Archbishop Oliver Plunkett - Last Martyr of the Reformation

by Arthur Russell

Oliver Plunkett (Born 1625 – died July 1st 1681) is remembered as the last Catholic cleric to suffer martyrdom in England. At the time of his death by hanging in Tyburn, London, Oliver was Archbishop of Armagh and as such was a primary target for the notorious Titus Oates and his “Popish Plot” which had already led to many executions of innocents, as well as causing the “Mother of Parliaments” to pass the Test Act which required Catholics to deny fundamental tenets of their religion before they could sit in Parliament. (This Act was not repealed until 1829 when Daniel O’Connell was finally allowed to take the seat he had won in the Co Clare by-election. It was strenuously argued against by Plunkett at the time of its introduction).

 Oliver Plunkett was charged with  conspiring to facilitate a French invasion of England to effect regime change and the restoration of Catholicism as the realm’s state religion. Driven by the mischievous Titus Oates, the totally fabricated Popish Plot caused panic in the English Establishment of the day, as well as among the common people, who dreaded a repetition of the infamous Gunpowder Plot at the beginning of the century. After much blood letting and violence, the Oates story eventually lost its traction with King Charles II and many in the London Parliament; but not before it claimed the life of the Irish Archbishop who was completely innocent of the charges that were made against him.

In relation to Archbishop Plunkett’s execution; King Charles himself is reported to have said to Sir Arthur Capell, the Earl of Essex and former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland who was one of the moving forces behind the Archbishop’s arrest on foot of the alleged conspiracy, “His blood be upon your head – you could have saved him but would not. I would save him, and dare not”.

 From this it is clear the Earl had not intended that the accusations and doubtful evidence he himself had caused to be presented to the Privy Council in London should lead to Oliver Plunkett’s death. The Earl’s real target was James Butler, the Marquis of Ormonde, a staunch supporter of Charles who had replaced him as Lord Lieutenant in Ireland after the Restoration and who had accorded a modicum of religious freedom to Ireland’s predominantly Catholic population. Oliver Plunkett was therefore an unwitting pawn and eventual victim in the larger game the Earl was playing, a game that took advantage of current religious discord to further his own agenda.

It proved to be an uncontrollable force, as due to fear of the hysteria which the Oates Popish Plot had generated among the general populace of London and England generally, neither earl or monarch were prepared to intervene to save the Archbishop who had been arrested in 1679 at the height of anti-Catholic hysteria, and who was sentenced to be executed by hanging, drawing and quartering in Tyburn on July 1st 1681 after a highly dubious trial.

It was a “Pontius Pilate moment” for the largely well-meaning but nervous Charles who, in the aftermath of his Restoration in 1660, was trying to create and promote a broader climate of religious tolerance throughout his kingdom which had been scarred by the upheavals of Civil War and the subsequent period of Puritanical intolerance that characterized the regime of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.

Who was Oliver Plunkett?

The Plunkett castle and church in Oldcastle, Co Meath, Ireland

Oliver Plunkett was a scion of the long established Plunkett family in Loughcrew, near Oldcastle in Co Meath, Ireland, and was related to many of the Norman-Irish families who were collectively known as Lords of the Pale. In common with many of these families, the Plunketts had remained loyal to Rome during the Reformation of the 16th century and supported the Confederation of Kilkenny which sought to defend the religious rights of both native Gaelic and Anglo Irish.

Their allegiance to the Royalist cause ultimately led to wholesale confiscation of many of their estates during the Cromwellian settlement of the 1650’s, many of which were not overturned as promised when Charles II assumed the throne in 1660.

By that time, Oliver was a student in Rome and was a highly regarded academic in the Irish College where he was ordained in 1654 and appointed Professor of Theology in 1657. From Rome, he successfully pleaded the case for the Irish Catholic Church with the newly established court of King Charles II after the Stuart monarch was invited back to London and was instrumental in winning a degree of freedom for Catholic religious practice in Ireland.

