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Biography

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Luke Kirby was an English Roman Catholic priest and martyr of the Elizabethan era, later numbered among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. He was born in Richmond, Yorkshire, in the north of England, in the middle of the sixteenth century. Details of his family and childhood are scarce in surviving sources. He studied at the University of Cambridge. After embracing the Catholic faith at a time when the Elizabethan religious settlement had outlawed the Roman Church in England, he left the country to prepare for the priesthood, a course that the penal laws would treat as treasonous.

In 1576 he entered the English College at Douai in the Low Countries, the seminary founded by William Allen to train clergy for the English mission. He later continued his studies at the English College in Rome. He was ordained a priest in 1577. In 1580 he was sent back to England. Landing at Dover in June of that year, he was arrested almost immediately and was in time confined in the Tower of London.

During his imprisonment Kirby was interrogated about his ordination and his contacts among recusant Catholics. He was tortured on the rack, a method frequently used against seminary priests in this period. Protestant clergy also examined him in an effort to induce him to conform to the established church. He refused to acknowledge the royal supremacy in spiritual matters or to abandon his priesthood. Under statutes that made it high treason for a priest ordained abroad to enter England, he was tried and condemned.

On 30 May 1582 Kirby was executed at Tyburn, then a public place of execution on the outskirts of London, by hanging, drawing, and quartering. He suffered together with the priests William Filby, Lawrence Richardson, and Thomas Cottam. Catholic contemporaries recorded that he met death with constancy. He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on 29 December 1886. On 25 October 1970 Pope Paul VI canonized him as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, a representative group of Catholics who died for their faith in England and Wales between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His feast is kept on 30 May, the anniversary of his martyrdom, and he is also commemorated on 25 October with the other Forty Martyrs in the calendar of England and Wales.

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