A letter of St Oliver Plunkett

The kindness and charity of your lordship are such that you have been pleased to express appreciation of my poor service in cultivating the vineyard of the Lord in this afflicted country and in corresponding with the Holy See, venerated and loved by me with a spiritual affection and reverence, as also with an earthly affection because as a good mother it nourished me for many years in Rome while I lectured there, as well as with other honours too great for my weakness to bear. God knows that I think of nothing else, day and night, than the service of souls, which is the service desired of me by the Sacred Congregation and the Holy See. Political or temporal matters have no part in my life: neither in my mind nor on my lips nor with my pen are they given any place. God knows how I laboured last year, 1670, in visiting six large dioceses, in holding a provincial council and various diocesan synods, and how I laboured this present year in the dioceses of Clogher, Down and Dromore, as well as my own.

  We are in greater fear and trembling here now. In Scotland parliament has decreed that for the future it will be a lèse-majesty to hear Mass. It seems as if the times of Nero, Domitian and Diocletian have come round again. We shall have martyrs’ blood to irrigate and fertilise the Church. These edicts do not at present include Ireland, because it is not named by the King in them, but I am sure that, as usual, we shall not be forgotten.

  Sentence of death was passed against me on the fifteenth. It has not caused me the least terror or deprived me of even a quarter of an hour’s sleep. I am as innocent of all treason as the child born yesterday. As for my character, profession and function, I did own it publicly, and that being also a motive of my death, I die most willingly. And being the first among the Irish, I shall, with God’s grace, give good example to the others not to fear death. I expect daily to be brought to the place of execution where my bowels are to be cut out and burned before my face, and then my head to be cut off. What speech I will have at my death will be sent to you. If I had obtained sufficient time to have brought my witnesses from Ireland, I think I should have defended myself as regards these romances of treason; but it was not granted to me, and I was brought to my trial destitute of all legal ways of defence.