George Beesley

George Beesley, whose surname is also recorded in some sources as Bisley, was an English Roman Catholic priest and martyr of the Elizabethan period. He was born at The Hill in the parish of Goosnargh in Lancashire, a part of northern England that remained a notable recusant district in the later sixteenth century. Traditional accounts place his birth around the early 1560s, though no contemporary baptismal record has been established with certainty. He belonged to an ancient Catholic family that had retained the old faith through the religious changes of the Tudor age. Like other young Englishmen who sought ordination when the Catholic priesthood could no longer be trained at home, he went to the Continent and studied at the English College then established at Reims after its removal from Douai. He was ordained priest at Reims on 14 March 1587.

In 1588 he was sent back on the English mission. Under the statute of 1585, the mere presence in England of a priest ordained abroad was high treason. Contemporary notices describe Beesley as a man of singular courage, still young, strong, and robust. He ministered in secret, celebrating Mass and administering the sacraments among recusant households under constant risk of arrest. Toward the end of 1590 he was taken in London by Richard Topcliffe, the pursuivant notorious for the hunting and interrogation of Catholic priests. He was confined in Bridewell and in the Gatehouse and was subjected to severe torture. He did not recant.

On 2 July 1591 Beesley was executed in Fleet Street, London, by hanging, drawing, and quartering, the penalty then prescribed for treason. He suffered together with another priest, Montford Scott, whose constancy he is said to have admired and emulated. Traditional reports of his last words give the Pauline text “Absit mihi gloriari nisi in Cruce Domini Nostri Jesu Christi,” followed, after a pause, by an appeal to the bystanders: “Good people, I beseech God to send all felicity.” As with most seminary priests put to death in that period, no reliable record of his burial survives.

Beesley was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 November 1987 among the Eighty-five Martyrs of England and Wales. He has not been canonized. Beyond the outline of his training, mission, imprisonment, and death, little of his pastoral work is securely documented, a limitation common to the biographies of many Elizabethan seminary priests. His memory is preserved with the English and Welsh martyrs of the Reformation era, and especially in Lancashire, the county of his birth.