Alban Roe

Bartholomew Roe, known in religion as Alban, was born in 1583 at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, in the Kingdom of England, to Protestant parents of the established Church of England. He was educated at the University of Cambridge. As a young man he remained an Anglican until a visit to a Catholic recusant prisoner, whom he intended to argue out of the Roman faith, instead led to his own conversion to Catholicism. In 1607 he entered the English College at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands, then a principal seminary for English clergy in exile. His independent and outspoken temperament brought him into conflict with the college authorities, and he was dismissed in 1610.

After leaving Douai he sought the monastic life among the English Benedictines. He was received at the monastery of St Lawrence at Dieulouard in Lorraine, taking the religious name Alban, and there made his profession as a monk of the Order of Saint Benedict. Following ordination to the priesthood he was sent in 1615 on the English mission, returning to a country in which it was high treason, under the Elizabethan penal statutes, for a priest ordained abroad to exercise his ministry. He worked chiefly in and around London. Arrested in 1618, he spent several years in prison before being banished from the realm in 1623. He returned to England almost at once and was arrested again in 1625.

For many years thereafter Roe was confined in the Fleet Prison in London. Even in confinement he continued a pastoral ministry among fellow prisoners and among visitors who could gain access to him. Later accounts consistently emphasize his cheerfulness, wit, and constancy; he was remembered as a man who did not allow hardship to sour his temperament. In 1641, amid the heightened anti-Catholic climate associated with the Long Parliament, he was transferred to Newgate Prison. In January 1642 he was tried and condemned to death solely for being a Catholic priest.

On 21 January 1642 he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, then the customary place of such executions on the outskirts of London, together with the secular priest Thomas Reynolds. Contemporary and near-contemporary reports describe him as facing death with courage and even humour. Alban Roe was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 and was canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His individual feast is kept on 21 January; in England and Wales he is also commemorated on 4 May with the other Forty Martyrs.