Saint Anne Line Film

Saint Anne Line, Elizabethan Catholic Martyr, Reformation, Catholic recusant, safe-house, Joh Gerard Jesuits:
A reminder that there is now a great new film out telling the inspiring and important life of one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, Saint Anne Line. She is one of the three women out of the forty to be canonised.  The film is available through AMAZON and our online shop:
www.marysdowryproductions.org/shop/

English Martyrs Key Words:

Old Bailey, Saint Anne Line, Saint Edmund Campion, Ten Reasons, recusants, hurdle, rack, Popish plot, Society of Jesus, English Mission, Catholic Martyrs, Tyborn, Bridewell, Dissolution of the Monasteries, London bridge, Scavenger’s Daughter, Judas Chair, Act of Supremacy, Act of Succession, execution, Jesuits, birettas, Treason, Plots, noose, the Gunpowder Plot, the counter-reformation, Catholic England, hanged, drawn and quartered, priest at the gallows, medieval torture, The English Reformation, Catholics until the Emancipation, English Martyrs, the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, Protestant Reformation, thumbscrews, martyrdom, Bell Tower, Eucharist, Catholic Sacraments, hangman, priest holes, safe houses, John Gerard, Medieval taverns, secret Mass, relics, medieval prison, Little Ease, Beast Market, stocks, beheading, Parliament, Queen Elizabeth I, manacles, Faith, fleas, rats, Topcliffe, ravens, chopping block, beheading axe, vestments, hidden room, Samuel Pepys, the plague, Henry Morse, city gates, castle walls, 40 Martyrs, traitor’s gate, persecution, Tudor Monarchy, Douai, Rheims, heroic sacrifice, Queen Elizabeth I, Cranmer, Book of Common Prayer, cauldron, pikes, betrayal, priest hunters, heretics, priest catchers, Papal Bull, Statue 27 Elizabeth.The English Martyrs, the Tyburn Tree, Tyburn gallows, Tower of London, recusant Catholic, Marian priests, Henry VIII, trial, Westminster, fines, rosary, devotional candles, St. Margaret Clitherow

The notorious Richard Topcliffe - Queen Elizabeth's 'interrogator'

Richard Topcliffe features in many of our short biogrpahical films about several Elizabethan Martyrs including:

St. Swithun Wells
St. Edmund Gennings
St. Polydore Plasden
each available on DVD through AMAZON UK and AMAZON COM and:
www.marysdowryproductions.org/shop/

In these films Queen Elizabeth's priest hunter and torturer, hater of Catholics who oversaw the executions of the above Martyrs, as well as many others is covered well.

There is a good write up about Topcliffe on Wikipedia:

Richard Topcliffe (14 November 1531 – 1604) was a landowner and Member of Parliament during the reign of Elizabeth I of England. He became notorious as a priest-hunter and torturer and was often referred to as the Queen's principal "interrogator".

Topcliffe entered the service of the Queen's secretary, William Cecil in the 1570s, and worked for Sir Francis Walsingham and the Privy Council. However, he regarded his authority as deriving directly from the Queen.

Topcliffe was a fanatical persecutor of Catholics and the Catholic Church, and was involved in the interrogation and torture of many priests and laity, at a time when all Catholics were accused of actively seeking to overthrow the ruling Anglican establishment of England in order to return England to Catholicism.

Topcliffe gained a reputation as a sadistic torturer who frequently played mind games with prisoners under interrogation. He claimed that his own instruments and methods were better than the official ones, and was authorized to create a torture chamber in his home in London. He also involved himself directly in the execution of sentences of death upon Catholic recusants, which involved hanging, drawing and quartering.

Topcliffe's victims included the Jesuits Robert Southwell, John Gerard, and Henry Garnet. Topcliffe features numerous times in Fr. Gerard's autobiography of his days as a hunted priest in Elizabethan England. In it he's described as, "old and hoary and a veteran in evil".

He also interrogated Ben Jonson in August 1597 in investigations into Jonson's suppressed play, The Isle of Dogs

Topcliffe arrested Polydore Plasden and Edmund Gennings during a secret Mass at St. Swithun Wells' house in Gray's Inn Lane. The day of their execution, Topcliffe rode first to the gallows especially errected outside Swithun's house, where he was so enraged by the 24 year old Fr. Edmund Gennings that he had the ladder turned quickly so that Gennings hung and then ordered the executioner to cut him down not a moment later so that when the executioner cut out Gennings' heart, Edmund was still alive. Swithun was cheerful as he stepped up to die for his faith and told Topcliffe to hurry up and that he should be ashamed to keep an old man waiting in his shirt in the cold. Topcliffe waited until he had seen Swithun hanged and then rode fast to Tyburn where Eustace White and Polydore were to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

Sir Walter Raleigh insisted that Polydore Plasden hang until he was dead before he was disembowelled, but Eustace suffered the same fate as Edmund Gennings and was alive when they disembowelled him.

These Martyrs dealt face to face with a great hater and persecutor of Catholicism in Elizabethan England and showed great courage and determination to the very end.

 

Individual biographical films on these Martyrs are now available through AMAZON and Mary's Dowry Productions (our online shop):

www.marysdowryproductions.org/shop/

 

NEW St. Anne Line film

From Mary's Dowry Productions, a new film on St. Anne Line, English Catholic Martyr, who was hanged at Tyburn in 1601 for hiding a Catholic priest. 

Visit our website for more information and to buy this DVD available in all Region Formats also available through AMAZON.

www.marysdowryproductions.org/shop/