Biography
Henry Walpole
About Henry Walpole
Henry Walpole was an English Jesuit priest and martyr born in Norfolk in 1558. He studied at Cambridge and Gray’s Inn. Jesuit Collections connects his decision to pursue Catholic priesthood with witnessing the 1581 execution of Edmund Campion, a story preserved in the community’s later memory. He left England to study in Catholic colleges and entered the Society of Jesus in 1584.
After ordination and ministry on the continent, Walpole returned to England in 1593. He was arrested soon after landing. Jesuit archival material records imprisonment at York and transfer to the Tower of London, where he was questioned and tortured. A sheet of surviving signatures and accounts of inscriptions in his cell are among the material traces of his imprisonment. These records make the long detention more than a simple preface to the final trial.
Walpole was sent back to York and tried in April 1595 with another Catholic priest, Alexander Rawlins. Both were convicted under laws against Catholic priests. Walpole was executed there on April 7. A Catholic reference notes that parts of reported interrogation material were forged, so his motives and words should not be reconstructed from every hostile examination record.
He was canonized with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970. His life should be kept distinct from that of Henry Morse, another English Jesuit martyr in this batch, who lived decades later and died in London.
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