St. John Southworth

Southworth spends years in English prisons and in the plague-wards of Westminster, a priest of the poor. On 28 June 1654 he is hanged, drawn, and quartered. The Spanish ambassador’s wife purchases the remains. At Douai the body is assembled and later found resistant to decay. In 1927 the relics are rediscovered; in 1930 they come to the new cathedral in London — the only English Reformation martyr so entire, so visible, in the Catholic cathedral of the capital.

John Southworth was a secular priest of Lancashire, trained at Douai, who worked in London through the plague and through the penal years. He was arrested for the last time in 1654 and sentenced under the statute that made a priest’s presence in England treason. On 28 June he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. The Spanish ambassador’s household bought the quarters from the executioner — a known, grim traffic — and had them embalmed and sent to Douai, where the body was sewn together and buried. When the English College later moved, the lead coffin went with the archives and was mislaid. It was identified again in 1927. In 1930 the relics were brought to Westminster Cathedral and placed in the Chapel of St. George and the English Martyrs, in a glass case in the north aisle, vested as a priest. Paul VI canonized him among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales on 25 October 1970. He is the only one of those martyrs whose body is still substantially together, and visible, in England.