Pilgrimage to Tyburn

St Edmund Campion

St Patrick's Catholic Church in Soho is a very active and vibrant parish in the heart of London's West End with a particular focus on serving the poor and vulnerable - a service that is nourished by the strong Eucharist-centred spiritual life of the parishioners and their priest, Fr Alexander Sherbrooke...

It was with great interest, therefore, that I discovered that they were holding a Mass, talk, and pilgrimage walk to mark the Feast of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales on May 4th. Given that I had only recently participated in a similar pilgrimage to Tyburn on Good Friday, organised by the Jesuit Fathers as part of their Young Adult Ministry, one might think that my appetite for Tyburn pilgrimages had been sated. But, instead, it seems that learning about the Tyburn martyrs and their powerful and costly witness to the Faith seems only to have fired my enthusiasm. Perhaps especially so considering that the weekly Lectio Divina group I attend invokes the patronage of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

The evening's proceedings started at 6pm with an Extraordinary Form Mass at St Patrick's itself. This was followed by a talk on the English Martyrs, given by Fr Sherbrooke, with a particular focus on the Carthusian Martyrs who had been martyred that very day (May 4th) in 1535.

The talk was immediately followed by the Litany of the Saints and Martyrs of England and Wales, many of whom were martyred at nearby Tyburn. After invoking the intercession of our home-grown saints and martyrs, the Litany concluded with this prayer:

"O God, who from the very birth of thy Church in this land didst make us the Dowry of Mary and loyal subjects of the Prince of thine Apostles; grant us by the merits and intercession of these our Saints and Martyrs that we may continue steadfast in the Catholic Faith, nor ever fail to cherish that most blessed Virgin as our Mother and maintain our allegiance to the See of Peter.

"O God, who didst raise up blessed Martyrs from every rank among us, to fight manfully for the true faith and the primacy of the Holy See; grant us through their merits and prayers that our whole people may agree in the profession of the same faith, and ever enjoy that unity for which thy Son prayed, who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen."

After concluding the Litany, we made our way, in separate groups in observance of the Coronavirus regulations, to the site of the Tyburn gallows near Marble Arch. The site is marked by a simple memorial situated on a traffic island; easy to miss if you are not looking for it. Quite a sight we must have seemed to onlookers as we knelt in prayer, buffeted by the wind and rain, on a traffic island in busy central London. But what a witness to our faith!

As we gathered round the site where so many martyrs had been executed in the cause of the Faith, we listened to that celebrated martyr St Edmund Campion's response to the inevitable guilty verdict was read out as we knelt at the site of his execution:

"How do I stand, between the Pope and the Queen? I hear the question a thousand times in my dreams, until it seems that my whole destiny is bound up in an answer to that question. I have appealed to reason, and on three different occasions, I have disputed publicly with scholars and clergymen. But little comes of it, save a few distorted notes for history books. You cannot reason with those who do not love reason.

"In the tower of London, I hear rumours about Edmund Campion. Some say that he has deserted the Pope; some say that he has deserted the Church. The crown is very busy, while I am on the rack, being tormented. Sometimes I find it hard to pray. At times I seem to have no feeling, no memory, only an intention. The day for trial has come now, and I must try to rouse myself, it seems so useless. Trial? It is a trial in name only. Nonsense! Is a man a traitor to England because he hears idle chatter, and does not report it? If that were so, how many men in England would be innocent of treason? Every man on this jury, every man in this court, yea! Even the judges on the bench would be guilty. Only a deaf man would be free of guilt.

My Lords and Jury: Let me say without equivocation, that I have never encouraged, nor tolerated conspiracy against the Crown. I have said, and I do say, that the Queen errs in matters of faith. But is it treason in this land of ours to say that the Queen is mistaken? If so, then our lives belong to the headsman, for we do say that the Queen errs. But we say something else too. We say that we love England, as much as man can love a country without despising its God.

"I stand here before you, a broken wreckage of a man. This trembling piece of clay that cowers at your feet, human brutes have battered to a bloody, senseless pulp. No part of it has not quivered under mailed fist or bludgeoning jack. These eyes that bore through you like a hunted beast's have been drained of sleep for days on end. This body that scarce can stand upon its feet they have starved to skin and bones, till now it is a shadowy skeleton, groping blindly to its grave. Whatever fiendish torture the hounds of Hell could conjure, they have tried on me, till this flesh could endure no more, and there was only the razor's edge between this life and the next.

"They broke my body, Your Honour; they tried to break my soul. Into my weakened limbs they injected drugs that slithered through my brains and coiled around the stronghold of my will like a brood of poisonous snakes. Ten times ten thousand harrowing moments, the citadel was all but fallen; the gates of the castle all but flung open. Today, I stand here before you, as my torturers hope, a man with a broken soul.

"Your Honour, my soul has not been crushed to shattered fragments. By the grace of God, it has come out bloody, but unbowed. I have not denied my faith; I have not betrayed my King. The blood of a God-man which gushed out in a torrent of love down the Cross of Ignominy two thousand years ago has spanned the centuries and flowed into my veins, and filled me with a strength not my own. I crawled out of your torture chambers with a spark of life flickering in my soul. It is enough. I do not ask for more. So long as I can stand before the world - even for one glorious second, a living witness to Christ, I care not if my life-blood trickles away like sand in an hourglass.

"I know I have not long to live. Only a few seconds of life are left to me. Already I can feel the death rattle creeping up my throat. But before I surrender my soul to God, I declare, before this travesty of a court of justice; before the ghosts of all the nameless martyrs you have killed; before these terrorized brow-beaten people who will one day fall crashing over your heads like a resounding clap of thunder; before men and angels; and the God you have exiled from your borders, out into the far limitless reaches of His creation, I declare, I am a Catholic! In this faith I have lived. In this faith I now die."

All in all, this pilgrimage was a fitting way to end the day on the Feast of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

LINK

St Patrick's Catholic Church, Soho - www.stpatricksoho.org/