 He was appointed Archbishop of Armagh in 1669 and set foot on Irish soil, after more than 20 years of exile, in March 1670. The homeland to which he returned contrasted sharply with the Ireland he had left twenty three years earlier in 1647. He had been advised on travelling to Ireland from Belgium not to travel as a cleric, which explained why a martial looking Captain William Browne (an assumed name) disembarked in the port of Dublin to take up his clerical mission. The Plunkett family home at Loughcrew was now occupied by the Naper family. Many of their neighbours were also gone, banished “to Hell or to Connaught” by the victorious Cromwellians as they went about “cleansing” huge swathes of lands in the East, Midlands and South of the island of Royalists and (hopefully) the Catholic religion.

In the aftermath of revolution and civil war, the population of Ireland was estimated to have fallen to well under 1 million. As part of the Cromwellian settlement, thousands of “disaffected” persons were killed. Thousands died of starvation and disease due to the disruption caused by the long war. Thousands more were deported to the West Indies as slave labourers to work the colonies’ sugar cane plantations. The so-called “curse of Cromwell” was a harsh reality of life for many during those difficult years.

  Plunkett’s Irish Mission

In the relatively benign religious climate that existed during the early years of Restoration arising from the Declaration of Breda in 1660, Archbishop Plunkett was able to travel widely to service the needs of his Irish congregation and to put some badly needed church reforms in place for the church arising from three decades of war and disruption. Some of his reforms of local clergy resulted in his making some enemies among those he sought to reform, a fact that worked against him later.

One of his first actions as Archbishop was to establish a Jesuit college in Drogheda in 1670 which lasted just five years before it was closed due to a new rising tide of religious intolerance. The school was remarkable in that in 1671, out of one hundred fifty students, forty were Protestant which meant that it was the first integrated school in Ireland.

As the tide of religious intolerance increased during the 1670’s, the Earl of Essex directed the Council of Ireland to pass a series of anti-Catholic laws including one ordering all priests and bishops to leave the country or risk arrest and possible execution for the crime of treason.

Plunkett refused to abandon his congregation. He went on the run and continued servicing them under the most difficult circumstances during the following years. He travelled everywhere as a layman and had to rely for food as well as shelter from cold and rain wherever he could find it. He had a price on his head, so life was precarious.

Arrest and Trial:

He was finally arrested in December 1679 and spent 6 weeks in Dublin Castle.

At his first trial in Dundalk he was charged with conspiring to bring a huge French invasion force to Ireland as well as raising a levy on his congregation to finance a local anti-Government militia, but it proved impossible for the prosecution to find credible evidence or witnesses. (The Marquis of Ormonde said of them “silly drunken vagabonds... whom no schoolboy would trust to rob an orchard").

Arising from this, the powers that be found it necessary to send the Archbishop to England where he was lodged in Newgate prison to await trial. He languished here for six long months before he was brought in front of a grand jury in Westminster Hall.

The first trial on English soil found no case against him, but he was not released.

The second trial has generally been regarded as a gross miscarriage of justice. Plunkett was denied defending counsel, though one Hugh O’Reilly from Cavan, at some risk to himself, travelled to England to provide him with legal advice. The prisoner was not allowed enough time to assemble defense witnesses and was frustrated in his attempts to obtain evidence to rebut witness being given against him. A servant, James McKenna, and a relative, John Plunkett, travelled back to Ireland but were not allowed time to assemble witnesses or evidence for the defence.

During the trial, the Archbishop strenuously disputed the right of the court to try him in England and drew attention to the criminal past of some of the prosecution witnesses.

It was all to no avail.

How History views the Trial

The following quotes attributed to Chief Justice Sir Francis Pemberton in course of the trial give indication of the determination of the court to find the prisoner guilty of treason:

"Look you, Mr. Plunkett, it is in vain for you to talk and make this discourse here now..." 

“Look you Mr Plunkett, don't mis-spend your own time; for the more you trifle in these things, the less time you will have for your defence". 

“You have done as much as you could to dishonour God in this case; for the bottom of your treason was your setting up your false religion, than which there is not any thing more displeasing to God, or more pernicious to mankind in the world.” 

At the end of the trial, the jury took all of fifteen minutes to return a guilty verdict, to which Plunkett is reported to have responded resignedly, “Deo Gratias”.

