The relics of the saints have a kind of long-sightedness: they have a way of hanging on in times of difficulty and a way of resurfacing when they are required again. There are, unfortunately, horror stories of the mistreatment or disposal of relics in the last century, but here is one of triumph, the kind of humble, unassuming victory of the saints, worked out in centuries of grace-filled struggle.
The Long Parliament of 1640–1660 afforded the clandestine Catholic clergy of England an unexpected breath of fresh air, more than it had known in recent memory. The previous century saw Edmund Campion brought to the scaffold and the fortunes of noble Catholic families drained from heavy fines. Even a generation earlier, hysteria from the Gunpowder Plot forced the knot tighter on England’s Catholics. Hurried trials made honest Protestant juries blush. Every family was required by law to attend and commune at the Protestant service. England had no bishops. Priests made do, saying Mass and hearing confessions. Simply being a priest was an act of high treason, and harboring or aiding clergy was also a criminal offense.
Now the political tensions provoked by the reign of Charles I saw a nation in civil war, and the public opinion of Catholics waned. Charles married a Catholic and was rumored to be sympathetic to the Roman Church. Parliament pressed harder for mandatory oaths that would exclude Catholics from political offices, impose restrictions on travel, and keep Catholics from owning a horse valued above £5—all while Charles secretly sought French aid against his own opposing ministers. The yet-nascent Established Church had spent much time fighting against an increasing Puritan minority with even more force.
Men entering at Douay (the English seminary established in France to educate priests to send back to England) knew that they were being prepared for a lonely and very often fraught ministry whose only real reprieve would be martyrdom. One such man was John Southworth, a Lancashireman who had been instructed in the Faith at home in secret. Southworth, being from the north, a kind of heartland of recusancy, would have felt very keenly the greater restrictions on Catholics, and valued the faith of the Apostles more than anything. He resolved to enter Douay and left home for France at age twenty-one. After at least one return to England because of poor health, he was ordained a priest six years later and sent back to England. Southworth operated in London for a time and later in his native Lancashire. There is record of his being arrested and imprisoned, narrowly escaping a death sentence at the insistence of Queen Henrietta Maria, who arranged for him and others to be deported to France.
Southworth made little of this upset and returned to his work in England. He was arrested another four times. On three occasions his release was negotiated by the Secretary of State, Francis Windebank, at the Queen’s direction. At his fourth arrest, he managed his own escape. His mission was to attend to souls, and this he did wherever he found himself. When there was an outbreak of plague in London, he visited those who had lapsed from the Faith out of fear of the new regime or out of convenience. He was by all accounts a likable and agreeable man. It was during this time that he earned the sobriquet “Parish Priest of Westminster.”
By the end of 1640, King Charles had lost the governance of the country in all but name. Sympathy with the rising Puritan faction had grown immensely. The king’s regicide and the seizure of power by Oliver Cromwell in 1649 put Catholics definitively on the losing side of the Civil War. Parliament directed the expulsion of all recusant families, but these directives could hardly occupy the attention of anyone with executive authority. The country was everywhere divided. England did not yet have a standing army, Parliament found it difficult to enforce its laws, and the legitimacy of the Established Church was questioned because of popish trappings and monarchical support while Cromwell’s officers lived in domineering, if irreproachable, austerity. Nevertheless, house priests enjoyed relative freedom to continue their work for souls, if they kept out of sight. Southworth continued his work but was caught while lodging in Westminster. He was found with “all the requisites for the celebration of Mass” and was taken prisoner. The arresting officer was one of Cromwell’s more zealous followers, which led to harsh treatment and an unusually swift indictment.
Despite these unfavorable conditions, Southworth’s good nature won the pity of his judges. He openly confessed that he was a priest, but the judge cut him off, and his testimony was delayed. The judges wanted Southworth to plead not guilty, since there was no proof of his crime. He had been found near the Mass kit but had not been caught administering the Sacraments. This suggestion, it seems, was even made in court while the magistrate implored him to deny his charges. Southworth was unmoved, and the magistrate was “so drowned in tears” that he could barely pass the sentence.
