Biography
Polydore Plasden
About Polydore Plasden
Polydore Plasden was a Catholic priest executed in Elizabethan London in 1591. He was born in 1563 and studied at Reims before continuing his preparation for priesthood in Rome. The Catholic Encyclopedia records his ordination on December 7, 1586. His time abroad prepared him for a ministry in England where his priesthood itself exposed him to prosecution.
He also appears under the name Oliver Palmer. A 1930 list published by the Venerable English College, compiled from its historical registers, records his arrival in April 1585 at the age of twenty-two and identifies London as his birthplace. The entry gives his departure year with a question mark, a useful reminder that even an archival summary does not resolve every detail of his movements.
In Rome he supported a petition to retain the Jesuits as the college’s superiors. Whitfield’s encyclopedia account also reports that he was later considered to have suffered harm through their agency in England, without explaining the circumstances. That unexplained report should not be expanded into a definite accusation or an invented dispute. After further time in Rome, he returned to Reims in 1588 and left for the English mission in September.
The New Catholic Encyclopedia describes his promise to return to England for the care of souls. It places his return in 1588, but emphasizes how little is known of the following years. Work in Sussex is possible rather than securely documented. By November 1591 he was in London, in the house of Swithun Wells, when government agents interrupted a gathering for Mass. Edmund Gennings was also present.
Plasden was tried for treason as a priest educated and ordained abroad. On the scaffold he affirmed loyalty to Queen Elizabeth while refusing to abandon his Catholic faith. The accounts describe Walter Raleigh directing that he be allowed to die by hanging before the remaining punishment was carried out. He died at Tyburn on December 10, 1591.
He was beatified in 1929 and canonized by Paul VI on October 25, 1970, among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.
His remembrance has both individual and local forms. Southwark’s diocesan directory places him with John Roberts and Eustace White on December 9, as an optional memorial. It distinguishes this liturgical observance from the December 10 execution date. The parish of Saint Thomas of Canterbury and the English Martyrs at Royston includes him among its collective patrons.
The college where he studied also preserves his memory. Its report of Martyrs’ Day in 2019 records an evening telling of Plasden’s life before the community invoked the college martyrs in prayer. That quiet act of remembrance joins the better-known public recognition of his martyrdom to the place that helped prepare him for priestly service.
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