverance in the Catholic faith’. Then word came that the officers were at the prison gates to take him to the place of execution: ‘desiring their patience a little (he) ended his service, blessed and kissed the company and so departed to his martyrdom’. Another account mentions ‘as he was at his 9 howert or thereabout, word was brought that the executioners staid for him at the prison gate’. This suggests that Sandys was reciting the canonical hour of None, the last of the Little Hours of the Divine Office.

Contemporary accounts of the execution show a combination of inefficiency and deliberate cruelty which made the onlookers protest. There was great difficulty in finding an executioner and even in procuring a knife with which to carry out the drawing and quartering of the body demanded by law:

‘At last thay found a most base companion, who was yet ashamed to be seen in that bloody action, for he blacked and disfigured his face, and got an old rusty knife full of teeth like a sickle, with which he killed him’.

In spite of the promise of the Sheriff, Paul Stacy of Stanway, that he would be allowed to hang until dead, he was cut down as soon as he was cast of the ladder. His clothes were then removed and by the time this was done he had recovered consciousness and while being disembowelled he was even able to struggle with the executioner and to grasp the knife. The butchery was such that the people present protested and some Protestant clergymen condemned it in their sermons. As he suffered, Sandys ‘cried out ever with St. Stephen “Lord forgive my persecutors” and so fell asleep in Our Lord’.

Blessed John Sandys’ cause was advanced with that of others in 1874, 1886 and 1923-26. It is interesting to see that three objections were made by the Promoter General, (Devil’s Advocate) as follows:

(i) Sandys’ name was not mentioned by Bishop Challoner (ii) the reason for his execution was not known (iii) that the way he grasped the knife while being disembowelled suggested that he did not want to die.

In reply to these objections, the postulators of the cause were able to establish that Challoner mention Sandys name, that he was condemned for being a priest, that he was referred to in contemporary documents as a ‘holy martyr’ and a ‘blessed saint’, that the reason for his execution was clearly established and, lastly, that the attempt to defend himself was instinctive and involuntary.

Stephen Rowsham

Blessed Stephen Rowsham - detail from a window at St Thomas's Fairford

Stephen Rowsham was born in Oxford about the year 1555. In 1572 he entered as a Commoner the college called ‘The House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin’ founded by Edward II, or ‘Oriel College’ as it became known. This was, in more recent years, the College of which Cardinal John Henry Newman was a Fellow.

There is no record of Stephen Rowsham having graduated but he became a clergyman in the Church of England. This we know from a document granting dispensation from abstinence in Lent which was issued by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1579 on the recommendation of ‘Stephen Rowsham, Curate of the Parish Church of St. Mary’s and others’. Whilst Curate of St Mary’s, he was known personally by William Warford S.J., who wrote that he was a ‘man of prayer and piety’ and that during this ministry in Oxford he was said to have experienced supernatural visions. We are told that on one occasion, when with many others he rushed out to see strange meteors in the sky, he and they saw over his own head a ‘crown very bright and splendent, which he showed to his fellows that stayed by him’.

From Fr. Warford we have the description of ‘a man of pleasant countenance, with a brown beard and full sweet voice; small and a little crooked, his neck awry and one shoulder higher than the other’. This was confirmed by other writers, including Bishop Challoner, who wrote that ‘he was not learned and of a weak and sickly constitution, but his soul was robust and constant’.

Within two years of his taking orders in the Church of England, he resigned his Living at Oxford and was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church. Rowsham journeyed to Rheims and, on his arrival in France, he knelt to give thanks to God for his safe crossing, and said ‘providing I might live as a good Catholic I care not if I have to earn my bread at the plough tail’.

He began his studies for the priesthood on the Feast of St. George, 1581, and was ordained priest at Soissons about Michaelmas in the same year. After a further seven months of preparation he was commissioned on 30th April 1582 in the church of St. Stephen, for work on the English Mission.