The French ambassador to England, Paul Barillon, conveyed a plea for mercy from King Louis XIV to King Charles, who decided not to intervene despite his reservations.

The Scottish clergyman and future Bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, who was at the trial, had no doubt of the Archbishop’s innocence of the charges brought against the Archbishop, considering him to be a “wise and sober man who had no aim but to live peacefully and tend to his congregation”.

Writing two centuries after the event; the commentator Lord Campbell stated that Chief Justice Pemberton’s handling of Oliver Plunkett’s trial was a “disgrace to himself and his country”.

Quite simply, there was never the slightest evidence that the Archbishop had ever conspired against the King, yet he was found guilty and was condemned to the cruelest death that could be prescribed under the law.

Execution at Tyburn

The following account of Oliver Plunkett’s trial and execution is taken from Bishop Burnet's, “History of his own Time, 1724”:

Execution Day at Tyburn July 1st 1681

Dr. Oliver Plunket was arraigned at the King's Bench, May 3, 1681, for "high treason, in endeavoring and compassing the king's" death, and to levy war in Ireland, and to alter the true religion there, and to introduce a foreign 'power.' 

The particulars of his trial, as well as his speech at the place of execution, may be found in the third volume of the State Trials, p. 294, Margrave's edit. Dr. Burnet gives us no very favorable idea of the equity of the proceedings against him.

'Some lewd Irish priests and others of that nation, hearing that England was at that time disposed to hearken to good swearers, thought themselves well qualified for the employment; so they came over to swear, that there was a great plot in Ireland, to bring over a French army, and to massacre all the English. The witnesses were brutal and profligate men, yet the earl of Shaftsbury cherished them much: they were examined by the parliament at Westminster and what they said was believed. Upon that encouragement it was reckoned, that we should have witnesses come over in whole companies. 

Lord Essex told me, that this Plunket was a wise and sober man, who was always in a different interest from the two Talbots; the one of these being the titular primate of Dublin, and the other came to be raised afterwards to be Duke of Tirconnell. These were meddling and factious men, whereas Plunket was for their living quietly, and in due submission to the government, without engaging into intrigues of state. Some of these priests had been censured by him for their lewdness: and they drew others to swear as they directed them. They had appeared the winter before, upon a bill offered to the grand jury: but as the foreman of the jury, who was a zealous Protestant, told me, they contradicted one another so evidently, that they would not find the bill. But now they laid their story better together and swore against Plunket, that he had got a great bank of money to be prepared, and that he had an army listed, and was in a correspondence with France, to bring over a fleet from thence. He had nothing to say in his own defense, but to deny all: so he was condemned; and suffered very decently, expressing himself in many particulars as became a bishop. He died denying every thing that had been sworn against him.

What Happened Oliver Plunkett’s Body and Head

The shrine containing Oliver's head in
St Peter's Church, Drogheda

After the execution, the Archbishop’s dismembered body was taken away by friends to a house near St Giles Church. His head and arms were placed in one box while the rest of the body was buried in the Churchyard beside the remains of five other Jesuit priests who had been recently executed arising from the Oates allegations.

“A copper plate placed on his breast, whereon was engraven these following words, set here down for the satisfaction of the curious: "In this tomb resteth the body of the right reverend Oliver Plunket, archbishop of Armagh, and primate of Ireland, who in hatred of religion was accused of false witnesses, and for the same condemned, and executed at Tyburn; his heart and bowels being taken out and cast into the fire: he suffered martyrdom with constancy, the 1st of July, 1681, in the reign of king, Charles II."

The remains of the Archbishop were exhumed in 1683 and moved to the Benedictine monastery at Lamspringe in Germany before being returned to Downside Abbey in England. His head was first brought to Rome, and from there to Armagh and eventually to Drogheda where, since 29 June 1921, it has been enshrined on an ornate altar in the parish Church of St Peter.

Saint Oliver Plunkett

Oliver Plunkett was beatified by the Catholic Church in June 1921 and was declared Saint in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican in May 1975. In 1997, he was made the patron Saint for Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland. Based on the evidence of his life’s work, this last is something he would truly appreciate.

