Augustine Webster

Augustine Webster was an English Carthusian prior and martyr of the sixteenth century. Almost nothing can be established with certainty about his family background, place of birth, or early education. He entered the Carthusian Order, whose monks combined eremitical solitude with a limited communal liturgy, and by 1531 he was serving as prior of the Charterhouse of Our Lady of Melwood, situated at Epworth on the Isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire. The English Carthusian houses were few in number but held in high regard for the strictness of their observance. As prior, Webster would have been responsible for the spiritual and temporal welfare of a small community of choir monks and lay brothers living under the rule derived from Saint Bruno.

The crisis that led to his death arose from King Henry VIII’s assertion of royal supremacy over the Church in England. After the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and the parliamentary acts that severed England from papal jurisdiction, clergy and religious were required to swear an oath recognizing the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England. In the spring of 1535 Webster traveled south with Robert Lawrence, prior of Beauvale Charterhouse, in order to confer with John Houghton, prior of the London Charterhouse, on the stance their order should take. The three priors were detained, confined in the Tower of London, and pressed to take the Oath of Supremacy. They declined, maintaining that the Bishop of Rome held a spiritual primacy that no secular ruler could claim.

Together with Richard Reynolds of the Bridgettine monastery of Syon and the secular priest John Haile, vicar of Isleworth, the three Carthusian priors were arraigned for high treason. A jury found them guilty. On 4 May 1535 they were taken to Tyburn, where they were hanged, drawn, and quartered—the customary penalty for treason. Their execution was intended as a public warning; it also inaugurated a broader assault on the Carthusian communities, several of whose members later died of starvation in Newgate Prison or were themselves put to death. Webster and his companions were among the earliest Catholics to suffer capital punishment under Henry VIII for rejecting the royal supremacy, preceding even the better-known deaths of Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More later in the same year.

Devotion to the English Carthusian martyrs persisted in recusant circles. Pope Leo XIII beatified Augustine Webster, together with a large group of English martyrs, in 1886. On 25 October 1970 Pope Paul VI canonized him as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, a representative group chosen from among the many who died between 1535 and 1679. In the liturgical calendar he is commemorated on 4 May with the other Carthusians who died that day, and he shares the feast of the Forty Martyrs. His witness is invoked as an example of monastic fidelity and of resistance to the state’s claim of absolute authority over the Church.