Thomas Sherwood

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Blessed Thomas Sherwood (c. 1552–1579) was a Catholic layman and martyr.

[edit] Life

We know of a number of members of a London Catholic Sherwood family in the latter 16th and early 17th centuries, without being able to establish clear connections between them all. Thomas Sherwood was born in London of Catholic parents and began his adult life as a woollen draper, but decided to travel to the new English College at Douai, to study for the priesthood. He was present at Douai in 1576. He decided to return to London to settle his affairs and find money to support his further studies. In the city he was a visitor to the house of the Catholic Lady Tregonwell, where it seems that Mass was secretly offered. The woman's son by her first marriage, George Marten, a Protestant, resented this. Happening to see Sherwood in the street in Chancery Lane, he began to cry, "Stop the traitor". In this way he managed to have Thomas brought before a judge. Although there was no proof of any kind against him, he implicated himself by answering openly on the issue of the Queen's supremacy. Once he had been imprisoned in the Tower of London at the orders of the Privy Council, his lodgings were searched and a large sum of money, 20-30 pounds, which he had borrowed to help his sick father, was purloined. Racked with a view to extracting details of houses where Mass was celebrated, he kept silent. As a result he was then thrown into a dungeon to rot and attempts by St Thomas More's son-in-law, William Roper, to smuggle money to him were unsuccessful. He is said to have been a small man, witty and cheerful. His story then finished with a hasty trial, and the inevitable sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering, carried out at Tyburn on February 7 1578/9, when he was 27 years of age.

He was beatified "equipollently" by Pope Leo XIII, by means of a decree of December 29, 1886.

[edit] References

  • Anstruther, Godfrey, Seminary Priests, St Edmund's College, Ware, vol. 1, 1968, pp. 313-314.
  • Wainewright, John B., "Sir John Tregonwell's Second Wife", in Notes and Queries 11 S. VI (149), Nov. 2, 1912, pp. 347-348
This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913. , heavily reworked and supplemented.
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