John Roberts (martyr)
Benedictine monk and priest
John Roberts, OSB (1577 – 10 December 1610) was a Welsh Benedictine monk and priest, and was the first prior of St. Gregory's, Douai, France (now Downside Abbey). Returning to Britain as a missionary priest during the period of recusancy, he was martyred at Tyburn. He is venerated as a saint by the Catholic church.
Early life and conversion to Catholicism
Roberts was born in 1577 in Trawsfynydd, a small village in Snowdonia, north Wales, the son of John and Anna Roberts of Rhiw Goch Farm. His father, a farmer, was a member of the Welsh nobility and was descended from the Welsh Princes. Roberts was baptised into the Anglican faith inside the local parish church of St Madryn but is said to have received his early education from an elderly man who had been a Cistercian monk at Cymer Abbey just outside Dolgellau until its dissolution by Henry VIII in 1537. He attended St. John's College, Oxford in February, 1595 before leaving after two years to study law at Furnival's Inn, London.
During his travels in Europe, he left both the law and his former faith behind, converting to Catholicism on a visit to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Roberts (martyr)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.