July 19 John Plessington

Thommy and John

Good morning
I love you

7-19-08, 1131, R., NC. I’ve decided to be here, work for D., wherever they may send me, but here looks like a good place to settle for the duration…. Our GSO apartment is now more storage and I’m very slowly making small boxes with labels/lists on the outside – for sons, niece, grandchildren: to be passed on. Some things of significant financial value – stuff; all things that get boxed have some personal and family value… ora pro nobis….


John Plessington
July 19 b. 1637 d. 1697 bl. 1929 c. 1970

[sources: Catholic online and ‘Spital Bouthton’s Litany of Death and Martyrdom, by Tony Cummings with photographs and additions by Steve Howe. – it is common to read several versions of a saint’s bio and there be the same sentences, paragraphs, even pages but no quotes – and using quotes just slows down the process… still, and but….

Canonized as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Any saint John with a d. date in the seventeenth century can easily be guessed to be the handiwork of our beloved British crown. My gut churns and my blood boils reflexively through my collective unconscious at the thought of England. Even the journey there with John and your mother was hard enough to swallow. And being there, not only was it foreign to everything in my being, there was something at the essence of my being that objected. An Irish and a Catholic reaction. Thought there are and were many Catholics who are loyal to the crown and their country for good reasons. And to the degree that we might find a buried heart at Wounded Knee, we Americans, Catholic and otherwise, have some basis for humiliation and sorrow and the greater need for forgiveness…. And maybe it’s uniquely American for us to publicly apologize for the sins of generations past. It does not [yet] seem to be in the nature of our British brethren to do the same….

John Plessington was born in Dimples, Lancashire. And his family, Catholics in a land viciously anti-Catholic [anti-Catholic seems a benign way to say it. Like saying the Nazis were anti-Semitic.], his family were royalist: and wealthy.

We pick up his story with his education pedigree – first his familial pedigree then his education lineage. Not only do they tell us about the person and his family, they shape the person and influence the potential. Catholic Schools-Portland 6th-8th public schools-Cheverus-Molloy-Shadowbrook-UA…. And where a person teaches speaks to who the person is and shapes who he becomes: UA-UAB-Tulane-Vanderbilt-WakeForest, sites of convenience…. Same as for you. Aborted catholic education after eighth grade; now Greensboro College and UNC-G [independently unloosened from the umbilical cord qua apron strings….????] Education is a forever process of increasing personal choice – having been planted in Catholic schools then uprooted and sent onto an anti-Catholic road, college is the beginning of the rest of your lives’ determining how you will be educated, what kind of educated person are you and will you become? The oasis of the college campus is an opportunity that is not likely to be ever provided again – four years to immerse in the minds, knowledge, wisdom, questions of our history, to shape and stimulate your questions and the way you pursue the answers, the answer, veritas splendor.

John Plessington was sent to Valladolid Spain and St Omer’s in France – not only to get a worldly education, a view of the world from a view not British nor Protestant but to get a Catholic education – which was not readily available in such a way in Protestant England. It is true, it is not unlikely necessary to leave one’s homeland [personal turf even] to get the proper education. An option for which you have received the tugma of opportunity.

The rest of John Plessington’s story, in a couple of lines, is well known to each of us. He was ordained, in Segovia [duh, not England!] and went home to minister and to teach. “He became a tutor at Puddington Hall near Chester until his arrest and martyrdom by hanging at Barrowshill, Boughton.” Hung, drawn and quartered, to be exact: a barbarous practice the English practiced with particular relish for centuries…. [and today they howl about abu grab?]

John Plessington is no biggie so the tertiary sources don’t give us much detail about his life. Chasing elaboration via the internet gets us a few secondary sources and hardly ever primary resources. In my skimming, I am hardly talented enough to surf, the net, the ‘Spital Boughton’s Litany of Death and Martyrdom’ provided a few tidbits and lots of local flavor – some of which I may have known once upon a time but came to me new when I read them today….

16th century England was not at all receptive to the penetration of their religious veil by Lutherans: a very Catholic England at the time. Bishop “George Cotes, only the second bishop of Chester, became a self appointed, vigorous defender of the established faith.” Truly, we are never self appointed to such a role. We are appointed prophet at baptism; it is each of our responsibility to defend the one true faith – and the established part is irrelevant, then as well as now.

