Jones, Edward, VENERABLE, priest and martyr, b. in the Diocese of St. Asaph, Wales, date unknown; d. in London, 6 May, 1590. Bred an Anglican, he was received into the Church at the English College, Reims, 1587; he was ordained priest in 1588, and went to England in the same year. In 1590 he was arrested by a priest-catcher, who pretended to be a Catholic, in a shop in Fleet Street. He was imprisoned in the Tower and brutally tortured by Topcliffe, finally admitting he was a priest and had been an Anglican. These ad. missions were used against him at his trial, but he made a skilful and learned defence, pleading that « confession elicited under torture was not legally suf. ficient to ensure a conviction. The court compli. mented him on his courageous bearing, but of course he was convicted of high treason as a priest coming into England. On the same day he was hanged drawn, and quartered, opposite the grocer’s shop where he had been captured, in Fleet Street near the Conduit. On the same day there suffered Anthony Middleton, priest and martyr, born probably at Middleton-Tyas, Yorkshire, date unknown, son of Ambrose Middleton of Barnard Castle, Durham, and Cecil daughter of Anthony Crackenthorpe of Howgill Castle. Westmoreland. He entered the English College at Reims, 9 Jan., 1582; was ordained 30 May, 1586, and went to England in the same year. His work lay in London and the neighbourhood and he laboured very successfully; he was captured at a house in Clerkenwell (London) by the same artifice which was practised on Father Jones. On the ladder he said: ‘I call God to witness I die merely for the Catholic Faith, and for being a priest of the true Religion”; and someone present called out, “Sir, you have spoken very well”. The erie was cut down and disembowelled while yet alive.
GILLOW, Bibl. Dict. Eng. Cath., s. v. Jones, Edward and Middleton, Anthony; CHALLONER, Memoirs of M isstonary Priests (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1878), I, 168-9; SANDERS, De Orig. ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani, ed. RIBADENEIRA (Cologne, 1610), appendix, 23 sq.; Knox, The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay (London, 1878). 4
C. F. Wemyss Brown.