It is said that, during this time, he was saying Mass one day when a large spider fell into the Chalice which was uncovered during the Consecration. Overcoming his natural repugnance, he swallowed the spider together with the Precious Blood of Our Lord and was rewarded by a wonderful experience of confirmation in his faith. He later asserted that on this occasion his ‘repugnance turned into great relish’.

Following his appointment to the English Mission, Stephen Rowsham set out in the company of another priest, Robert Ludlam, who was also to suffer martyrdom.

There is no recorded information concerning his activities in England, but he was arrested almost immediately and sent to the Tower on 19th May 1582. The official Tower Diary for that period states that on the 14th August that year, by orders of Secretary Walsingham, Stephen Rowsham was put into the notorious dungeon known as ‘Little Ease’, where the unfortunates confined there could neither stand nor lie down with any comfort. This hole was near the torture chamber and he was to remain in it for eighteen months and thirty days.

Comfort of another kind was not lacking for, according to an account written towards the end of that century, Rowsham told a fellow prisoner that whilst in ‘Little Ease’ he was visited there by ‘God the Father, Christe our Saviour, Our Blessed Ladye and glorious soules of Saintes full often’, so that on one occasion ‘for the space of one days and a halfe he thought himself in heaven’.

Three of those imprisoned with Rowsham were taken out to execution on 28th May 1582. They were Thomas Ford and Robert Johnson, priests, and John Smart. He had looked forward to sharing their sufferings but had to endure more months of confinement in his cramped cell. As his companions died at Tyburn, Rowsham felt three gentle strokes on his hand and saw light in his cell. He took this to signify the pain and the joy his friends experienced. A letter from him describing these happenings was found upon one, Thomas Pounde, a fellow prisoner, and sent to Secretary Walsingham on 1st September 1586, by which time its contents had been copied and circulated throughout England.

After his weary months in the Tower, Stephen Rowsham was moved to Marshalsea prison, together with Mr Godsalf another seminary priest, in February 1584. Here he was to stay until September 1585 when, following a change in the Government’s policy, he was sent overseas with the promise of certain death should he return. He reached the English College at Rheims on 8th October 1585. In February 1586, undaunted by his previous experience, he once again set out for England.

His second mission lasted little more than the first and he was at liberty for only a few months. Arrested at the house of a Catholic recusant, Mrs Strange, a widow, he was taken to Gloucester gaol.

Here he seems to have been treated in a comparatively humane way and was able to say Mass daily. In 1587 Stephen Rowsham was brought before the Lenten Assizes in Gloucester and charged under the Statute of 1585. He freely admitted his priesthood but denied any guilt or treason in what he had done, and openly declared that if he had had several lives he would willingly lay them all down for the same cause. He was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

Even in captivity the martyr converted and reconciled some half-dozen of his fellow prisoners. A contemporary report says that ‘Mr Thomson, a gent(leman) of Oxfordshire, then a prysoner, and seinge and hearinge all his doinges, wished him to cease in that place from such actions, bycause of the danger of lawe, but he answered that he was past feare of such lawes and therefore went forward still’.

Mr Thomson was a well-known recusant from Burford, Oxfordshire, the father of several young children, who had fled to the Forest of Dean, where he lived and still sheltered a priest. He was discovered by Robert Alfield and taken to Gloucester gaol where he was a prisoner with Stephen Rowsham. It was this Mr Thomson who persuaded Stephen Rowsham to tell of his strange visions which were circulated in an anonymous account of the persecution of Catholics, written in 1595, the writer having the story from Mr Thomson himself.

After his trial Stephen Rowsham was returned to Gloucester Gaol and on the way was subjected to insults from a number of apprentices and boys from Gloucester who ‘were gotten to one of the dunghills, from which they pelted this holy confessor most spitefully and all berayed his face and clothes’.

