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The Priest of the Plague — A Martyr's Story
Among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales — men and women who gave their lives for the Catholic faith during the brutal years of the Reformation and its aftermath — Saint Henry Morse stands out not for fame or scholarly brilliance, but for something quieter and perhaps more difficult: an almost superhuman willingness to keep going back. Arrested five times for the single crime of being a Catholic priest, he escaped or was released four of those times, and every single time he returned to England to continue his ministry. He contracted the plague three times while nursing the sick and survived each bout. And on the morning of his execution, he celebrated Mass one last time before being dragged through the streets to his death.
His is not a story of dramatic spectacle. It is a story of stubborn, relentless fidelity — and of a man who chose, again and again, to serve rather than to save himself.
Early Life and Protestant Upbringing
Henry Morse was born in 1595 at his grandmother's house in Brome, a small village in Suffolk, near the Norfolk border. He was baptised into the Church of England and raised in a Protestant household. His father, Robert Morse, was a minor landowner in the area.
At the age of sixteen, Henry left home to study law, first attending Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and then continuing at one of London's Inns of Court. It was during these years of study and intellectual formation that something began to shift inside him. He grew increasingly dissatisfied with the established religion and found himself drawn more and more toward the teachings of the Catholic Church. The exact details of what prompted this interior movement are not fully recorded, but what we do know is that his older brother, William, had already converted to Catholicism the year before and was studying for the priesthood at the English College in Douai, in Flanders.
When their father died in 1614, Henry made the decision to cross the English Channel and join his brother at Douai. It was there, at the English College, that he was formally received into the Catholic Church on June 5, 1614. He was nineteen years old.
First Arrest: The Price of Conversion
Shortly after his conversion, Henry planned to return to England to settle some financial matters before entering the seminary that autumn. The moment he arrived back on English soil, he was stopped by port authorities and asked to take the Oath of Allegiance — a legal requirement that acknowledged the King's supremacy in all religious matters, effectively denying the authority of the Pope.
Morse refused.
It was a clear-eyed choice. He had just embraced the Catholic faith, and he was not about to deny its foundations within days of receiving it. The authorities arrested him and confined him to Southwark gaol. He remained imprisoned for four years.
His release came in 1618, not through any legal victory, but because King James I ordered a general amnesty and banishment of roughly one hundred Catholic priests and dissenters — a political move tied to diplomatic negotiations regarding a possible Spanish marriage for his son, Prince Charles. Morse was among those released and exiled to France.
Seminary, Ordination, and the Call to the Jesuits
After his release, Morse made his way back to Douai, but the English College there had too many students to accommodate him, so he was sent on to the English College in Rome. It was in Rome that he studied theology and was ordained a priest in 1623.
Before leaving Rome, Morse visited the Superior General of the Society of Jesus and requested to be admitted into the Jesuit order. The General agreed, and arranged for Morse to be formally accepted upon his return to England. He left Rome for the English Mission on June 19, 1624.
Second Arrest: A Novitiate Behind Bars
Morse had barely arrived in England and begun his work assisting the Jesuits in the Newcastle-upon-Tyne area when disaster struck. He was arrested for the second time and imprisoned — first in Newcastle gaol, then transferred to York Castle.
He had not yet completed the novitiate required of those entering the Society of Jesus. But Providence, as it so often does, provided a way.
In York Castle, Morse found himself sharing his imprisonment with another Jesuit priest: Father John Robinson, a classmate from Rome. Under Father Robinson's direction, Morse carried out his novitiate from behind prison walls. The three years he spent in York Castle thus became, in a deeply unexpected way, his formation as a Jesuit. When he was finally released — as part of another general amnesty — he emerged having made his simple vows as a member of the Society of Jesus.
He was then formally banished from England.
Chaplaincy in the Low Countries
After his banishment, Morse spent several years on the continent, serving as a chaplain to the English and Irish soldiers fighting in the armies of the King of Spain in the Low Countries (present-day Belgium and the Netherlands). He also served for a time as an assistant to the novice master.
But England remained on his heart. He longed to return to the mission, to minister to the Catholics who had no priests, no sacraments, and no one to care for them.
