ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



were countrymen, and had been schoolfellows before in Westmorland. 

 But as Bost grew jealous of his safety, they never met again till the priest 

 was captured. When Bost was taken, Ewbanke was present by the 

 Dean's special direction and behaved himself so considerately that with- 

 out him and his man the fugitive could not have been secured at that 

 time. 1 In his examination at Durham on 11 September 1593, by the 

 lord president, the dean of Durham, and others of the Council of the 

 North, Bost acknowledged that he was above fifty years of age ; born 

 at Dufton in Westmorland ; left Oxford ' aboute thirteen yeres synce ' 

 to go to the parts beyond the seas ; within a year and a half was made 

 priest at Rheims by the Bishops of Laon and Soissons and returned 

 again to England with twenty-eight other priests, including Ballard. 

 After describing his wanderings he further confessed that for the past 

 year he never left Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland, and during 

 the past five years he was often in Yorkshire for a month at a time, and 

 that it was very much against his will, when he was unable to say mass 

 once every day. 2 During his imprisonment in the Tower he is said to 

 have been ' often most cruelly racked insomuch that he was afterwards 

 forced to go crooked upon a staff.' Of his trial and execution in July 

 1594, on a charge of treason to his country, we have a graphic descrip- 

 tion, if genuine, by an eye-witness, Christopher Robinson, a fellow- 

 countryman and seminary priest of the same mission. The execution 

 was carried out according to the barbaric methods of the sixteenth 

 century, when the victim behaved with the greatest fortitude and 

 devotion. In 1 597 Robinson himself, a native of Woodside near Wigton 

 in Cumberland, who had been ordained in 1591 at Douay while the 

 college sojourned at Rheims and sent to England in the following year, 

 was executed at Carlisle on the same charge. The bishop of Carlisle is 

 said to have held frequent conferences with him and to have showed him 

 great kindness and consideration while he was in custody, but was unable 

 to shake his papal convictions. 3 Few causes doomed to failure can 



1 S.P. Dom. Eliz. xxxij. 89 (latter part). For the academic career of Henry Ewbanke the reader 

 may consult Clarke's Register, Oxford Hist. Soc., ii. 56, iii. 81, or Foster's Alumni Oxonienses. He is 

 described on the matriculation register of Queen's College as a Londoner by birth, but as Dr. Magrath, 

 the present provost of Queen's, has privately pointed out, ' it is probably a bedel's blunder, as he would 

 not in that case have got a tabardship or a fellowship.' It will be seen from the dean of Durham's state- 

 ment that Ewbanke was at school in Westmorland with John Bost, probably at Appleby Grammar School. 

 He was afterwards a canon of Durham and had his pedigree and arms enrolled at St. George's visitation 

 in 1615. 



* A certified copy of his confession will be found in Lansd. MS. 75, f. 22. The vera copia is signed 

 by John Bost, and witnessed by ' H. Huntyngdon,' the lord president. The document is endorsed 

 ' 1593. The examination of John Boste, II Septembris, 1593.' 



3 Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1878), i. 207-9, 2 39~4> " 3 II- 5 > Douay Diaries, \. 

 15, 31, ii. 223, 232, 239. Bishop May, writing to Sir Robert Cecil on II July, 1597, said that ' Thomas 

 Lancaster is the only man that I have trusted or can trust to discover such Jesuits and seminaries as do 

 lurk within my diocese, to the corruption of many of her Majesty's subjects. He was the only man that 

 gave me sure intelligence when and where I might apprehend, as I did, Christopher Robinson, our late 

 condemned seminary, whose execution hath terrified a great sort of our obstinate recusants ; where, 

 nevertheless, there be still harboured three or four more notable seminaries or Jesuits, who pass and 

 repass within my diocese without controlment, such is the careless or partial dealing of some of our jus- 

 tices. Among the said seminaries or Jesuits there is one Richard Dudley, termed by the aforesaid Robin- 

 son and other his associates the angel of that profession. He is. the only heir of Edmund Dudley, esquire, 



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