Carthusian Martyrs of London

Life and Ministry

The London Charterhouse, founded in AD 1371 on the site of the Black Death plague pit, was the most observant of the English Carthusian houses and the spiritual center of pre-Reformation Catholic devotion in London. Its prior in AD 1535 was John Houghton, a Cambridge-trained priest who had entered the order at the Beauvale Charterhouse in Nottinghamshire and been elected to London four years earlier. With his sub-prior Humphrey Middlemore and procurator William Exmew, Houghton refused to swear the Oath of Succession in the form that recognized Henry VIII's supremacy over the Church of England, on the grounds that no monk of his order could in conscience separate himself from the Roman communion.

Circumstances of Death

Houghton was arrested in the spring of AD 1535 with Robert Lawrence (prior of Beauvale) and Augustine Webster (prior of Axholme), tried on 28 April with the Bridgettine Richard Reynolds and the secular priest John Haile, and on 4 May was the first to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in his monastic habit — the only execution at Tyburn ever of a man in religious clothing. His severed arm was nailed over the gate of his own monastery. Middlemore, Exmew, and Sebastian Newdigate followed on 19 June. Over the next two years a remaining group of ten monks of the Charterhouse who would not take the oath were imprisoned at Newgate and starved to death by deliberate withholding of food; a further three were transferred to other Carthusian houses and there executed. The total death count is eighteen, the largest body of religious in a single English house to die for refusing the oath.

Legacy

The Charterhouse martyrs are remembered together as Saint John Houghton and Companions in the Catholic calendar (4 May), and as the Eighteen Carthusian Martyrs in the wider English Catholic tradition. Houghton's death set the pattern that More and Fisher would follow within ten weeks: the death of the Christian who treats the sovereignty of God over the Church as a non-negotiable. The witness of the Charterhouse is also the witness of an entire community: not one or two, but a religious house standing together, refusing the oath together, dying together, until only those who took it remained. Their blood stayed in the stones of the old Charterhouse, and when the king finally took the property, he could not take the witness.