Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson was a sixteenth-century English Catholic priest who was executed for his faith during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He was a native of Shropshire in the west of England, though neither the exact year of his birth nor a more precise birthplace has been preserved in the surviving historical record. Like many of his generation who remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church after the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559, he left England in order to study for the priesthood at the seminaries established on the Continent for the English mission.

Johnson received his formation at the English College at Douai, founded by William Allen to train priests for work in England, and subsequently at the English College in Rome. These houses prepared men to return as missionary priests to a kingdom in which the Catholic Mass was prohibited and in which a priest ordained abroad was treated as a traitor. He was ordained in the 1570s and was sent back to England around 1580 to minister in secret to recusant Catholics.

Not long after his arrival he was arrested and confined in the Tower of London. There he was examined and subjected to torture, including the rack. Together with other captured priests he was charged with high treason, specifically with having conspired at Rome and at Rheims to murder the queen and to raise rebellion. The prisoners denied any political plot and maintained that their only purpose had been to exercise their priestly office among English Catholics.

On 28 May 1582 Johnson was taken from prison to the gallows at Tyburn, then just outside London, in the company of the priests Thomas Ford and John Shert. All three were hanged, drawn, and quartered, the statutory penalty for treason. Johnson died professing the Catholic faith and denying the conspiracy charges brought against him. Because of the manner of execution, no burial place for his remains is recorded.

Pope Leo XIII beatified Robert Johnson on 29 December 1886 as one of a large group of English and Welsh martyrs of the Reformation era. He has not been canonized. His memory is kept on 28 May, the anniversary of his death, and he is numbered among the blessed martyrs of England.