On the morning of his execution, which probably took place near the gaol, he celebrated his last Mass which many Catholics attended and was able to hear confessions and give Holy Communion to those present. After Mass, when the Sherriff’s Officers were already waiting to take him to the scaffold, he said his Evensong, blessed, kissed and embraced everyone present and went cheerfully to the hurdle. One of the jailers said to him ‘Oh, Mr Rowsham, if I were in the like danger as you are and might avoid it as easily as you may by going to church, surely I would soon yield to that’. Rowsham answered ‘I pray thee be contented good friend, within this hour I shall conquer the world, the flesh and the devil’.

When he was laid on the hurdle to take him to his execution, one of his legs dragged on the ground as he was drawn along. When a woman bystander advised him to draw it up, he replied ‘No, all is too little for Christ’s sake’, and so he went to his martyrdom.

Before leaving for his execution, remembering the savagery dealt out to Blessed John Sandys, Stephen Rowsham had prepared his clothing for quick removal after he was cut down from the rope so that there would be less time for him to recover consciousness before the fearful butchery was carried out on him. Mercifully the precautions were not necessary for on the outcry of the people, the Dean and Preachers, he was let hang until he was dead and the rest of the sentence carried out. March 1587 is the traditional date of his death.

Henry Webley

Henry Webley was born in Gloucester about 1558. He was possibly a relative of the martyr Thomas Webley, also a citizen of Gloucester, who was executed at Tyburn on July 6th 1585.

We know nothing of his life before the year 1586 when he was arrested with four companions. They were apprehended on board a ship in Chichester harbour prior to their leaving for France. There is evidence to suggest that Henry Webley spent some time in London because, after his arrest, he was accused of assisting a priest, Blessed William Dean, who is known to have worked in the capital.

The five prisoners were examined in Chichester by the Mayor before being despatched to London to be dealt with by the Privy Council. They were committed to the Marshalsea prison where Webley was to spend the next two years. In contemporary prison lists he is classed among ‘recusants’ and ‘prisoners for the matter of religion’. A spy, Nicholas Berdon, described him as ‘neither wealthy nor wise but very arrant’. Among papers sent by Nicholas Berdon to Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State, were lists of all priests in London prisons and also lists of laymen. One of the latter contained five names and marked ‘Gentlemen of wealth’ and ‘meet for Wisbech’. Wisbech was a prison in Cambridgeshire where confinement was less trying for wealthy prisoners. Webley, not being wealthy, would not have been able to pay for little comforts within prison walls.

Webley was brought to trial with many Catholics in the wave of persecution that followed the coming of the Armada in 1588. In August of that year, John Pickering, a lawyer acting for the Crown, drew up a list of Catholic prisoners and put Webley’s name among those to be charged with being reconciled to the Catholic Church. Under the Statute of 1581 this was high treason. Lord Burghley, however, wrote the word ‘felony’ in the margin opposite this group, implying that he thought Webley should be charged under the Statute of 1585. This covered those charged with receiving or helping Englishmen ordained priests abroad. After Webley’s name on the list are two comments: ‘take the Q(ueen’s) part’, which is deleted, and ‘refuse pardon’. The cancelled comment indicates that, when the famous ‘bloody question’ was put to Webley (how he would behave in the event of an invasion of England organised by the Pope for the purpose of restoring the Catholic religion), he refused to declare that he would support the Queen. The other comment, ‘refuse pardon’, signifies that he was offered a pardon on the usual condition that he would conform to the Established church. This he refused to accept.

Henry Webley was one of a group of sixteen Catholics, clergy and laity, who were arraigned at Newgate Sessions in London on August 26th 1588. The priests were charged under the Statute of 1585. The laymen were variously charged, under the same Statute for the felony of assisting priests, or under the Statute of 1581 for the treasonable offence of being reconciled to the Catholic Church.

