Thomas Atkinson

Blessed Thomas Atkinson was an English Roman Catholic priest and martyr of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. He was a native of the East Riding of Yorkshire. Surviving records give few particulars of his family or of his youth. Because Catholic seminaries were forbidden in England, he went to the Continent and studied at the English College, then located at Douai and Reims. He was ordained priest at Reims in 1588.

After ordination Atkinson returned to England and spent the rest of his life as a missionary priest, working chiefly in Yorkshire. For some twenty-eight years he ministered to recusant Catholics under the penal laws, which made the presence of a seminary priest in the realm a capital crime. Contemporary Catholic accounts portray him as a man of austere life who customarily travelled on foot, often by night, in order to bring the sacraments to scattered households while reducing the risk of arrest. He was especially remembered for his care of the poor.

In 1616 Atkinson was apprehended at the house of a Catholic family named Dawson at Hemingbrough in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Catholic articles connected with his priestly ministry were found with him. He was taken to York, tried, and condemned solely for being a priest. On 11 March 1616 he was executed by hanging, drawing, and quartering at York. Writers of the recusant tradition record that he was of advanced years at the time of his death and that he met his sentence with constancy.

Thomas Atkinson’s cause was among those of the English and Welsh martyrs examined in the twentieth century. Pope John Paul II beatified him on 22 November 1987 together with eighty-four other martyrs of England and Wales who had suffered between the 1580s and the 1670s. He is commemorated as Blessed Thomas Atkinson; his individual memorial is observed on 11 March, the date of his martyrdom. Primary documentation of his career remains limited, consisting mainly of seminary registers, state papers relating to his arrest and trial, and later martyrological compilations.