Catholic priests were butchered during the English Reformation with a savagery rarely equalled elsewhere. In a happily more ecumenical age, what does their sacrifice demand of us today?

The Coronation of King Charles III provoked contrasting reactions from Tablet readers. In Westminster Abbey, the King swore to uphold “the Protestant Reformed Religion of the Church of England”, and we were all “invited” to swear an oath of loyalty. Two days earlier, on 4 May, Fr Stephen Giles had celebrated Mass with the children of the English Martyrs Catholic Primary School on Merseyside and had wondered – as he wrote in a letter to The Tablet (13 May) – what St John Fisher and St Thomas More would have made of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s invitation to us to swear the oath of loyalty to the King, “considering the price they and others paid” for refusing to do so.  

Martyrdom, the willingness to die for one’s faith, has played an essential role in the story of Christianity from its earliest days, and continues to do so in countries such as Syria and Nigeria. But it has not been required of Catholics in England for over 300 years. Nevertheless, the response to Fr Giles’ apparently simple inquiry opens a complex field of unanswered questions. These are amplified in The Douai Martyrs by Fr Gerard Skinner, a record of 159 seminarians of Douai College in northern France who joined the English Mission and died between 1577 and 1680. Twenty of them were among the Forty English Martyrs canonised by Paul VI in 1970. In many cases, the last chance these men had to escape public execution was to agree to take the Oath of Supremacy, recognising Elizabeth (or James I or Charles I), as “the supreme head of the Church in England”. They refused.