Francis Ingleby

Francis Ingleby was a sixteenth-century English Catholic priest executed under the Elizabethan penal laws and later beatified by the Roman Catholic Church. He was born at Ripley in Yorkshire, in the north of England, about the middle of the sixteenth century (commonly given as around 1551), into the gentry family seated at Ripley Castle. He was a younger son of Sir William Ingleby and of Anne, a daughter of the Mallory family of Studley. Like other recusant households in Yorkshire, the Inglebys retained Catholic sympathies after the English Reformation. Francis received the education usual for a gentleman of his rank, studying at Brasenose College, Oxford, and afterwards at the Inner Temple in London, one of the Inns of Court, with a view to the law.

Instead of following that career he chose the Catholic priesthood at a time when priests trained in the continental seminaries were forbidden to enter or remain in England. He crossed to the Continent and was admitted to the English College at Reims in 1582. After formation there he was ordained priest at Laon in 1584 and was sent to the English mission almost at once. He returned to the north and worked in secret among recusants in Yorkshire, celebrating Mass and administering the sacraments under the threat of informers, searches, and statutory treason for the mere fact of priesthood. He belonged to the secular clergy, not to a religious order.

In 1586 Ingleby was arrested and imprisoned at York. He was tried as a seminary priest under the 1585 statute that made it high treason for a priest ordained abroad to come into or remain in the queen's dominions. Condemned on that charge, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at York on 3 June 1586. Catholic martyrologists recorded him among the missionary priests who suffered at York in the 1580s. In accordance with the penalty for treason, his remains were not given a known Christian burial that can be identified today.

He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 November 1987 as one of the Eighty-five Martyrs of England and Wales, men and women put to death between 1584 and 1679. He is styled Blessed Francis Ingleby and has not been canonized. His individual commemoration is associated with 3 June, the date of his execution. Beyond the outline of family, education, ordination, mission, trial, and death, little is securely documented; later pious elaborations are not treated here as established fact.