Richard Hill (martyr)

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Blessed Richard Hill (?-1590), Catholic priest and martyr.

He was born at a date unknown in Yorkshire. Very little is known of him except that like his fellow Yorkshiremen John Hogg and Richard Holiday, he arrived in the mid-1580s at the English College at Rheims to study for the priesthood, Holiday on September 6, 1584, Hill on May 15, 1587, and Hogg on October 15, 1587. The three were together ordained subdeacons at Soissons on March 18, 1589, by Bishop Jérôme Hennequin, deacons May 27 and priests September 23 at Laon by Bishop Valentine Douglas, O.S.B. They were all sent on the English mission on the following March 22, 1590, in the company of their fellow priest Edmund Duke but aroused suspicion by keeping together as a band and were arrested in County Durham soon after landing in the North of England. Given the 1585 Act making it a capital offence to be a Catholic priest in England the terrible sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering was inevitable. The trial was at Durham and the sentence was carried out there at Dryburne on May 27, 1590. With the priests were executed four common criminals felons, who declared that they, too, died Catholics. In the crowd were a good number of Catholics and reportedly when the priests' heads were as customary cut off and held up, only the officers and a Protestant minister or two would say "God save the Queen". It is also said that two Protestant spectators, Robert Maire and his wife Grace, were converted to the Catholic faith.

Richard Hill was declared Blessed (the last stage prior to sainthood) by Pope John Paul II on November 22, 1987.

[edit] Sources

• The most reliable compact source is Godfrey Anstruther, Seminary Priests, St Edmund's College, Ware, vol. 1, 1968, pp. 107, 167, 170, 172.
• "Ven. Richard Hill". Catholic Encyclopedia. (1913). New York: Robert Appleton Company. 

This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.