 Related reading : 

“Making it Big Through Lies and Perfidy” by Anna Belfrage (EHFA Blog on Titus Oates and his Popish Plot for Feb 2014). 

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Arthur Russell is the Author of ‘Morgallion’, a novel set in medieval Ireland during the Invasion of Ireland (1314), by the Scottish army led by Edward deBruce, the last crowned King of Ireland. It tells the story of Cormac MacLochlainn, a young man from the Gaelic crannóg community of Moynagh and how he and his family endured and survived that turbulent period of history. ‘Morgallion’ has been recently awarded the indieBRAG Medallion and is available in paperback and e-book form. More information available on website - www.morgallion.com

Making it Big Through Lies and Perfidy

by Anna Belfrage

Many of us walk around hoping that eventually the bad guys will pay. Some, of course, expect things to be set aright after death, in the golden halls of heaven, where, as the song says, “you’ll get pie in the sky when you die” – assuming you’re good.

Sadly, being good has very little to do with material success in life. In fact, history is rife with examples of people who were anything but good and still ended up surfing through life on a silver platter. The subject of this post proves this case many times over, and I am hard put not to shudder in revulsion as I give you Titus Oates, perjurer and sodomiser, liar extraordinaire and renegade.

Titus - and I bet it's a wig

Let us start at the beginning: Titus was born around the time when Charles I was executed, and grew up in relatively affluent circumstances – affluent enough to accord him schooling. Not that Titus seemed to have excelled at school, but he managed to make it into the Anglican church after his studies at Cambridge and landed a living in Kent. Here Titus showed the first indications of his future notoriety, as he accused a schoolmaster for sodomy – a lie, and Titus was jailed for perjury but managed to escape.

Next time we hear of him, dear Titus had decided to make his fortune on the seas, and landed a position as a chaplain aboard a ship in the English navy - until he was accused of buggery (most apt, given the hapless schoolteacher), at the time a capital offense. Only Titus’ clergyman’s status saved him from a very early encounter with the noose. Unfortunately.

Anyway; the boat incident forced Titus to reinvent himself, and so he joined the household of a Catholic peer and converted to the Catholic Church. Not, one would think, a spur of the moment thing for an Anglican priest. Afterwards, Titus would insist he did this only to be able to infiltrate into the darker bowels of the Catholic Church. Or maybe he was just being his normal, self-seeking self. Whatever the case, Titus had no more success as a Catholic than as an Anglican, and ended up thrown out of the Jesuit college (you have to give him plus points for going all the way) he had enrolled in. Oh dear; now what was Titus to do?

Titus looking his best

In 1678, Titus was close to thirty and so far had not achieved anything noteworthy with his life. That was about to change, as Titus was soon to befoul the very air of London with a sinister pack of lies that would lead to harsh persecution of Catholics and spring him to immediate fame – plus permanently blacken his soul – well, whatever part of it that wasn’t already tarnished. Not only was he seriously unappealing on the inside, but his exterior left a lot to be wished for. As per Lady Antonia Fraser, contemporary descriptions make him sound more like a pig than a man (!). Add to this a grating voice and one wonders what the charismatic qualities were that had Titus duping his fellow country-men so completely.

Duke of York, Catholic & not so loved

It’s actually very easy. Titus’ contemporaries wanted to believe him. They salivated at his preposterous stories, they roared in anger as they set off on their papist-hunting sprees. That Titus was feeding them lies was irrelevant, and the more astute among the politicians, chief among them Shaftesbury, took the opportunity to advance anti-Catholic legislation, ultimately forcing the king to advise his brother, the openly Catholic Duke of York, to leave the country.

So what was it Titus said? Well, together with the fanatic but dense Tonge – an Anglican priest who seems to have believed everything Oates told him and saw potential Jesuit assassins behind every bush– and aided and abetted by a most unsavoury character called Bedloe, who gladly perjured himself right, left and centre by insisting he had “witnessed” what Titus quoted as being gospel truth, Titus presented a complicated “Popish Plot” which had as its intent to murder the king. The queen’s physician was accused as being party to it, as was the Duchess of York’s secretary, one Edward Coleman, and rather unfortunately Coleman’s correspondence did include some rather fanatic writings about the need to restore England to the “true faith”.  But from there to murder is a very long step, and the king was not convinced.

