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Robert Drury was born in 1567 in Buckinghamshire, England, in the later sixteenth century, when the Elizabethan settlement had made the public practice of Roman Catholicism illegal and had turned the presence of priests ordained abroad into a capital offence. He came of a family of some standing and, like many English Catholic youths of his generation, was sent to the Continent for an education and priestly formation that could not be obtained legally at home. He studied at the English College at Rheims and later at the English College in Valladolid, Spain, seminaries founded to supply clergy for the English mission. He was ordained a priest in the early 1590s and returned to England to work among recusant Catholics.

For more than a decade he served as a secular missionary priest, celebrating Mass and administering the sacraments in secret under the constant risk of arrest. The penal statutes made it high treason for a priest ordained overseas to remain in the realm, and many of his contemporaries were captured and put to death. Around the accession of James I in 1603, Drury was among a group of secular priests who signed a protestation of allegiance intended to show that English Catholics could be loyal subjects of the Crown while remaining faithful to the pope in spiritual matters. That attempt at a political distinction was overtaken by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and by the harsher measures that followed.

In 1606 Parliament imposed a new Oath of Allegiance whose wording required Catholics to deny the pope’s authority to depose princes. Drury regarded the oath as incompatible with his faith and refused to take it. He was arrested, tried for treason on the ground of his priesthood, and condemned. At his trial and in prison he maintained that he was a loyal subject of the king but could not in conscience swear the oath as it stood.

On 26 February 1607 he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in London, the customary place and manner of execution for those convicted of high treason. He died professing both his Catholic faith and his civil loyalty. No recorded Christian burial of his remains is known, as was typical for those executed in this fashion. On 22 November 1987 Pope John Paul II beatified him among the Eighty-five Martyrs of England and Wales. He has not been canonized. His feast is kept on 26 February, the anniversary of his death.

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