“Look, Margaret!” From a barred window in the Tower of London, Sir Thomas More called to his daughter to witness the scene: five priests – John Haile, a secular clergyman, Richard Reynolds, a Brigittine monk and renowned theologian, and three Carthusian priors, John Houghton, Robert Lawrence and Augustine Webster, clad in the creamy white habits of their Order – were being led to Tyburn, the infamous gallows a few miles away, the fate of those who dared defy the royal will.
On that May 4, 1535, after a farcical trial and conviction of high treason these men would be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn Tree for refusing to swear to the so-called Act of Supremacy. By this Act, the reigning monarch, Henry VIII, had usurped the power of the Pope and proclaimed himself head of the Church of England – a schismatic innovation that was proclaimed throughout the land.
But it was not to watch a morbid spectacle that More called Margaret. The former Chancellor of England, also imprisoned for refusing to separate himself from the unity of the Holy Church, was parrying his daughter’s arguments to persuade him to swear to the Act and go free. Truth be told, most of the prominent classes had turned a blind eye to heresy in order to save their skins.
But deep in his heart More knew that it would not be his skill as a lawyer, judge or apologist that would prepare his daughter for the blow of the executioner’s axe that would soon separate them, but the living testimony of a love stronger than death. “Dost thou not see, Meg, that these blessed Fathers be now as cheerfully going to their death as bridegrooms to their marriage?”1
With a sure step and shining semblance, these confessors of the Faith began their passion, proclaiming that the Church is immortal and indefectible and that victory belongs with those who defend her.
The undisputed leader and father figure among them was forty-eight-year-old Dom John Houghton, Prior of the Charterhouse of the Salutation of the Most Holy Mother of God, near London.
He would be the first of the group to be hanged, indeed the first since pagan times in England to be put to death simply for being a Catholic. As the protomartyr of the Protestant Revolution in England, he is the worthy prototype of hundreds – if not thousands – of men and women who, between 1534 and 1680 gave their lives in opposition to the satanic forces that closed all of the country’s monasteries, desecrated its most sacred institutions and handed it over to heresy by force of law.
A Saint risen from anonymity
There is an ancient adage: “Cartusia sanctos facit, sed non patefaci – The Charterhouse makes saints, but it does not make them known.” When St. Bruno, under divine inspiration, founded La Grande Chartreuse on the snowy peaks near Grenoble, France, in 1084, he and his first companions embraced a life of anonymity and solitude as their way of serving the Church and society. Accordingly, Houghton might have passed almost unnoticed by posterity had not the protagonists of what historians candidly call “the devastation of England”2 knocked at his door.
Born into the gentry, in Essex, he studied law at Cambridge. He was ordained a secular priest at the age of 24, but before he was 30, his search for a more radical self-giving led him to the London Charterhouse. When our story begins, he was not only prior but also visitator of the English province of his Order with responsibility for nine flourishing monasteries.
Dom Houghton used to say that he had Angels more than men under his direction. Many of them were young and of noble birth, and in all of them the conviction burned bright that their country was the special property of the Blessed Virgin, the “dowry of Mary – dos Mariæ”, a title dating back to the consecration of the nation by King Richard II in 1381.
For them, Houghton was another Bruno: zealous in the liturgical offices, an exemplary ascetic, wise teacher and a lover of books. He embodied the dignity of his office, but if one of the monks was feeling low, he would go to him as a friend and brother, leaving his priorship behind in his cell. This is how one of the monks of the monastery described him: “He was slight of stature, elegant in appearance, shy in look, modest in manner, sweet in speech, chaste in body, humble of heart, amiable and beloved by all.”3
“The King’s Great Matter”
In their own way, even the so-called “royal commissioners” – Thomas Cromwell and his cronies – held him in high esteem. The absolute sovereign of the land found himself in a predicament, euphemistically called “the King’s Great Matter.” He wanted the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon – who had failed to produce a male heir – so that he could marry the scandalous Anne Boleyn. But since the marriage was valid, not even the Supreme Pontiff could dissolve it.
Besides, the people loved the virtuous princess who had left Spain to make England her home. A devout Catholic, protector of the people and patron of the universities, Queen Catherine was applauded whenever she took to the streets and now, more than ever, she was admired for her steadfastness in the face of adversity. Unlike so many others, this was no uprising of the masses.