London at large, however, was more than happy to believe this convoluted pack of lies, and when Edmund Godfrey, a Protestant magistrate, was found dead, the anti-papists went wild. London seethed with anger, Catholics were beaten and hounded, their homes were subjected to searches for illegal weapons (few were found) and people were warned to be on their guard; there were evil Jesuits everywhere, lurking in the shadows, and there were nasty recusants hiding throughout the country, horrible Catholic people that wanted to overthrow the Anglican Church and reinstate the hegemony of the Pope in England. What can I say? A crowd gone wild is a hotbed of fevered imaginations – even more so when people in authority foment the flames of lunacy.

Catherine of Braganza - Catholic but loved

Whatever his other faults, Titus had an impeccable sense of timing. With the rabble baying for Papist blood, Titus now presented evidence – collected while he was working undercover in the Jesuit colleges (Duh!) – showing that five elderly Catholic peers were involved in the plot. And the Irish Archbishop. And the queen. Stop! What? The rabble was fond of their long-suffering queen, Catherine of Braganza – as was her husband. The king was incensed, hastening to his wife’s defence.  He interrogated Titus, caught him out on a number of lies and had him arrested. Parliament growled, threatened the king with a constitutional crisis, and forced Titus’ release.

One would have thought the more intelligent among the men in the Protestant faction would have steered well clear of a man as despicable as Titus. After all, surely some voice of reason would prevail, right? Nope. As the Earl of Shaftesbury is supposed to have said, “I will not say who started the game, but I am sure I had the full hunting of it.” (Yet another quite unlikeable man.)

Like Shaftesbury, the more ambitious among Charles II’s Protestant subjects simply used Titus for their own purposes, and so several innocent but prominent men were accused, tried and condemned to death based on the unsubstantiated ravings of Mr Titus Oates. Last to die was Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, who was executed on July 1 in 1681.

While all this was going on, Titus was lapping up the good life. He’d been given an apartment at Whitehall and an annual allowance of well over one thousand pounds per year – more than sufficient to live the life of a gentleman. He was presented with a coat of arms and there were whispers of an impending marriage with Shaftesbury’s daughter. Luckily for her, innocent creature that she was, that was never to be.

Plunkett’s trial and execution had sickened many people – the Archbishop was known to be a good and virtuous man, no matter his Catholic faith – and the popular sentiment began to turn. At last the voice of reason could be heard over the din of the excited rabble, and in a somewhat more sane state of mind, the powers that were took stock and decided to dismiss Titus Oates famous plot as misguided fabrications.

Titus getting his comeuppance

So in August of 1681, the wheel of fate did a squeaky turn-about, and Oates was thrown into prison and fined a hefty 100 000 pound fine for sedition. Things went from bad to worse for Oates in 1685, when the new king, James II, had him re-tried for perjury. Oates was sentenced to life imprisonment and to be whipped five days a year for the remainder of his life. After being pilloried for two days, he was brutally whipped through London for the following five. I suspect James had hoped Oates would die of this harsh treatment, but Oates was nothing if not resilient, clinging on to life with the stubbornness of a barnacle.

A couple of years later, James II was out on his ear – betrayed by his Protestant peers – and replaced by his eldest daughter and her Dutch husband. For some very strange reason, William of Orange and Mary decided to pardon Titus and grant him a pension for the rest of his life. How Mary could agree to reward a man who had consistently hounded her father, her uncle and her aunt is something of a mystery, but then Mary seems to have been a person torn asunder between her faith and loyalty to her husband, and her (one hopes) love for her deposed but devoted father. Whatever the case, Titus Oates was allowed to live out the remainder of his sorry life in comfort – most undeserved, if you ask me.