In 1633, his health broke down. His superiors sent him back to England — this time to replace Father Andrew White, who had accompanied the first Catholic settlers to southern Maryland in the New World. Morse took a false name — "Cuthbert Claxton" — and began his clandestine ministry in London, working in the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, a poor district on the outskirts of the city.
The Plague: "The Priest of the Plague"
What happened next is the heart of Henry Morse's story — and the reason he earned the title by which he is best remembered.
In 1635, plague arrived in London, carried on boats from Flanders. By 1636, it had become a devastating epidemic, ravaging the city and its suburbs. The authorities sealed London, preventing residents from fleeing to the countryside. The poor suffered most terribly. Catholic families, already denied most forms of state relief due to the penal laws, were left in an especially desperate situation.
The leaders of the Catholic community in London — the Provincial of the Jesuits and the head of the secular clergy — each chose one priest to take responsibility for visiting and ministering to the plague-stricken. The Jesuit Provincial chose Henry Morse. The secular clergy chose Father John Southworth, another martyr whose story is deeply intertwined with Morse's.
Together, the two priests threw themselves into the work. They visited the homes of Catholics and Protestants alike — the sick, the dying, the terrified, and the destitute. Morse heard confessions, brought the Blessed Sacrament as viaticum to the dying, secured medicine for the sick, dressed their wounds and sores, and prepared the dead for burial. He compiled a list of roughly four hundred infected families and visited them regularly.
The work was not only spiritually demanding — it was physically dangerous in the extreme. Morse himself contracted the plague, and not once but multiple times. Each time, he recovered — something his contemporaries regarded as miraculous, given the mortality rate of the disease. At one point, when he fell seriously ill a second time, his Jesuit superior ordered him to stop his ministry among the plague victims. But the moment Morse finished reading that letter, he felt an immediate and unexplained improvement in his condition — enough to resume his work.
Catholic doctors, including Dr. Thomas Turner and another physician known as Dr. More, assisted Morse in his rounds. Medicine was, in fact, one of the very few professions Catholics were still legally permitted to practice in England at the time.
The effect of Morse's ministry was profound. His selfless care for the sick — regardless of their religion — moved many people deeply. It is reported that around ninety Protestant families were received into the Catholic Church during this period, and some accounts suggest that over one hundred people converted to the faith in less than a year, largely through the witness of Morse and Southworth's ministry.
Meanwhile, Puritan preachers were actively blaming the plague on Catholic "idolatry," stoking anti-Catholic sentiment among the frightened and grieving population. Morse continued his visits in the face of this hostility without hesitation.
Third Arrest and the Mercy of a Queen
Morse's ministry did not go unnoticed by the authorities either. On February 27, 1636, he was arrested for the third time — recognized by a priest-hunter — and imprisoned in the notorious Newgate Prison.
On April 22, he was brought to trial. The charges against him were that he was a priest and that he had "perverted" several hundred of the King's Protestant subjects. Morse defended himself ably at trial. He was convicted of being a priest but acquitted of the charge of pervading conversions. Nevertheless, no formal sentence was passed.
His release came on June 17, through the intervention of Queen Henrietta Marie — the Catholic wife of King Charles I. The Queen appealed on Morse's behalf, citing his extraordinary service to plague victims, Catholics and Protestants alike. It was a rare moment of mercy in an era defined by persecution.
Return to the Continent and Back Again
After his release, Morse briefly resumed pastoral work in London, but it quickly became clear that he could no longer move about safely. He returned to the continent and once again served as chaplain to the English soldiers in the Low Countries.
In 1641, when King Charles I was forced to decree the exile of all Catholic priests from England, Morse — unwilling to place his bail bondsmen in legal jeopardy — complied and left the country voluntarily.
But in 1643, his Jesuit superiors assigned him back to England — this time to northern England, in Cumberland, where he was less well known. The strategy worked for eighteen months. Morse ministered quietly and without incident, tending to the scattered Catholics of the region.
The Fourth Arrest, a Miraculous Escape, and the Fifth
Late one night, Morse accidentally walked into a group of soldiers. They suspected him of being a priest — a man traveling alone after dark was grounds for suspicion in those times — and arrested him, holding him overnight in the home of a local official.
