A Priest to the End
The relics of the saints have a kind of long-sightedness, they have a way of hanging on in times of difficulty, and a way of resurfacing when they are required again. There are, unfortunately, horror stories of the mistreatment or disposal of relics in the last century, but there is here one of triumph, the kind of humble, unassuming victory of the saints, worked out in centuries of grace-filled struggle.
The Long Parliament of 1640-1660 afforded the clandestine Catholic clergy of England an unexpected breath of fresh air, more than it had known in recent memory. The previous century saw Edmund Campion brought to the scaffold and the fortunes of noble Catholic families drained from heavy fines. Even a generation earlier hysteria from the Gunpowder Plot forced the knot tighter on England’s Catholics. Hurried trials made honest protestant juries blush. Every family was required by law to attend and commune at the Protestant service. England had no bishops. Priests made due, saying Mass and hearing confessions. Simply being a priest was an act of high treason, and harbouring or aiding clergy was also a criminal offence.
A broadside ballad with anti-Catholic sentiments.
Now the political tensions provoked by the reign of Charles I saw a nation in civil war, and the 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 entering at Douay (the English seminary established in France to educate priests to send back to England) knew that they were being prepared for a lonely and very often fraught ministry 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. Southworth being from the north, a kind of heartland of recusancy, 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. He resolved to enter Douay and left home for France at age twenty-one.
An illustration of the College at Douay.
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, narrowly escaping 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 is 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 fear of the new regime or out of convenience. He was by all accounts a likeable and agreeable man, even those who did not share his religion or cause found him a very likeable man. It was during this time also that he earned the sobriquet ‘Parish Priest of Westminster.’
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 sympathetic acts 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 their laws, the legitimacy of the Established Church was questioned because of 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 continued his work, but was caught while lodging in Westminster. He was found with ‘all the requisites for the celebration of Mass,’ and was taken prisoner. The arresting officer was one of Cromwell’s more zealous followers, which led to harsh treatment and an unusually-fast indictment.
A recusant altar, photo from Fr Finigan’s excellent blog.
Despite these truly unfavourable conditions, 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. The English College at Douay sang the Te Deum and a Mass of thanksgiving when they received the news. An onlooking royalist found his vocation, and entered the Society of Jesus in Rome the same year.
The site of the Tyburn Tree today.
Here we pick up the story of Southworth’s relics, one no less full of false starts, and no less unrelenting. The sentence prescribed placing the four quarters of the body 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, and embalmed Southworth for burial. The body was kept by the Ambassador until the body could be safely returned to France in 1655. Bishop Challoner records in 1741 that the body 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 family lay his head upon the cushion that supported Southworth’s head.
A memorial with relic of St John Southworth at the present-day collegiate church of St Peter, Douai.
The 1790s brought destruction and irreligion in France. And with the Revolution came innumerable losses of precious art, church plate, and sacred relics. The Crown of Thorns and the priceless windows of the Sainte-Chapelle were removed for safe keeping; many relics were hidden. Not everything escaped destruction, however, the relics of St Genevieve, patroness of Paris, were thrown into the Seine. A woman dressed as the ‘goddess of liberty’ was enthroned on the altar at Notre-Dame de Paris, the weekdays were rearranged to supplant Sunday, and the blood of religious and clergy quite literally ran in the streets. The English clergy who had found 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 non-juror clergy were seen as enemies of the State. Fearing imprisonment, the residents of the College buried church 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 suspicions were confirmed, and the clergy were taken prisoners by the National Guard. They were held in captivity in France until their return was negotiated to Dover in 1795.
Readers will be aware that France and England have long comported themselves as feuding siblings, here making war upon one another, here contracting peace, here rallying 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 conditions under which the English faithful had suffered. Mass was offered in secret and 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 made this a ready possibility.
The Victorian Era brought many social reforms. Restrictions on Catholics were lifted dramatically by contemporary standards, and Catholic Emancipation came in 1829, but the popular view of the Church 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, though movement in Oxford did little for the Catholic cause. Slowly the new hierarchy began to take stock of what could be done. Cardinal Manning acquired land for a cathedral 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 completion until Manning’s successor, Cardinal Vaughan, broke ground in 1895. After this land was bought in 1856, permissions were acquired to go and make a search of the grounds at Douay, and to try to recover what had been buried there for safe-keeping.
H.E. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster
The buildings of the College at Douay had been made into barracks, and their layout significantly altered, so that Msgr George Mary Searle, the search party’s leader, arrived, the sketch they had to follow made very little sense. Only 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. Searle (although his failure to discover the sequestered relics brings an end to his involvement in our story) continued a fruitful priesthood and an academic career as an astronomer at the Catholic University of America (his father was American), and boasted the discovery of no fewer than six galaxies in his career. 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.
Fr George Mary Searle, C.S.P
In 1923 plans were made for the demolition of the barracks where the buildings of the College stood. The buildings would be torn down and the ground levelled for a road to run across the site of the former college. In 1927 workmen were digging a cellar for a new building erected there and uncovered a lead coffin. The coffin was conveyed to a morgue for inspection, and thereafter to the Institut Médico-Légal in Lille for detailed research of the remains.
A plaque marking the site of the discovery.
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 Msgr Searle’s spade. The earlier party had been so close to finding Southworth. The physical description of the man fit that of Southworth, and x-rays of the body confirmed Southworth’s identity by his sentence: beheading and quartering. More courageous readers may find old photographs of this examination here, please be advised that the photographs may be jarring to some.
After the body was recovered, the precise location could be again compared to Fr Stout’s sketch made in the eighteenth century. Now that the barracks were gone, other landmarks could be used to show that location of the body corresponded exactly to the sketch.
The relics of St John Southworth, carried in procession to the cathedral.
On 1 May 1930 Westminster’s parish priest was brought in triumphant procession to the RC 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. The papal legate wreathed in incense, led what one described as ‘one mile of watered silk,’ 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.
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 become Christ’s anointed, 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 relics of St John Southworth in Westminster Cathedral.
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, one 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).
A window showing St John, St Oswald & St Edmund Church, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Greater Manchester.