Titus' companions in the hereafter (one hopes)

Sadly, Titus Oates cannot be held up as warning example. If anything, the man’s life just proves that if you lie and fabricate, perjure yourself repeatedly and send innocent man to die with your fanciful accounts, chances are you’ll be rewarded – even richly rewarded. Personally, I hold out hope that things are set right in the afterlife, and so I don't think Titus is presently relaxing in the everlasting peace of heaven, munching contentedly on pie. No, Titus, I believe, is hanging in chains over one of hell’s pits of brimstone and fire, condemned to forever roast and scream. Am I sorry for him? Not much...

Anna Belfrage is the author The Graham Saga, so far consisting of A Rip in the Veil , Like Chaff in the Wind, The Prodigal Son and  A Newfound Land.  The next instalment in the acclaimed series, Serpents in the Garden is due for release March 1 and to some extent takes place in Titus Oates’ London.

Set in seventeenth century Scotland and Virginia/Maryland, The Graham Saga tell the story of Matthew and Alex, two people who should never have met – not when she was born three hundred years after him.

Of hands, heads and other bits and pieces

by Anna Belfrage

It is said that when Francisco Franco lay dying back in 1975, he had the desiccated hand of St Teresa right beside him on his pillow. No doubt the dying dictator was hoping Spain’s patron saint would guide him all the way to heaven – personally I have serious doubts as to whether he qualifies.

Franco was by his own reckoning a most devout person, motivated not only by power but also by a need to defend the Catholic church when he took up arms against the Spanish Republic. As an aside, the Republic did go overboard on several occasions vis-à-vis the religious organisations, but that is totally unrelated to this post – as is Franco, apart from him clutching St Teresa’s hand when he died.

This post, you see, is about the hands, the finger joints, the bits and pieces of various saints and martyrs that have travelled the world, carried from one dusty monastery to the other in the hope of bringing with them some part of the saintliness that imbued their original owner.

The reliquary containing St Teresa's hand

In the case of St Teresa, this remarkable woman was an anomaly. First of all, she was of Jewish descent. Her father was a converso and had been forced to wear the sambenito robes at every church in Toledo for seven consecutive Fridays while being pelted with refuse and verbally abused for being a doubtful Christian – and there are A LOT of churches in Toledo. Secondly, she was a woman, at a time when the religious authorities were very negatively inclined to women who attempted to study and interpret scripture or even worse, claim to have spiritual visitations from Christ. Thirdly, while Teresa was a nun, she was also a very attractive nun, a woman who didn’t think twice about utilising her feminine wiles to get what she wanted.

And still, despite these obvious drawbacks – I mean, a woman saying she was talking to God? Come on! After all, Spain had San Juan de la Cruz doing the chatting with Jesus, and the country didn’t need one more direct line to God, did it? – Teresa was recognised already in her own lifetime as being something very, very special. She levitated, she was overcome by visions, and she wrote inspired books about all these her experiences, books that were viewed with much suspicion by the Inquisition – so much, in fact, that Teresa herself was hauled before the Inquisition two years before her death.

Whatever the case, Teresa was obviously destined for great things after death, and no sooner had the poor woman expired, but people began squabbling over her remains. The nunnery where she died hastily buried the body, hoping to keep it. Down came Teresa’s confessor, ordered the grave opened, marvelled at her un-decayed flesh and… sliced off her left hand! (The one adorning Franco’s pillow, four centuries or so later)

The body was taken to Ávila, it was disinterred several times more as various parties squabbled over her final resting place, and at every such disinterment poor Teresa lost a part of her fantastically preserved remains. An arm ended up at the convent where she died, her jawbone and her right foot reside in Rome, part of her cheek is in Madrid, her heart is carefully preserved in a reliquary in Alba. There is a finger with a ring on it in Ávila, and other bodily parts now live in Brussels, México and Paris. Poor woman: come Resurrection, she will have a hard time collecting all her bits and pieces.

This is where it all becomes quite interesting. As per the Christian faith, the dead will rise again upon the Day of Resurrection; they will stand up intact from their graves and be returned to some sort of life. (Nowadays, Christian faiths don’t worry overmuch about an intact body – cremation is an accepted practise – but they definitely did back then!) I assume this only goes for the good ones, the ones deserving to live forever in Paradise, and reasonably this should include all the saints. Unfortunately, all the saints will have problems similar to St Teresa’s, namely that they won’t be able to locate all their parts – or even worse, they will locate too many parts.

