The Seed of the Church: Tyburn & London

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Tyburn and all London's Martyrs of Christian Disunity

  Anne Askew, a Protestant woman, is burned at Smithfield, 16 July 1546 The site of the Tyburn executions today, where the Edgware Road meets Bayswater Road at Marble Arch The Tyburn Tree, the three-sided gallows erected in 1571. Dr John Storey, a Catholic member of Parliament who had escaped to the Low Countries, was kidnapped in Bergen op Zoom and became its first victim on 1 June 1571

  St Ralph Sherwin, a priest of the Society of Jesus, hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, 1 December 1581 The monument in Stratford commemorating especially the Protestant lay people who were burned nearby under Queen Mary on 27 June 1576 Father Henry Morse, a former Anglican who became a priest of the Society of Jesus, hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, 1 February 1645 under the Commonwealth St Robert Southwell, a priest of the Society of Jesus, hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, 21 February 1595. John Cardmaker, a former Franciscan priest, and John Warne, an upholsterer and Sacramentary protestant, burned at the stake at Smithfield, 30 May 1555 Richard Reynolds, Bridgettine monk of Syon Abbey, hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, 4 May 1535

On Saturday 27 May 2006, an Ecumenical Commemoration of all London's martyrs from the Church's divisions, Catholic and Reformation, took place at Tyburn Convent not far from Marble Arch in London.

Tyburn Convent is the national shrine to commemorate the Roman Catholic martyrs who lost their lives for their faith in the 16th and 17th centuries. It is situated on Hyde Park Place, a few hundred yards from the junction of Edgware Road and Bayswater Road, which was a principal place of execution for Middlesex, especially of those who had been held at Newgate Prison.

In a generous move, the community of Benedictine nuns who maintain a vigil at the shrine daily invited fellow Christians of all traditions to join with them in recalling the fortitude and life's offering of the Cathoilc martyrs. as they likewise commemorated the Anglicans, Reformers and other Protestants who had died for the sake of their beliefs in Christ during the same troubled period of the Christian Church's in English history.

The service took place in Ascensiontide, a traditional season of praying for unity. Its aim was the purification and healing of memory held in each of the Church traditions represented, to thank God for the faithfulness of Christians in the past, to praise God for uniting all those who had gone to a martyr's death with the Passion of his own Son, and to pray that in the power of the Cross of Christ, their witness and devotion wholly to Christ will bear witness in the visible unity of Christians.

Follow these links to see more details.