Robert Ludlam

Robert Ludlam was an English Roman Catholic priest who died as a martyr in the reign of Elizabeth I and is remembered among the Padley Martyrs. He was born in Derbyshire, in the Kingdom of England, around the middle of the sixteenth century, into a family of yeoman standing. Precise parish and year of birth are not securely established in the surviving record. He studied at the University of Oxford and matriculated at St John's College in the 1570s, but left without taking a degree. In that period Catholic students commonly abandoned the universities rather than swear the Oath of Supremacy, which acknowledged the English monarch as supreme governor of the church. He is reported to have worked for a time as a schoolmaster before crossing to the Continent to train for the priesthood.

Ludlam entered the English College at Reims, the seminary that prepared clergy for the English mission after Catholic ordination had become impossible at home. He was ordained priest in the early 1580s and returned to England. From 1585 it was high treason, under statute, for a priest ordained abroad to enter or remain in the realm. He therefore ministered in secret to recusant Catholics who would not attend the services of the established church. His work is associated with his native Derbyshire, where recusant gentry households offered shelter and where the older religion still had a following despite fines, imprisonment, and the capital law against seminary priests.

In July 1588, during the crisis year of the Spanish Armada, Ludlam was at Padley Manor in Derbyshire, the house of the recusant gentleman John Fitzherbert, together with the priest Nicholas Garlick. The house was raided by officers acting for George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and both priests were arrested. They were joined in condemnation by Richard Simpson, a priest already in custody. The three were tried at Derby and convicted of treason for their priesthood. On 24 July 1588 they were executed by hanging, drawing, and quartering at Derby, at or near St Mary's Bridge. Catholic tradition has remembered their constancy; Padley later became a place of pilgrimage, and the three are known as the Padley Martyrs. The disposal of Ludlam's remains after the quartering is not securely recorded.

Ludlam was a secular missionary priest, not a member of a religious order. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 November 1987 among the Eighty-five Martyrs of England and Wales, but he has not been canonized. His liturgical commemoration is kept on 24 July, the anniversary of his death, and he is also remembered with the wider company of English and Welsh martyrs of the Reformation period. Standard hagiographical sources do not attach to him an extensive list of formal patronages.