Edward Stransham

Edward Stransham was born at Oxford, England, about the year 1557. He belonged to the generation of English Catholics who came of age after the Elizabethan religious settlement had made the open practice of the Roman Catholic faith illegal. He was educated at St John's College in the University of Oxford, where he matriculated in 1575, being then recorded as about eighteen years of age and a native of the city, and where he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1576. As religious tests and the pressure to conform to the established church intensified at the university, he left Oxford and England in order to train for the Catholic priesthood on the Continent.

In 1577 he entered the English College at Douai in the Low Countries, the seminary founded by William Allen to prepare clergy for the English mission. When the college was obliged to relocate to Reims in France, he continued his theological studies there and was ordained priest in December 1580. In 1581 he was sent back to England. Later writers record that he was among the first seminary priests to enter the country by way of Dunkirk, a route less closely watched than the traditional Channel ports. For the next several years he ministered principally in London and around Oxford, celebrating Mass in secret, hearing confessions, and supporting recusant families who refused attendance at Protestant services.

In 1583 Stransham returned briefly to Reims, bringing two students destined for the seminary, and then crossed again to England to resume his pastoral work. The statute of 1585 made it high treason for any Jesuit or seminary priest ordained abroad to be present in the kingdom, and felony to receive or assist such a priest. In the summer of 1585 Stransham was arrested in London. He was confined first in the Tower of London, then in the Marshalsea prison, and finally in Newgate.

On 16 January 1586 he was arraigned in Westminster Hall together with another priest, Nicholas Woodfen. Both were indicted simply for being Catholic priests ordained overseas and remaining in England contrary to the statute. They were found guilty. On 21 January 1586 Stransham and Woodfen were drawn on hurdles to the gallows at Tyburn. There they were hanged, drawn, and quartered, the death prescribed for high treason. Stransham was still a young man, not yet thirty years of age.

The Catholic Church regards Edward Stransham as a martyr. Pope Pius XI beatified him on 15 December 1929 among a large company of English and Welsh martyrs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has not been canonized and is therefore known as Blessed Edward Stransham. His memory is kept on 21 January, the date of his execution, and he is also commemorated with the other Reformation-era martyrs of England and Wales. Surviving records say little of his personality beyond the perseverance shown by his repeated return to a mission that he knew could end in a traitor's death.