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St. Thomas More, "The Tyburn Tree," and St. John Fisher, as depicted in Brompton Oratory, London, UK

The Forty Martyrs of England and Wales

It's hard to read the print on the bottom of the second image. The numbers correspond to the following:

1.)St. Edmund Gennings
2.)St. Robert Southwell
3.)St. John Kemble
4.)St. John Boste
5.)St. Margaret Ward
6.)St. Anne Line
7.)St. John Almond
8.)St. John Plessington
9.)St. David Lewis
10.)St. John Jones
11.)St. Richard Gwyn
12.)St. John Roberts
13.)St. Philip Evans
14.)St. John Lloyd
15.)St. Edmund Campion
16.)St. Alexander Briant
17.)St. Margaret Clitherow
18.)St. Augustine Webster
19.)St. Robert Lawrence
20.)St. John Houghton
21.)St. Richard Reynolds
22.)St. Luke Kirby
23.)St. Eustace White
24.)St. Polydore Plasden
25.)St. John Wall
26.)St. John Stone
27.)St. John Rigby
28.)St. Ambrose Barlow
29.)St. Henry Walpole
30.)St. John Southworth
31.)St. Philip Howard
32.)St. Alban Roe
33.)St. Edmund Arrowsmith
34.)St. Swithun Wells
35.)St. Thomas Garnet
36.)St. John Paine
37.)St. Ralph Sherwin
38.)St. Cuthbert Mayne
39.)St. Henry Morse
40.) St. Nicholas Owen

Our former bishop, Archbishop Joseph Hurley, was the great-great-[fill in greats as necessary....] nephew of Abp Dermott Hurley of Dublin, who was caught when he came back to Dublin from the college at Douai, France, held in prison and hideously tortured for many months, and then hanged outside the city gates of Dublin at the express orders of Elizabeth I. He is one of a group of 16 (?) Irish martyrs who have been beatified.

We used to have a mural depicting his torture, but it has since been removed. We have a shrine to St. Patrick, and tourists are always puzzled by the fact that many of our early priests in this Spanish-settled town were Irish, with Spanish first names. . This was because it was illegal for the Irish to study for the priesthood or even celebrate Mass in Ireland, and most of the Irish went to Spain to study. (The English went to France, generally.) After they were ordained, they could not return to Ireland for political reasons, so they were sent to the Spanish-speaking New World, since they had learned Spanish during their studies in Spain. Mexico had a number of Irish priests of this kind.

People always ask me about it, and at first I was a little uncomfortable explaining it to visitors if I suspected they might be Episcopalians. However, I finally just decided the only way to deal with it was simply to give a calm, factual explanation and let them figure out how they were going to process it. I would suspect that most of them are totally ignorant of this part of the history of the Anglican Church. Of course, as a consolation, I then remind them that once the Puritans took over, they persecuted both Anglicans and Catholics with equal zeal.

There's nothing wrong with this. The Anglicans long ago added to their liturgical calendar people who suffered martyrdom during the bloody reign of Mary I.

While I'm sure many died specifically because their religious beliefs were at odds with whomever happened to be wearing the Crown of St Edward at the time (Henry VIII acted against not only Papists, but also against Lutherans and Calvinists), many others were either involved in or accused of being part of plots to overthrow the government (i.e. treason, not heresy). Henry VIII, the son of a usurper himself, and his children always acted swiftly and ruthlessly to stamp out any hint of rebellion.

Ducking for cover now...

When I was a little boy, the elders on the Irish side of the family told us kids of these martyrs and those who had suffered in Eire. For them, the English Protestants played the same role in their history as the Mohammedan Turks did for the Greek side. And both sides told us never to forget these stories.