Thomas Plumtree

Thomas Plumtree was a Roman Catholic priest in sixteenth-century England who was put to death after the failure of the Rising of the North. The year and exact place of his birth are not preserved in the surviving record. He is known to have been rector of Stubton in Lincolnshire. After Elizabeth I’s religious settlement restored Protestant worship and the royal supremacy, he was deprived of that living because he would not conform and continued to hold the Catholic faith.

In November 1569 the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland raised the northern counties in a rebellion intended to restore Catholic public worship and to advance the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots. Plumtree attached himself to the insurgents as a chaplain. When the rebels occupied Durham he celebrated Mass in Durham Cathedral, briefly restoring the old liturgy in that church. The rising collapsed within weeks as royal forces advanced and the earls fled into Scotland.

Plumtree was captured. He was offered a pardon if he would recant Catholicism and acknowledge the queen’s supremacy in religion; he refused. He was hanged in the marketplace at Durham on 4 January 1570. Catholic contemporaries treated his death as martyrdom for the Mass and for refusal to deny the faith.

Pope Leo XIII beatified him in 1886 among a group of English Reformation martyrs. He is venerated as Blessed Thomas Plumtree. No extensive cult or list of patronages is recorded beyond his place among the English martyrs of the Elizabethan period.