Goaded on by pride and sensuality, the king set out to overturn all obstacles. “No one could have foreseen, when Henry VIII first met Anne Boleyn in 1522, that the fate of the world for centuries was at stake. Kings paying lip service to Christianity had broken marriage vows for a thousand years or more, and a few had died in their sins; yet never before had a king been willing to rend the seamless garment of the Church to make a woman of her sort a queen.”4
In so doing, the monarch shamelessly desecrated the precious legacy of Pope St. Gregory the Great who, in 596, had sent forty monks to Christianize the island nation. Appointing the heretic Thomas Cranmer as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, he began a methodical ransacking of the country, closing monasteries and seizing Church lands, with the proceeds naturally finding their way into the royal coffers. However, more than a material pillaging, it was a plundering of the nation’s soul. Proclaiming himself head of the Church of England, Henry imposed his heretical ultimatums, leaving a trail of blood and destruction wherever he met resistance.
“Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon before the papal legates”, by Frank Salisbury – Palace of Westminster, London
Monastic life was deeply rooted in England. By the mid-sixteenth century around one in every fifty adults was in religious life in the 900 or so monasteries scattered across the verdant English countryside. The aim of these royal commissioners was clear: they were after signatures to formalize in the monastic sphere the new status of the king, who had just deposed the Pope.
The Carthusian solitaries on the outskirts of the city were a link between society and Heaven, a focal point of influence and supernatural radiation. The monastery was of strategic importance, and they wanted to lure it into the schism.
A heavenly harbinger
It was not by word of mouth that the Carthusians learned that a storm was brewing, as recorded in the monastery annals: “It happened in the year of the Lord 1533, which preceded that stormy tempest, a comet was seen in the air, extending its rays clearly and manifestly as far as our house, […] a thing unheard of and unseen in past times. In the same year, our venerable Father Prior [Houghton] went out of the church after the Second Nocturn, and entering the cemetery, saw in the air a globe as of blood, of great size – and being terrified at the sight, fell to the ground.”5 He would not wait long to understand the meaning of the heavenly announcement.
In the spring of 1534, the commissioners arrived at the monastery and summoned the prior to give his consent to the king’s new “marriage”. Houghton declared that he could not understand how the marriage to Queen Catherine, celebrated according to the rites of the Church, could be annulled – an answer that landed him a month in prison, along with Dom Humphrey Middlemore, now Blessed.
There was great rejoicing in the monastery when, after negotiations, they were released. But, like a wary captain, Houghton set about preparing his subordinates. Within months, having twice returned empty-handed to the king, the commissioners were back at the monastery with redoubled demands. It was no longer just a question of “succession”, but of “supremacy”, that is, the rejection of papal authority.
Houghton feared for his men more than for himself. If scattered, would they persevere? Under coercion, would they resist? Imprisoned and tortured, would they be faithful to the shedding of their blood? Gathering them together, he proposed a triduum: the first day would be dedicated to Sacramental Confession; the second to mutual reconciliation, and the third to the celebration of a Mass of the Holy Spirit.
On the second day, the Prior said to them: “My dearest Fathers and Brothers, what you see me do, I beseech you to do likewise.”6 Then rising, he knelt before the eldest in the house and begged forgiveness for all the faults he had at any time committed against him. The elderly monk repeated his example. Amid tears, the prior made the same request to all the other religious, down to the last lay brother. An eyewitness described the scene:
“In like manner all followed him one after another, each from each begging pardon. O what grief was there, what profusion of tears […] from this day anyone who looked upon the countenance of our holy Father, which never before in any circumstances gave signs of change, knew how much he was suffering.”7
Mass to the Holy Spirit at the Charterhouse of the Salutation of the Most Holy Mother of God – Tyburn Convent, London
In the throes of anguish at the cataclysmic state of the Holy Church in his beloved country, at the prospect of imminent death and the uncertainty of how his spiritual sons would face it, he was granted a remarkable grace.
The Holy Spirit, the Comforter
On the third day, during the Mass of the Holy Spirit, “a whisper as of light air, faintly sounding outwardly to the senses, but operating much within, was observed and heard by many with their bodily ears, and felt and drawn in by all with the ears of their heart. At whose sweet modulation, the venerable prior, overwhelmed with the fulness of the Divine illumination, and dissolved in tears, was unable for a long time to proceed with the Mass. The convent also stood in astonishment, hearing the voice and feeling its wonderful and sweet operation in the heart.”8
It was evocative of the promise of Our Lord Jesus Christ before the Passion: “I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Counsellor” (Jn 14:16). They were ready for the storm that was about to break.
A splendid crown of glory
After months of imposing a regime of imprisonment, cruel surveillance and nefarious proposals on the monastery, the king’s henchmen realized that they could not overcome these men. They had to be eliminated. It was then, on May 4, 1535, that the future martyr Thomas More saw from his prison window the scene that moved him: men who, though bound, were truly free.