But the official's wife was Catholic. Under cover of darkness, she helped Morse escape.
He enjoyed six weeks of freedom. Then, one day, he and his guide became lost in the countryside and innocently knocked on the door of a nearby house to ask for directions. The man who answered the door was one of the very soldiers who had arrested him weeks before — and he recognized Morse immediately.
There would be no fifth escape.
Trial, Imprisonment, and the Final Days
Morse was transferred from local jails to London's Newgate Prison in January 1645 and brought to trial at the Old Bailey. The charge was straightforward and devastating under the law: his very presence in England, having previously been banished, was itself proof of high treason. He was found guilty and condemned to death.
During the four days between his sentencing and his execution, Morse received a steady stream of visitors in his cell. Many came seeking his prayers or asking for a keepsake — a relic of a man they already regarded as a saint. Among his visitors were ambassadors from Catholic nations — France, Spain, Portugal, and the Flemish Count of Egmont — who came to show their solidarity with the persecuted Catholics of England and to honor a man they recognized as a martyr.
The Martyrdom: February 1, 1645
At four o'clock in the morning on February 1, 1645, Henry Morse celebrated his final Mass in Newgate Prison. He bid farewell to his fellow prisoners with calm and warmth.
At nine o'clock, he was dragged on a hurdle through the streets of London to Tyburn — the notorious place of public execution on the outskirts of the city. A vast crowd had gathered to witness the execution. The French Ambassador attended with his full entourage, as did the Count of Egmont and the Portuguese Ambassador — a rare show of diplomatic presence at an execution, and a powerful statement about the significance of what was happening.
Morse was placed on a cart beneath the gallows. As the noose was placed around his neck, he was permitted — as was customary — to make a final statement to the crowd. He addressed the assembled thousands:
"I am come hither to die for my religion… I have a secret which highly concerns His Majesty and Parliament to know."
In one of the most moving details of his martyrdom, as he stood on the cart with the noose around his neck, Morse struck his breast three times — a prearranged signal to a priest he knew was somewhere in the crowd, asking for a final absolution before his death.
The cart was pulled away. Morse was allowed to hang until he was dead.
After his death, his body was subjected to the brutal punishment reserved for those convicted of high treason: he was cut open, his heart removed and his entrails burned. His head was displayed on London Bridge, and the four sections of his quartered body were mounted on the four gates of the city.
The footmen of the French Ambassador and of the Count of Egmont dipped their handkerchiefs into Morse's blood — preserving relics of a martyr.
An eyewitness, Ambrose Corby, recorded what he saw: in the presence of an almost infinite multitude looking on in silence and in deep emotion, died Father Henry Morse — a saviour of life unto life, upright, sincere, and constant. Corby added, simply: "May my end be like his."
Beatification and Canonization
The heroism of Henry Morse was not forgotten, but it took centuries for the Church to formally recognize it.
On December 15, 1929, Pope Pius XI beatified Henry Morse as part of a group of English martyrs.
Then, on October 25, 1970, Pope Paul VI canonized him — along with the other Forty Martyrs of England and Wales — in a ceremony at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Of these forty saints, ten were Jesuits, and Henry Morse was among them.
Legacy
In 2012, a Catholic church dedicated to Saint Henry Morse was built on Shelfanger Road in Diss, Norfolk — near the county where he was born — replacing the older church of the Most Holy Trinity.
His story carries a particular resonance in our own time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the London Jesuit community chose Henry Morse as their patron — a fitting choice, given that their own men were engaged in work not unlike his during the plague of 1636.
But beyond any single moment of crisis, Saint Henry Morse's life offers something enduring for every Catholic: a witness to what it looks like to keep the faith not through grand gestures, but through the quiet, stubborn decision to keep serving — no matter how many times the world tries to stop you.
A Prayer for the Intercession of Saint Henry Morse
Lord God, through the intercession of Saint Henry Morse, grant us the courage to remain faithful in times of suffering. When we are tempted to abandon our calling out of fear, remind us of this martyr who returned again and again to serve your people — even at the cost of his life. Strengthened by his example, may we love you and one another with the same steadfast devotion. Amen.
Saint Henry Morse, S.J. — pray for us.
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