John Southworth was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn, beheaded, and quartered on June 28, 1654. The other men executed with him were charged with forging currency. Southworth was the last to face the executioner, and, after a brief address to the crowd there gathered, he prayed in silence and went to his reward. The English College at Douay sang the Te Deum and held a Mass of thanksgiving when they received the news. An onlooking royalist found his vocation and entered the Society of Jesus in Rome the same year.
The sentence prescribed placing the four quarters of the body at the four corners of London, but the Spanish Ambassador, Alonso de Cárdenas, bribed the jailer with forty shillings and took the body to be embalmed. (A bone was removed from the spine to be kept as a relic by the English clergy.) The body was kept by the ambassador until the body could be safely returned to France in 1655. Bishop Richard Challoner records in 1741 that the body was interred at Douay in the church near Saint Augustine’s altar. The faithful gathered there to pray and venerate the body of the martyr, and the miraculous healing of a boy was recorded. A fever deemed incurable subsided after the family laid his head upon the cushion that supported Southworth’s head.
A few decades later, the 1790s brought destruction and irreligion in France. The English clergy who had found refuge and acceptance at Douay were now viewed with double suspicion. King Louis XVI was killed on January 21, 1793, and war was declared on England. The Catholics of France had sided with the king, and the non-juror clergy were seen as enemies of the State. Fearing imprisonment, the residents of the College buried church plate and relics, carefully hidden and noted. Fr. Thomas Stout, one of the priests involved in the burial, made a rough diagram, noting that Southworth was buried exactly six feet deep. Soon after, their suspicions were confirmed, and the clergy were taken prisoners by the National Guard. They were held in captivity in France until their return was negotiated to Dover in 1795. The fathers of Douay earnestly desired to return to their home of more than two hundred years, but the circumstances of neither country made this a ready possibility.
Meanwhile, England’s Catholic hierarchy was not restored until 1850. Immigration from Ireland and an increasingly Catholicizing wing of the Church of England gradually pushed the trappings of the Roman Church further into the public eye, though the movement in Oxford did little for the Catholic cause. Slowly the new hierarchy began to take stock of what could be done. Cardinal Manning acquired land for a cathedral in the City of Westminster, where the first Catholic cathedral since the English Reformation would be built. Not long after, permissions were acquired to make a search of the grounds at Douay and to try to recover what had been buried there. The buildings of the College at Douay had been made into barracks, and their layout significantly altered, so that when Msgr. George Mary Searle, the search party’s leader, arrived, the sketch the party had to follow made very little sense. Some of the church plate was found, but no Southworth. It was thought that after some seventy-five years, the coffin and its contents were likely to have disintegrated. The diocese of Westminster continued its recovery of hidden church furnishings that had survived the Reformation, but her martyred parish priest lay yet hidden in France.
In 1923, plans were made for the demolition of the barracks. In 1927, workmen were digging a cellar for a new building erected there and uncovered a lead coffin. The coffin was conveyed to a morgue for inspection, and thereafter to the Institut Médico-Légal in Lille for detailed research of the remains. The investigation found a body whose form had been mostly preserved, though some water had entered through a hole in the coffin, presumably made by Msgr. Searle’s spade. The earlier party had been so close to finding Southworth. The physical description of the man fit that of Southworth, and x-rays of the body confirmed Southworth’s identity by his sentence: beheading and quartering. After the body was recovered, the precise location could be again compared to Fr. Stout’s sketch made in the eighteenth century. The location of the body corresponded exactly to the sketch.
On May 1, 1930, Westminster’s parish priest was brought in triumphant procession to the Roman Catholic cathedral. His return brought with it the whole weight of the restoration of England’s hierarchy, and it was a turning point for the English faithful. The papal legate, wreathed in incense, led what one described as “one mile of watered silk”: religious from throughout the entire country turned up to greet their saint, flanked by a multitude of faithful carrying candles, banners, and singing hymns. Girls wearing their Easter best strew flowers in front of the ornate feretory, which bore Southworth’s restored relics; he was robed in his priestly vestments and Canterbury cap behind the crystal. He now keeps watch over the English Church from her capital. Every year when the chosen men of Westminster lie on the pavement of the cathedral to become Christ’s anointed, Saint John’s feretory is moved to the main aisle to lie next to them as they hear his name sung in the Litany.