The charge against Webley was that of assisting priests. Of the sixteen arraigned, thirteen were to suffer execution, the other three had recanted. four of the prisoners, including Webley, were to be hanged for their felony, the rest were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Queen Elizabeth mitigated the sentence passed on those guilty of treason from hanging, drawing and quartering to death by hanging. The sentences were carried out in various places in and around London on the 28th and 30th August 1588. It seems clear that the thirteen could have saved their lives if they had been willing to conform to State Church and acknowledge the Queen as its head as did their three companions.

On the morning of August 28th the Sheriff and his officers took Henry Webley and two priests, William Gunter and William Dean, from Newgate prison. They were put on a cart and taken to Mile End Green where Webley and Dean were to be hanged. At the place of execution the martyrs were not permitted to address the assembled crowd and when William Dean tried to do so a cloth was stuffed violently into his mouth. William Gunter was then taken by the Sheriff to Holywell Fields, Shoreditch, where he met the same fate as Dean and Webley. The martyrs are said to have died ‘with great constancy and joy’. After their death the scaffolds were guarded to prevent people removing the bodies for burial or taking away relics.

Henry Webley’s name is included in all the principal catalogues of martyrs. He was amongst those dealt with in the Ordinary Process of English and Welsh Martyrs at Westminster in 1874 and was one of the 241 martyrs whose Cause was introduced in 1886. His Cause was again considered in the Apostolic Process at Westminster 1923-26. Although the martyr’s Cause met with objections, these were overcome and his name is now to be counted among those of his fellow countrymen who exchanged their lives for an incorruptible crown.

William Lampley

Nothing is known of William Lampley’s early life. At the time of his arrest he was living and working in Gloucester. Father Christopher Grene writing in 1592, states that he was ‘a poore man by occupation a Glover’ who was taken for ‘persuading some of his kyn to the Catholic Religion’. To do this was counted as high treason and punishable by death. Other contemporary writers give the reasons for his arrest as ‘refusing to attend Protestant Church Services’ (though this was not a capital offence) and ‘for relieving a priest of the Roman Communion’.

The ordinary folk of Gloucester proved unwilling to testify at his trial and only one could be found to speak against him. This was a man ‘that had before denounced his own wife for her conscience, (i.e. for not conforming to the established religion of the State) and caused her to be imprisoned and so indebted as not to show his face.’ This man was placed under the protection of the court for his own safety.

The judge was Sir Roger Manwood, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. He was a judge of the Oxford Circuit which at that time included Gloucester. Sir Roger is recorded as not wishing to condemn William Lampley to death and offered him pardon if he would only go to church. He also commanded William’s kinsmen, friends and Officers and Preachers to try to persuade him to conform. Their efforts were fruitless and the judge ordered that the passing bell should be tolled in the hope that the ominous sound would cause the martyr to weaken in his resolve. This, and other last minute offers of pardon, proved to be in vain.

It was recorded that he ‘most willingly yielded himself to them and their torments and they therefore ended him as butcherlye as they did any’. The traditional date of his execution is 7th December 1588.

When a layperson was martyred with a priest, the facts were often noted and documented; poor folk like the glover, without standing, goods or land and who died alone, were remembered only by their immediate friends and relatives. Their death made little impact on the world at large.

The promotion of the cause for the beatification of William Lampley depends largely on the evidence of Father Christopher Grene who wrote in 1592 that ‘only three martyrs were executed in Gloucester, two priests – John Sandys in 1586 and Stephen Rowsham in 1587 – and one Layman by occupation a poor glover’. Only William Lampley the poor glover fits this description and he is treated as a martyr in contemporary Catholic accounts of his death and by two writers on English Martyrs, Dr Anthony Chapman and Bishop Richard Challoner.

Richard Sergeant

Richard Sergeant was born into a wealthy Gloucestershire family in the late 1550’s. He was probably born at Stone, an area served from a chapel of ease in the parish of Berkeley. That a family named Sergeant was living there about this time is evident from a will in the Gloucestershire Records Office of a ‘Thomas Sargeant Esquyer’ dated 25th January 1565. An earlier mention of the Sergeant family occurs in the rental book compiled by Robert Cole, an Augustinian canon of Llanthony Priory in 1455. Like many other priests in penal times, Richard Sergeant used an alias on different occasions, being also known as ‘Lee’ and ‘Long’.

