Blessed William Harrington is one of more than a hundred beatified and canonised martyrs to have been hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn during the Reformation.
He was born in 1566 at Mount St John, Felixkirk, in the North Riding of Yorkshire and he decided to become a priest at the age of 15 years after meeting St Edmund Campion when the famous Jesuit missionary was sheltering in his father’s home.
He made his way to France and began to study for the priesthood at Rheims before joining the Jesuits at Tornai, but bad health forced him to return home. He eventually returned to Rheims and was ordained there in 1592.
In summer of that same year he was sent on English Mission but was caught in London, where he had been ministering, the following May.
Blessed William spent the following nine months in prison and Butler’s Lives of the Saints tells us that he “bore its rigours with notable fortitude and constancy”.
His demeanour, according to his Acts, made a deep impression during his trial but he was nonetheless condemned for his priesthood and sentenced to death.
The sentence was carried out on February 18th, 1594, and Stow in his Chronicle recorded that “Harrington, a seminary priest, was drawn from Newgate to Tyburn, and there hanged, cut down alive, struggled with the hangman, but was bowelled and quartered”.
Bishop Challoner in the Memoirs of Missionary Priests remarks that it “cannot be drawn to an argument of his not being resigned to die, but only shows the efforts which nature will be sure to make in a man whose sentences are stunned by having been half hanged, and therefore, by the motions of his hands and body, strives to resist that unnatural violence which is offered by the hands and knife of the executioner”.
Blessed William was aged just 27 years at the time of his death.
Butler’s notes that a curious fact about his death is that Harrington was posthumously accused of having fathered a child before his ordination, a claim dismissed as “baseless” and “discredited from the start”.
Butler’s also notes that this was the only claim of its kind made against and of the English and Welsh martyrs of that period.