John Southworth

John Southworth was an English Catholic priest and martyr born in 1592 at Samlesbury Hall in Lancashire, into a recusant gentry family that remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church after the English Reformation. In a period when Catholic priestly formation was forbidden in England, he was sent to the English College at Douai in Flanders. He was ordained a priest in 1618 and returned to England on the mission the following year, working first in Lancashire and later among the poor of London and Westminster.

Southworth was arrested on several occasions under the Elizabethan statute that made it high treason for a priest ordained overseas to minister in England. He was imprisoned in the Clink and other London prisons and was banished from the kingdom in the mid-1620s, yet he returned to continue his pastoral work. During the plague of 1636 he remained in the capital to care for the sick when many fled the city. Queen Henrietta Maria, the Catholic consort of Charles I, interceded for him and helped secure his release from imprisonment during the 1630s.

After the Civil War, under the Commonwealth government of Oliver Cromwell, he was arrested again in 1654. Tried at the Old Bailey, he acknowledged that he was a Catholic priest and was condemned to death. On 28 June 1654 he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. He was the last Catholic priest executed at that site. The Spanish ambassador Alonso de Cárdenas obtained his body, which was taken to the English College at Douai and there venerated as a relic.

The remains were hidden during the French Revolution, later recovered, and in 1930 translated to Westminster Cathedral in London, where they rest in the Chapel of St George and the English Martyrs. John Southworth was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929 and canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His liturgical memorial is kept on 27 June.