He obtained the degree of Bachelor of Arts at Oxford on 20th February 1571. Nothing more is known of him until ten years later when he entered the English College at Rheims on 25th July 1581. Receiving the sub-diaconate on 14th April 1582 and the diaconate on 9th June following, he was ordained priest at Laon on 7th April 1583 and said his first Mass two weeks later. On September 10th, in the same year, he left for England.

Three years later we hear of his arrest and imprisonment with Fr. William Thomson in Newgate. Their trial was held at the Old Bailey, London on 18th April 1586 when they were charged under the statute of 1585.

Richard Sergeant and his companion were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 20th April 1586. According to the Records of the University of Oxford it was witnessed by John Gerard, S.J., but no further details are given.

Although the accounts of both the London and Middlesex Sessions contain no reference to the trial, there are some documents which do:

1. ‘In the sessions of oier and terminer at Justice Hall in the Old Bayle the xviii of Aprile 1586….. Rishard Lea alias Longe made priest at Laon in Fraunce as afforesayd and remayning here in this realme after the tearme aforesayd was then condemned for treason.’ (Excerpts from the ‘notes concerning the trials of certain Catholic priests’, Harleian MS 360)

2. ‘The eighteenth of Aprill (1586) in the Assizes holden at London in the Justice Hall, William Thomson alias Blackborne made a priest at Rhemes, and Richard Lea alias Long made a priest at Lions (Laon) in Fraunce, and remaining here contrary to the Statute, were both condemned, and on the 20th day of April drawne to Tyborne and there hanged, bowelled and quartered. (Excerpt from Stow’s ‘Annals of England’ 1605)

In addition to these Protestant sources, Fr Robert Parsons S.J. writing two months after the execution of Sergeant and Thomson, says ‘they joyfully and with wonderful constancy died confessing in a loud voice and with cheerful countenance the Catholic Faith and in particular the Primacy of the Apostolic See’. Parsons adds that they resolutely refused the pardon which was offered them on condition that ‘they give way this last point regarding the Pope’.

Two Plaques for St Peter’s Church in London Road Gloucester by Ian Hollingsbee

Part of the role of the Gloucester Historic Building committee together with the Gloucester Civic Trust is to commission plaques for historic buildings or events in and around the city of Gloucester. About a year ago it was proposed that two plaques should be prepared for St Peter’s Church, one for the building of St Peter’s Church and the other for the Gloucester Catholic martyrs.

As a member of the Civic Trust council of management I was asked to liaise between the church authorities and the GHB committee and to this end I approached Canon Michael Fitzpatrick to suggest the erection of the two plaques. Each plaque was to have no more than 50 words and the wording itself was to be undertaken by the parish.

Canon Michael was pleased to accept the scheme subject to the approval of the churches and he commissioned a local priest to undertake the difficult task of producing the content within the 50 word specification. Agreement was made as to the location of the two plaques and the decision to produce them in olive green so as not to clash with the stonework of St Peter’s church.

In June 2006 the wording was approved and quotations obtained for the plaques. The cost of each plaque, being just under £400 pounds, is to be funded from the GHB budget. With the transfer of Canon Michael, his replacement, Fr Massey, was informed of developments relating to the two plaques and added his support to the venture. I can confirm that at the time of writing the two plaques have been obtained and we must now fix a date with the Mayor and Bishop Declan for their public unveiling in 2007. Two possible dates would be the feast of the English Martyrs on 4th May or the Beatified Martyrs of the Clifton Dioceses on 14th November. The event whenever will be publicized and an article is to be prepared by the Civic Trust for the local ‘Citizen’ newspaper on the Gloucester Catholic Martyrs.