John Rigby

John Rigby was an English Catholic layman put to death for his faith in the closing years of the sixteenth century. He was born about 1570 at Harrock Hall, Eccleston, near Chorley in Lancashire, the son of Nicholas Rigby and his wife Mary, daughter of Oliver Breres of Preston. The Rigbys belonged to the recusant Catholic gentry of Lancashire, a county that retained a substantial Catholic population despite the Elizabethan religious settlement and the recusancy laws that accompanied it. In his earlier years Rigby himself conformed at least outwardly to the Church of England and attended its services, a course taken by many who hoped to avoid fines, imprisonment, and civic disability.

He was later reconciled to the Catholic Church by the Franciscan priest John Jones, who was himself executed in 1598 and later canonized. After that reconciliation Rigby entered the household of Sir Edmund Huddleston of Sawston Hall in Cambridgeshire, serving as a steward or gentleman attendant. In 1600 he went to London in connection with a recusancy summons against Huddleston’s daughter, Mrs. Fortescue, who was too ill to appear. When Rigby came before the court he was questioned about his own religion. He acknowledged that he was a Catholic and that he had been reconciled by a priest. Under the statute of 1585, reconciliation to the Roman Church was high treason.

Rigby was committed to Newgate Prison. He was pressed to recant and to attend Protestant worship, which would have secured his life, but he refused. Tried and condemned as a traitor, he was drawn on 21 June 1600 to St Thomas’ Waterings on the Old Kent Road in Southwark, the usual place of execution for those convicted in Surrey, and there hanged, drawn, and quartered. He was about thirty years of age. Contemporary Catholic accounts present him as dying without recantation and with composure.

He was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929 among a large group of English and Welsh martyrs, and was canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His individual memorial is kept on 21 June, the anniversary of his death; in England and Wales he is also commemorated with the other Forty Martyrs. As a layman who suffered specifically for the act of reconciliation rather than for priestly ministry, he occupies a distinct place among the Reformation-era English martyrs.