William Way

Blessed William Way was an English Roman Catholic priest martyred in 1588 under the penal laws of Queen Elizabeth I. He appears in contemporary and early modern sources under the additional names William May and William Flower, aliases of the kind frequently adopted by seminary priests to conceal their identities while travelling and ministering in secret. Reliable information about his family and childhood is almost entirely lacking. Early catalogues of missionary priests identify him as coming from the Diocese of Exeter in the west of England, a jurisdiction that then encompassed Devon and Cornwall, but they do not record a precise birthplace or an exact year of birth. Later writers have sometimes proposed a birth around 1560; that figure is an inference from typical age at ordination rather than a documented fact, and no contemporary register confirming it is known.

Like many Englishmen who sought ordination after the Elizabethan religious settlement, Way left the country to study at the English College. By the mid-1580s that college, originally founded at Douai, was operating at Reims in France. There he completed his theological formation and was ordained priest in September 1586, after which he was sent into England the same year. The statute 27 Eliz. c. 2 of 1585 had declared it high treason for any priest ordained abroad since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to come into or remain in the realm. Way’s ministry therefore took place under the constant threat of capital punishment. Traditional accounts state that he was arrested after only a short time on the mission, in 1587, and was held in London prisons, including the Clink in Southwark, a common place of confinement for recusants and priests.

The summer and autumn of 1588 were marked by the approach and defeat of the Spanish Armada and by a corresponding surge in executions of Catholic clergy. Way was tried for the statutory treason of being a seminary priest rather than for any specific political conspiracy. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered on 23 September 1588 at Kingston upon Thames in Surrey, the penalty prescribed for high treason. No authentic relic or burial place has been identified; the quartered remains of such victims were customarily displayed on city gates or other public sites as a deterrent. Surviving notices of Way himself are brief and focus on the fact of his priesthood and execution rather than on sermons, letters, or personal anecdotes, which is typical of many of the lesser-documented Elizabethan martyrs.

William Way was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 November 1987 as one of the Eighty-five Martyrs of England and Wales, a group whose members died between 1584 and 1679. He has not been canonized. Because the documentary record is so thin, he is commemorated chiefly as a representative of the secular clergy who returned from the Continental seminaries and accepted the legal consequences of their vocation. In martyrologies and local calendars his memory is associated with 23 September, the date of his death, as well as with the collective observance of the English and Welsh martyrs.