William Carter

William Carter was a sixteenth-century English printer and Catholic recusant executed for his faith in the penal years of Queen Elizabeth I. He was born in London and as a young man was apprenticed for ten years to John Cawood, printer to the Queen. After his apprenticeship he entered the service of Nicholas Harpsfield, the deprived Catholic Archdeacon of Canterbury, who was then a prisoner in the Fleet Prison for refusing the Elizabethan religious settlement. Carter acted as Harpsfield’s secretary during that confinement and remained with him until Harpsfield’s death in 1575.

After Harpsfield’s death Carter married and established his own press, working first from a house on Tower Hill and later from other sites in London. At a time when the printing and circulation of Catholic books had been made illegal, he produced works intended to sustain English Catholics and to argue against the established Church. Among the books that came from his press was Gregory Martin’s A Treatise of Schisme. A passage in that treatise that drew on the Old Testament story of Judith and Holofernes was later interpreted by government lawyers as an incitement to the killing of the Queen.

Carter’s press and stock of Catholic books were found in a search of his house. He was arrested and imprisoned, spending time in the Gatehouse and in the Tower of London. In the Tower he was tortured on the rack in an effort to obtain the names of those who had commissioned or distributed his publications and of other Catholics. He did not give the information demanded of him. In January 1584 he was tried at the Old Bailey on a charge of treason arising from the printing of the Treatise of Schisme and was convicted.

On 11 January 1584 he was drawn from Newgate to the gallows at Tyburn and there hanged, drawn, and quartered, the statutory penalty for high treason. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 among a large group of English and Welsh martyrs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His liturgical commemoration is kept on 11 January, the anniversary of his death. As a married layman who used the printing press to serve a persecuted Catholic community, he occupies a distinctive place among the Reformation-era martyrs of England.