Tied to wooden hurdles and cruelly dragged by horses through the muddy streets of London, the holy prior and his companions arrived at Tyburn with their bodies bruised but their principles intact. Houghton addressed the crowd, which included members of the royal court under cover, clinging to the hope that he would renounce the Faith: “Our Holy Mother the Church has decreed otherwise than the king and the Parliament have decreed, and therefore rather than disobey the Church I am ready to suffer.”9
In a gesture of Christian forgiveness, he embraced his executioner and asked permission to finish his prayer, Psalm 31, which he sang: “In te, Domine, speravi, non confundar in æternum.” He was then hanged and left to fall to the ground, still alive. His abdomen was opened with a sharp knife and his entrails were torn out and thrown into the fire. As the executioner prepared to remove his heart, the Saint exclaimed softly: “Good Jesus, what will You do with my heart?”10
That same day, Cromwell’s minions returned to Houghton’s monastery to incite the monks to give in. They found the religious as confident and recollected as if the prior were still with them. They nailed one of the martyr’s arms to the charterhouse door, a precious relic that the religious hastened to retrieve. In the dramatic months that followed, fifteen other Carthusians from the same monastery endured interrogation, imprisonment, torture and martyrdom.
At that time, one monk who had died of natural causes appeared to another and said: “It is well with me. I am in heavenly glory […] but I am in a much less and lower glory than our Fathers who suffered, for they are in great glory crowned with the palm of martyrdom, and our Father Prior has a crown more splendid than the rest.”11
Martyrdom of the English Carthusians – Valldemossa Charterhouse (Spain)
A future resurrection for the Faith?
One historian comments: “Houghton’s murder was of a singularly atrocious kind. His story is a vivid demonstration of the lengths to which Henry and Crowell were prepared to go, the depths to which they were willing to descend, to break the will of England.”12
Despite its present disfigurement, there still lingers over England a “perfume left by the Angels,”13 according to Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. The sacrifice of a multitude of men and women from all walks of life, who shed their blood for the Faith during the Protestant Revolution, remains as an offering of “pleasing odour” (Gn 8:21).
Today, near the site of the Tyburn gallows in the heart of London, there is a convent of Benedictine contemplative nuns whose life of perpetual Eucharistic Adoration honours these martyrs and intercedes for the country’s conversion.
Many words from saints indicate that this will happen, such as those of St. John Marie Vianney in 1854, as related by the Archbishop of Birmingham, William Bernard Ullathorne. After listening attentively to the prelate tell of the difficulties faced by Catholics in the Anglican nation, the Curé of Ars said “with a voice as firm and confident as though making an act of faith: ‘Mais, monseigneur, je crois que l’Eglise d’Angleterre retournera à son ancien splendeur – But, monsignor, I believe that the Church of England will return to its former splendour.’”14
Such a reversal will transpire through the gracious mercy of God and of Mary Most Holy, but by divine will the cooperation of the just plays an important role. Some souls are called to suffer in a special way to obtain the graces necessary for the fulfilment of God’s plans for humanity. St. John Houghton showed he belonged to this class of suffering souls, confident of the final victory of the Holy Church, when he serenely stepped onto the scaffold and embraced his executioner. ◊
Notes
1 Cf. HENDRICKS, OCart, Lawrence. The London Charterhouse. Its Monks and its Martyrs. London: Kegan Paul Trench, 1889, p.150-151.
2 COBBETT, William. A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland. 2.ed. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1905, p.21.
3 BRENNAN, Malcolm. Martyrs of the English Reformation. Saint Marys (KS): Angelus, 1996, p.5.
4 WALSH, William Thomas. Philip II. Charlotte (NC): TAN, 1987, p.36.
5 CHAUNCY, OCart, Maurice. The History of the Sufferings of Eighteen Carthusians in England. London: Burns & Oates, 1890, p.44.
6 Idem, p.50.
7 Idem, p.50-51.
8 Idem, p.51.
9 MEYER, G. J. The Tudors. New York: Delacorte, 2010, p.216.
10 HENDRICKS, op. cit., p.154.
11 CHAUNCY, op. cit., p.74.
12 MEYER, op. cit., p.209-210.
13 CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio. Perfume de Anjos que passaram… [Perfume Left by the Angels…] In: Dr. Plinio. São Paulo. Year I. N.9 (Dec. 1998), p.35.
14 ULLATHORNE, OSB, William Bernard. Letters. London: Burns & Oates, 1892, p.52-53.
