John Roberts

John Roberts was born in 1577 at Rhiw Goch, near the village of Trawsfynydd in Merionethshire (now Gwynedd) in north Wales. He came from a family of the local gentry that had conformed to the established Church of England after the Reformation; his father was also named John Roberts. As a young man he was sent to St John's College, Oxford, where he studied in the 1590s. He left the university without taking a degree, a step that later Catholic writers associated with his growing dissatisfaction with the Elizabethan religious settlement and his refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy. He then pursued legal studies in London, at Furnival's Inn and among the Inns of Court. It was during these years in the capital, or possibly on a subsequent journey, that he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, at a time when recusancy carried heavy penalties and the Mass was forbidden by law.

In 1598 Roberts crossed to the Continent and entered the English College at Douai, then located in the Spanish Netherlands and a principal seminary for the training of priests for the English mission. He later transferred to the English College at Valladolid in Spain. He was ordained a priest in 1602. Almost immediately he sought admission to the Benedictine Order and was professed at the Abbey of San Martín Pinario in Santiago de Compostela, thereby becoming one of the earliest Welshmen of the penal period to revive Benedictine monastic life. Together with a small group of English Benedictines he was instrumental in founding, in 1607, the monastery of St Gregory the Great at Douai. That community, of which Roberts was the first prior, survived the French Revolution by transferring to England and is today Downside Abbey in Somerset. The restoration of the English Benedictine Congregation in the early seventeenth century owed much to his energy and to the Spanish Benedictine houses that sheltered the exiles.

From 1603 onward Roberts made repeated, clandestine visits to England as a missionary priest. He was arrested on several occasions, imprisoned, and banished, yet each time he returned. In 1603, during a severe outbreak of plague in London, he remained in the city to minister to the sick, an act of pastoral courage that was remembered by contemporaries. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 intensified the hunt for priests, and Roberts was again expelled. He continued to move between the Continent and England, combining monastic responsibilities at Douai with missionary work. His final capture occurred in early December 1610, when he was taken in London. Brought to trial at the Old Bailey, he was convicted of high treason under the Elizabethan statute that made it a capital offence for a priest ordained overseas to enter the kingdom. He declined to save his life by taking the Oath of Allegiance in the form required.

On 10 December 1610 Roberts was drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered together with the secular priest Thomas Somers. Witnesses recorded his calm and even cheerful demeanour on the scaffold; he is said to have joked with the hangman and to have asked that the two priests might die together. After the execution, portions of his remains were displayed on the city gates according to the custom for those condemned as traitors, but Catholic sympathizers, including members of the Spanish embassy, recovered relics. These are now kept at Downside Abbey, at Tyburn Convent in London, and in other churches. Roberts was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 among a large group of English and Welsh martyrs, and he was canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His liturgical memorial is observed on 10 December, the day of his death; in Wales he is also honoured on 25 October with the Six Welsh Martyrs and their companions.