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Biography

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Robert Sutton was an English Roman Catholic priest and martyr of the Elizabethan penal era. He was born at Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire in the mid-sixteenth century; no contemporary record supplies a precise year of birth. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, taking the degree of Bachelor of Arts in the mid-1560s and Master of Arts a few years later. In accordance with the religious settlement of Elizabeth I he received Anglican orders and in 1571 was instituted rector of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, a parish long associated with John Wycliffe. Surviving sources give no indication that he married during his years as a Church of England clergyman.

In the later 1570s Sutton converted to the Roman Catholic faith, an event recusant writers link to the influence of a younger brother. He resigned the living of Lutterworth and crossed to the Continent to enter the English College at Douai, then in the Spanish Netherlands. After completing his studies he was ordained priest in 1577, most probably at Châlons. In 1578 he returned secretly to England as a seminary priest. Under the statute of 1585 the mere presence in the realm of a priest ordained abroad constituted high treason.

Sutton’s missionary activity was concentrated in his native Staffordshire, where he celebrated Mass in secret, reconciled recusants and administered the sacraments among Catholic families. After some years of this clandestine work he was arrested and confined in Stafford gaol. At trial he was convicted of being a Catholic priest who had remained in England. On 27 July 1588 he was executed at Stafford by hanging, drawing and quartering, the penalty prescribed for treason. Contemporary Catholic accounts portray him as meeting death with constancy; the precise disposal of his remains is unrecorded, as was usual for those condemned as traitors.

His name was preserved in the Douai catalogues of martyrs and in the later compilations of Bishop Richard Challoner. In the twentieth century his cause was joined to those of the Eighty-five Martyrs of England and Wales. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Rome on 22 November 1987. He has not been canonized. His individual liturgical commemoration falls on 27 July, the traditional anniversary of his martyrdom; he is also remembered collectively with the other martyrs of the English Reformation. No authentic portrait, extensive personal writings or identified relics are known to survive.

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