Robert Grissold

Robert Grissold (also recorded as Grisold or Griswold) was an English Roman Catholic layman executed for his faith in the early seventeenth century. He was a native of Rowington in Warwickshire and is described in surviving notices as a yeoman or farm labourer, and as a servant in the household of a Mr Sheldon of Broadway. Later writers have associated him with the recusant Greswold family of Solihull, though the precise degree of kinship is not firmly documented. Almost nothing reliable is known of his childhood, education, or household. Even his year of birth is not established by contemporary record; later hagiographical summaries sometimes place it in the mid-1570s on the basis of an estimated age at death, but that figure remains conjectural. He lived as a recusant in the English Midlands across the close of Elizabeth I’s reign and the opening years of James I, when statutes against Catholic priests and those who assisted them remained in force.

In the summer of 1603 Grissold was in company with the seminary priest John Sugar (also spelled Suker), a convert who had been ordained at Douai and had returned to the English mission. The two were arrested near Rowington and committed to Warwick gaol, where they were held for about a year. Sugar was detained under the 1585 statute that made it high treason for a priest ordained abroad to remain in England; Grissold was held for the related felony of assisting or accompanying a priest. During imprisonment he was pressed to conform to the established Church of England as the price of release and refused. Contemporary Catholic reports present him as steadfast in that refusal.

At the Warwick assizes in July 1604 both men were condemned. On 16 July 1604 they were executed at Warwick. Traditional accounts describe Grissold as encouraging the priest on the way to execution and as dying with constancy. Their deaths belong to the continuing enforcement of Elizabethan penal law in the early Jacobean period, before the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 further hardened official policy toward Catholics. Documentation of Grissold’s personal circumstances—marriage, children, or the place of burial after execution—is too thin to support firm statements.

He received no formal ecclesiastical honour until the later twentieth century. On 22 November 1987 Pope John Paul II beatified him together with eighty-four other English and Welsh martyrs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is therefore counted among the Eighty-five Martyrs of England and Wales. His individual commemoration is associated with the date of his death, 16 July; the group is also commemorated on 4 May in the dioceses of England and Wales. He has not been canonized.