John Houghton

John Houghton was a Carthusian monk and priest who became the first Catholic executed in the persecutions that followed King Henry VIII’s assertion of royal supremacy over the Church in England. He was born in Essex toward the end of the fifteenth century and was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he took a degree in civil and canon law. After ordination he served for some years as a secular priest before seeking admission to the Carthusian Order at the London Charterhouse. Within that community he held the offices of sacristan and procurator, positions of trust among hermit-monks living according to the austere rule of Saint Bruno.

In the early 1530s Houghton was chosen prior, first of the Charterhouse of Beauvale in Nottinghamshire and almost immediately afterwards of the London Charterhouse, the principal Carthusian house in the kingdom. As prior he was drawn into the conflict between the English crown and the papacy. When the Oath of Succession was imposed in 1534, requiring recognition of the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and of the succession of their children, Houghton and his community at first refused. After a period of imprisonment they consented to swear, adding the reservation that they did so only as far as the law of Christ allowed.

The following year the Act of Supremacy and the Treasons Act made denial of the king’s title of Supreme Head of the Church of England a capital offence. Houghton, together with Robert Lawrence, prior of Beauvale, and Augustine Webster, prior of Axholme, went to Thomas Cromwell to plead for an exemption for their order. They were arrested and confined in the Tower of London. Tried for high treason at Westminster, they were condemned. On 4 May 1535 Houghton was taken to the gallows at Tyburn still wearing his religious habit. He was hanged, cut down while still alive, disembowelled and quartered, the first of five men executed that day and the proto-martyr of the English Carthusians. Eighteen monks and lay brothers of the English Charterhouses would eventually die rather than acknowledge the royal supremacy.

Houghton’s head was placed on London Bridge and portions of his body were displayed on the city gates as a warning. He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 among a group of English martyrs and was canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. In the Roman Martyrology and in Carthusian calendars he is commemorated on 4 May, the anniversary of his death.