Cuthbert Mayne

Life and Ministry

Cuthbert Mayne was born in Devon in AD 1544, conformed to the Church of England under Elizabeth I, took Anglican orders, served as a chaplain at St John's College, Oxford. There he was drawn by his friendship with Edmund Campion and Gregory Martin into the Catholic recusant movement, traveled to Douai in AD 1573, entered the English College, and was ordained Catholic priest in AD 1575. He was sent back to England in AD 1576 to the Catholic recusant household of Francis Tregian at Golden Manor in Probus, Cornwall, where he served as a domestic priest under the cover of estate steward.

Circumstances of Death

Mayne was arrested at Golden Manor on 8 June AD 1577 in a search ordered by the High Sheriff of Cornwall. The crucial evidence at his trial at Launceston Assizes was a wax Agnus Dei medal he was wearing, identified by the prosecution as a tangible sign of the papal supremacy he was charged with promoting. Convicted under the statute of Elizabeth I making it a felony to bring Roman bulls and devotional objects into the realm, he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, the first Catholic seminary priest to be put to death under the Elizabethan recusancy laws. He was executed at Launceston on 30 November AD 1577, after a botched hanging in which the rope broke and he was disemboweled while still partly conscious.

Legacy

Mayne is the protomartyr of the English Catholic mission priests — the first of the more than one hundred and seventy seminary-trained priests who would die for the Mass in England between AD 1577 and AD 1681. Canonized in AD 1970 with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His witness opened the road that Campion, Southwell, Owen, and the Carthusian remnants would walk after him. The convert priest from a Devon Anglican parsonage went home to die in a Cornish town square, and the line of priests behind him went on saying the Mass that he had been put to death for saying.