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Biography

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Thomas Holland was born in 1600 at Sutton in Lancashire, England, into a Catholic recusant milieu at a time when the penal laws still made the open practice of Catholicism illegal. Like many English Catholic youths of his generation, he was sent to the Continent for an education that could not safely be obtained at home. He studied at the English Jesuit college of Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands and later at the English College in Valladolid, Spain. In 1624 he entered the Society of Jesus. After Jesuit formation and ordination to the priesthood he was assigned to the English mission and sent to England in 1635.

On the mission he worked chiefly in London. He was noted for a gift for languages, being able to speak French, Spanish, and Flemish as well as English, and he used disguises and aliases, including Sanderson and Hammond, in order to move about the city and minister to Catholics of different ranks. His work consisted of the clandestine celebration of Mass, the hearing of confessions, the instruction of those who sought to enter or return to the Catholic Church, and assistance to the poor. The years of his ministry coincided with the political crisis of the late personal rule of King Charles I and the outbreak of the First English Civil War in 1642, which further endangered Catholic priests in areas under parliamentary control.

In 1642 Holland was arrested in London and imprisoned. He was tried at the Old Bailey on the statutory charge of being a Catholic priest, which under Elizabethan treason legislation remained a capital offence. He was convicted. On 12 December 1642 he was executed at Tyburn by hanging, drawing, and quartering, the death prescribed for high treason. Catholic and Jesuit accounts describe him as facing death with composure and as praying for the king and for England. His remains were disposed of according to the custom of Tyburn executions; no securely identified burial place is recorded in the sources commonly cited for his life.

Holland was remembered as a martyr by English Catholics and by the Society of Jesus. In the twentieth century his cause was included among those of the English and Welsh martyrs presented to the Holy See. Pope Pius XI beatified him on 15 December 1929. He has not been canonized. His liturgical commemoration is kept on 12 December, the day of his death. Surviving information about him comes from Jesuit catalogues, reports from the English mission, trial notices, and later martyrologies; some particulars of his family background, the exact sequence of his formation, and the precise circumstances of his arrest remain only partially documented.

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