Pilgrim Ways

In Herefordshire, we are taken to Pembridge Castle and to the one-time home of the Herefordshire martyr, Father John Kemble. His dismembered body lies in the churchyard at Welsh Newton, about three miles away (where an annual pilgrimage took place and at which Dom Bede preached in 1909). Father Kemble was born in 1599 at Rhydyar Farm, in the parish of St.Weonard's and was ordained a priest in 1625. The shires of Hereford and Monmouth had clung tenaciously to their Catholic faith and significant nobles, such as the Marquis of Worcester, at Raglan Castle, and most of the landowning gentry -such as the Vaughans, Blounts, Wigmores, Pritchards, Bodenhams, Moningtons and Berringtons - gave shelter and succur to clandestine priests.

In 1610 John Kemble's friend and spiritual father, Roger Cadwallader, was martyred at Leominster, when John was just eleven. On returning to Pembridge, where he lived with his nephew, he must have had a clear understanding of the dangers which would lie in store for him. When Dom Bede visited the Castle it had been converted into a farmer's home but he said that "the pilgrim was kindly welcomed... though they do not share his faith, are proud of Father Kemble and anxious to tell all they know of him." An old seat, known as "Father Kemble's seat", was the usual resting place of this septuagenarian, who was seventy nine when he was arrested and dragged off to prison. At the top of the house is the old chapel, and the altar which was used here is today preserved at the Catholic Church at Monmouth.

Several Jesuits - including the martyr, St.David Lewis SJ - stayed nearby at Raglan Castle, where they founded a school. Raglan was the last castle to hold out for Charles I and when it fell some forty priests were found within its walls. .

In 1678 Father Kemble was arrested. In April of the following year, the House of Lords ordered that he be brought to London. He suffered terribly during this period before being sent back to Hereford. Here, he was sentenced to a barbaric death, and was strapped to a hurdle and dragged out to the public race course called Wigmarsh, or Widemarsh Common, just outside the city. The old man's last utterance was: "I die only for professing the old Roman Catholic Religion which was the Religion that first made this kingdom Christian; and whoever intends to be saved must die in that religion...I do heartily forgive all those that have been instrumental in my death." To the hangman he said this: "Honest Anthony, my friend Anthony, be not afraid; do thy office; I forgive thee with all my heart. Thou wilt do me a greater kindness than discourtesy." His last words were those of Jesus: "In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum."

Baddesley Clinton In Warwickshire, Baddesley Clinton, the home of the Ferrers family, is another house of chapels and hiding places. The tenacious struggle of a clandestine faith is summed up in the legend inscribed over the door: "Transit gloria mundi: fides Catholica manet." The diary of Henry Ferrers (1549-33) is preserved in the Bodleian and it provides minute detail of the life of a typical Catholic country squire during the bleak days of persecution. A modern pilgrim enjoying the tranquillity of this idyllic setting should perhaps remember the subterranean passage under the moat in which six Jesuits, including John Southwell and John Gerard (virtually the whole of the young Jesuit community in England), hid for three days, knee-deep in water. This was an event of very great significance for English Catholicism. Had these men been caught at what had become the Jesuit headquarters, some historians including Professor Scarisbrick, believe that the Jesuit general would probably have withdrawn the Society from this country. The abandonment of the English mission would have had incalculable consequences.