“It came to [Bishop Cotes’] notice, in 1555, that a clergyman in Lancaster, one George Marsh, was preaching Luther's doctrine. Marsh, a 40-year-old widower with children, was summoned to Chester. There, in the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral, which was then used as the Consistory Court of the Diocese, he was charged with having ‘preached and openly published most heretically and blasphemously..... directly against Pope's authority and the Catholic Church of Rome.’ He was condemned to death and led through the streets of Chester on his way to Spital Boughton, reading his Bible. There, on Gallows Hill, he was burned at the stake, his immolation (by all accounts an inefficient and drawn-out affair) being officially witnessed by the Sheriff of Chester. He was buried in St Giles' Cemetery or, as the Official History of Chester more graphically puts it, ‘in it are deposited such of the ashes of the martyr, George Marsh, as could be collected’.” [Note. The ‘official history’ must have been written in the Protestent era. George Marsh was not a martyr but a heretical blasphemer! 

By the seventeenth century, the reformation had swept England; and turn about became fair play – and the English play with such viciousness…. In Chester, the crown’s encouragement to convict the Papists in their midst was more followed in the ignoring of the order. Until Titus Oats’ stirred up the masses with his story of the ‘Popish Plot’! And here’s one tidbit I learned today – Titus joined the Jesuits. But, the Jesuits soon turned him out as unsuitable for their order. That vein of inquiry would be worth a thesis I bet; especially since some might attribute this rejection as a source of the malfeasance, the maliciousness Oats promulgated.
Now to the luckless, but unrepentant clerics. When the spread of Lutheran protest was gaining momentum on the continent in the 16th century, and encroaching across the Channel, George Cotes, only the second Bishop of Chester, became a self-appointed, vigorous defender of the established faith. “In revenge [Oats] contacted influential Protestants in London and, with their aid, spread the rumour that the Jesuits were plotting to assassinate King Charles II. A nationwide panic ensued, followed by a pogrom against the Catholics.”

A pogrom against the Catholics – visions of Fiddler on the Roof? The Diaspora? The Holocaust? Pogrom, a Russian/Yiddish derivation – destruction of a town, e.g.; to slaughter, to inflict butchery….

In Chester, John Plessington was swept up in the ‘Popish Plot’. He was convicted of High Treason because he was a Catholic Priest, ordained under the auspices of the Pope’s bishops…. From the gallows, in his last word John Plessington defiantly declared: "But I know it will be said that a priest ordayned by authority derived from the See of Rome is, by the Law of the Nation, to die as a Traytor, but if that be so what must become of all the Clergymen of the Church of England, for the first Protestant Bishops had their Ordination from those of the Church of Rome, or not at all, as appears by their own writers so that Ordination comes derivatively from those now living." Logic was never meant to dissuade irrational beliefs – the irrationality being the antithesis to logic and a defense against it.

As an aside – as we are asked to meditate on Jesus’ suffering on the cross – let me suggest that you ponder the martyrdom John Plessington endured for our sakes, for the righteousness of our faith…. He “was hanged, drawn and quartered. (This most horrible and barbaric of punishments prevailed for hundreds of years in England for the most serious of crimes- most notably High Treason. It involved the unfortunate criminal being dragged around the town, and from there to the place of execution on a wooden sledge or pallet, being there hung for a short period, but cut down while still conscious, then having his private parts cut off and burned before his eyes, followed by his belly being slit open and his bowels similarly burned. Trouble was taken to ensure the victim remained conscious and observant throughout the process, which was witnessed by large crowds. Finally, he was beheaded and his torso roughly chopped into four pieces which, together with his head, would be publicly displayed- after being sprinkled with certain spices to prevent the birds pecking at it- in prominent positions around the town, such as upon the city gates- or even in different cities throughout the country).

George Marsh and John Plessington never met. However, the trajectories of their lives continued to shape the people of Chester. In 1898, Nessie Brown persuaded the City Council to erect a memorial to George Marsh on Gallows Hill. The furious entries by the Catholics – ya think there was passionate objection, vehement protests, to such an affront? “The base of the frontispiece states that George Marsh was buried a martyr, ‘who was burned for the truth's sake April 24th 1555.’ On the memorial itself is engraved, ‘I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and the testimony which they held.’

Ten years after John Plessington was canonized, “the memorial was temporarily taken down to allow for the adjacent road to be widened. During this interlude it was taken to stonemasons to be renovated, and the suggestion was made that Plessington's name should be appended to it, as both had been martyred on Gallows Hill for their respective faiths. The City Council gave its consent, as did Stephen Brown, nephew of the donor, Nessie Brown. Restored to its original site, the plinth now bears the inscription "John Plessington Catholic Priest, martyred here on 19th July 1679. Canonised Saint 25th October 1970."

There are not two truths. Is it possible, therefore, that each of these men are martyrs? And how are you building the edifice of your faith?

I love you
Dad