William Hart

William Hart was born in 1558 at Wells in Somerset, England. He belonged to the generation that grew up after the Elizabethan Religious Settlement had made the Church of England the established church and had rendered the public practice of Catholicism illegal. He was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. In keeping with the path taken by other English Catholics of his time who sought ordination, he left England to study for the priesthood on the Continent.

In 1576 he entered the English College at Douai in the Low Countries, the seminary founded to train priests for pastoral work in England. He later continued his formation at the English College in Rome. He was ordained a priest at Rome in 1581 and soon afterward returned to his native country as a missionary. The English government regarded priests trained in the seminaries of Douai and Rome as agents of a foreign power, and their presence in the realm was treated as a capital offense.

Hart labored among the recusant Catholics of Yorkshire, especially in the region of York. The recusant community there included families who maintained the old faith in secret, often at the cost of heavy recusancy fines and the risk of imprisonment. Around Christmas of 1582 he was arrested and confined in York Castle. Reports from the period present him as constant in his faith during imprisonment and as a support to fellow Catholic prisoners.

On 15 March 1583 William Hart was put to death at York by hanging, drawing, and quartering, the punishment inflicted on those convicted of high treason. He was approximately twenty-five years of age. His execution was one of several carried out at York in the early 1580s against seminary priests and those who assisted them.

Pope Leo XIII beatified him on 29 December 1886 as one of a group of English martyrs of the sixteenth century. He is commemorated on 15 March. William Hart was a secular priest rather than a member of a religious order, and he has not been raised to the honors of canonization.