Roger Cadwallador

Roger Cadwallador was an English Roman Catholic priest and martyr, born in 1568 at Stretton Sugwas, near Hereford, in Herefordshire. He came of age in the Welsh border country during the later Elizabethan penal period, when the Mass was forbidden, recusancy was fined and imprisoned, and, under the statute of 1585 against Jesuits and seminary priests, the mere presence in England of a priest ordained abroad was high treason. He left the country to train for the priesthood on the Continent and was ordained at Valladolid in 1593. He then returned as a missionary to his native region, one of the secular clergy who worked without the protection of a religious order, dependent on recusant households for shelter and concealment.

For about sixteen years he ministered principally in Herefordshire and neighbouring districts, serving Catholic families who refused conformity to the Church of England. Contemporary recusant tradition remembered him as a man of unusual learning, especially in Greek. He is associated with an English version of material from Theodoret, a mark of the scholarly culture that the exile colleges tried to preserve among the missionary clergy. His long survival in a watched border county indicates both the strength of local Catholic networks and the constant risk that attended every seminary priest after 1585.

In 1610, in the reign of James I and in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Cadwallador was arrested. He was required to take the Oath of Allegiance, whose clauses concerning the papal deposing power many Catholics held to be incompatible with their faith; he refused. Convicted under the penal laws as a priest ordained overseas who had remained in England, he was sentenced to the traitor’s death of hanging, drawing, and quartering. He was executed at Leominster on 27 August 1610. No reliable record survives of a burial place, which is typical after that form of execution, when remains were commonly displayed as a warning.

His memory was kept in recusant martyrology and was given wider circulation in the eighteenth century through Richard Challoner’s collections of missionary priests. He was not canonized. On 22 November 1987 Pope John Paul II beatified him among the Eighty-five Martyrs of England and Wales, men and women put to death for the Catholic faith between the 1580s and the later seventeenth century. His individual feast is kept on 27 August, the anniversary of his death at Leominster.