Alexander Rawlins

Blessed Alexander Rawlins (c.1550 - 7 April 1595) was an English Roman Catholic martyr, beatified in 1929.

Life

While Richard Challoner says that Rawlins was born somewhere on the border between Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, Rawlins states to the examiners that he was born a Catholic in the city of Oxford. He went to school in Winchester before continuing his studies at Hart Hall at Oxford. He then went to London where he apprenticed himself to an apothecary.[1]

In June 1586, he was arrested with Swithun Wells, a known Catholic sympathizer, and seminarian Christopher Dryland and imprisoned in Newgate. After imprisonment, he decided to travel overseas. Sailing from Southampton he landed at Saint-Malo and proceeded to Picardy. He travelled widely, mostly on foot, going to Rome, and Paris before arriving at Reims, where he entered the college in December 1587 and was ordained a priest 18 March 1590. He arrived in England as a missioner in April 1590 with Edmund Gennings and Hugh Sewell.[2] His mother's maiden name was Yeale, and Rawlins sometimes went by the alias "Francis Yeale".

He was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1595, alongside Henry Walpole. The hangmen would have cut him down to be disemboweled alive, but they were stayed by a gentleman on horseback who made them wait until Rawlins was dead, and then lower the rope so his body should not fall.[3]

His feast is on 7 April.

References

  • Matthew Bunson, Margaret Bunson, Stephen Bunson (2003), Our Sunday Visitor's encyclopedia of saints, p. 65.

Notes

  1. ↑ "Some Papers of Blessed Alexander Rawlins", The Venerable, Vol. III, No.3, Exeter, Catholic Records Press, October 1937
  2. ↑ "Gennings, Edmund". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10516. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  3. ↑ Miola, Robert S., Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources, OUP Oxford, 2007, ISBN 9780199259854, p. 151



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