How the Carthusians Resisted the Reformation

‘Good Jesu, what will you do with my heart?’ These were supposedly the final words of Prior John Houghton, as the knife plunged into his chest. He was executed on 4 May 1535: a brutal business at Tyburn, the site famous for its garish public executions. Houghton and his fellow accused were dragged through the London streets and hanged, before being cut down, disembowelled while still breathing, and, finally, decapitated. Their severed body parts were sent around the city for public display, a ‘pitiful and strange spectacle’, and a stark reminder of their high treason.

The convicted were devout men, and included three leaders of Carthusian charterhouses: priors John Houghton of the London Charterhouse, Robert Lawrence of Beauvale, and Augustine Webster of Axholme. The Carthusians were a monastic order renowned for their deeply contemplative lifestyle. Established in France during the 11th century, the Order pursued a hermit-like existence of solitude and prayer. The Carthusians arrived in England in the 12th century, and nine monasteries were founded between 1178 and 1429. By 1540 they were all gone.