The English Catholic martyrs hold a special place in the Faith of these isles. As indeed the name of the church in Sleights - English Martyrs - indicates. Blessed Nicholas Postgate, with his local links, is remembered with particular affection.

At the back of St Hilda’s Church in the chapel dedicated to the English Martyrs is a statue of Blessed Nicholas Postgate, dressed in the simple clothes of a seventeenth century countryman, carrying a palm frond, symbolising his martyrdom, and with a knotted rope noose around his neck, signifying the manner of that martyrdom.

Beneath the statue hangs the near-contemporary painted image, a copy of the original in Whitby Museum painted about 1720, within the lifetime of someone who knew him. Nicholas was born in around 1597 in Egton Bridge. His home was probably Kirkdale House, a long-disappeared cottage just across the river Esk from St Hedda’s Church.

At a time when Catholicism was outlawed in England, Nicholas became a student for the priesthood at the English College in Douai, now in France but then in the Dutch Netherlands. This college was founded by William Allen, later a cardinal, as a training place for English men who, as priests, would return to the darkness of Protestant England with the risk of trial and execution.

He said his first Mass on April 2nd 1629 and by June 1630 was in the East Riding. After some thirty years he returned ‘home’, settling at the Hermitage near Ugthorpe, from where he ministered across a wide area of the North Riding, much of which is now North Yorkshire.

Amazingly he continued to minister into his eighties until December 8th 1678 when he was arrested at Red Barns in Littlebeck during the baptism of the baby son of Matthew and Margaret Lyth. A scuffle resulted in four men, including Postgate and Lyth, being arrested and sent across the moors to Brompton Hall near Scarborough. From here the magistrate, George Cayley, sent them to York for trial. It is said that he composed his famous hymn, still sung regularly throughout the diocese, while he was awaiting trial in York’s castle prison.

Nicholas Postgate’s trial was not a fair one, some of the evidence had clearly been bought, and he was sentenced to death by hanging, drawing and quartering on York Knavesmire. The sentence was carried out on August 7th 1679.

Pope Pius XI declared him Venerable in 1929 and Pope St John Paul II raised him among the Blessed in 1987. There is a shrine to his memory at St Hedda’s Church in Egton Bridge and a rally in his honour is held in July each year, alternating between Ugthorpe and Egton Bridge.

The Catholic Martyrs' Map shows, with hyperlinks giving personal details about each one, the location of the saints and martyrs who died for their Faith between 1534 - 1680. It can be downloaded by clicking on the button below.