Bartholomew Roe

(VENERABLE ALBAN).

English Benedictine martyr, b. in Suffolk, 1583; executed at Tyburn, 21 Jan., 1641. Educated in Suffolk and at Cambridge; he became converted through a visit to a Catholic prisoner at St. Albans which unsettled his religious views. He was admitted as a convictor into the English College at Douai, entered the English Benedictine monastery at Dieulward where he was professed in 1612, and, after ordination, went to the mission in 1615. From 1618 to 1623 he was imprisoned in the New Prison, Maiden Lane, whence he was banished and went to the English Benedictine house at Douai but returned to England after four months. He was again arrested in 1625, and was imprisoned for two months at St. Albans, then in the Fleet whence he was frequently liberated on parole, and finally in Newgate. He was condemned a few days before his execution under the statute 27 Eliz. e. 2, for being a priest. With him suffered Thomas Greene, aged eighty, who on the mission had taken the name of Reynolds. He was probably descended from the Greenes of Great Milton, Oxfordshire, and the Reynoldses of Old Stratford, Warwickshire, and was ordained deacon at Reims in 1590, and priest at Seville. He had lived under sentence of death for fourteen years, and was executed without fresh trial. They were drawn on the same hurdle, where they heard each other's confessions, and were hanged simultaneously on the same gibbet amidst great demonstrations of popular sympathy.