Take Swithin of Winchester, for example. Now, this is a somewhat odd saint, as nothing really noteworthy was written about him until a century or so after his death, when he was chosen as patron saint of the new cathedral in Winchester. This brought about quite the Swithin revival, and suddenly this rather insignificant man was credited with miracles, with wisdom – and with saintliness. His bones were moved out of his original tomb to the new basilica, and people came from afar to pray at his tomb.

So far, Swithin had remained whole. His bodily remains were still rattling around in the same coffin, but this state of affairs was not to last. His head was sent off to Canterbury, an arm went to Peterborough, and bit by bit the poor man’s bones went on a reluctant walkabout.

Any church worth its name wanted a relic, something to entice the faithful to come and visit. In some cases, people went to great lengths to acquire such relics, like St Hugh of Lincoln, who reputedly bit off a piece of St Mary of Magdalene’s arm while visiting a convent in France. Sounds a bit too gruesome to be true, but undoubtedly this fascination with relics led to a rather brisk trade in them – and most of the finger bones, embalmed hearts, fragments of the True Cross, were forgeries.

In some cases, potential saints had their bodily parts separated from the rest of their bodies prior to death – or upon being executed. (After all, by severing someone’s head and hanging it on a pole for some years before dropping it to sink in the Thames, the authorities were symbolically ensuring that person would never make it through the Resurrection – denying the unfortunate the possibility of eternal life.)

Such a saint is St Oliver Plunkett, the last person to die as a Catholic martyr in England. Oliver Plunkett was the Archbishop of Armagh, an Irish Catholic who had the misfortune of being a contemporary with the extremely anti-Catholic fanatics that dominated English political life in the 1670’s.

England was unhappy with its Catholic queen, with its royal Catholic heir, James, Duke of York. Charles II’s brother had probably converted to Catholicism as early as 1669, but this change of faith only became public when the Test Act was introduced in 1673, whereupon any person wishing to hold office had to condemn certain practices within the Catholic Church as superstitious and idolatry. James refused, thereby making it known to all and sundry that he was no longer of the “right” faith.

To further add fuel to this infected fire, along came Titus Oates, a slimy character gifted with a very vivid imagination and a glib tongue. He “revealed” the infamous Popish plot whereby even the queen was accused of intending to murder her husband. It was all lies, but the lies were craftily constructed, and the people – Parliament especially – wanted to believe the Catholics were up to no good, and as a consequence more than twenty people lost their lives before Oates was revealed as being a perjurer.

As part of this Popish plot, Plunkett was accused of conspiring with the French, aiming to invade England. There was not a shred of evidence supporting this, but Plunkett was brought to England, placed on trial and convicted of treason – despite “everyone” knowing that he was innocent of anything but being Catholic.

He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in 1681, originally buried in two (?) tin boxes, but his remains were exhumed in 1683 and his head was sent off to Rome, most of his body was buried in England while bits and pieces ended up in France, the Americas, Germany and Australia. The head has since then been returned to Ireland, and is now displayed in St Peter’s Church, Drogheda. Just like St Teresa, poor Oliver will have to do quite some globetrotting to find himself…

Nowadays, the Vatican takes a negative stance on relics – and especially on the trade in relics. For those wannabe saints that are presently living out their lives amongst us, all those who work so hard at being good, at being charitable and doing good deeds, this means that they need not worry that they will be chopped up after death.

No, modern day saints will be buried whole, they will remain in the ground whole, and whatever shrines are built in their names will instead include real time footage of miracles and speeches, no doubt available for download if you have the right app. Sadly, I think the biggest problem in this world of ours is that there are too few of us who aspire to saintliness. After all, being good to others is so “last year” in a society that more and more embraces the simplified cult of “ME”.

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Anna Belfrage is the author of three published books, A Rip in the Veil , Like Chaff in the Wind and The Prodigal Son. The fourth book in The Graham Saga, A Newfound Land, will be published in the autumn of 2013. Set in seventeenth century Scotland and Virginia, the books tell the story of Matthew and Alex, two people who should never have met – not when she was born three hundred years after him.