Background
He was born at Dimples Hall, Garstang, Lancashire, the son of Robert Plessington, a Royalist Roman Catholic, and Alice Rawstone, a family thus persecuted for both their religious and political beliefs.
He was born at Dimples Hall, Garstang, Lancashire, the son of Robert Plessington, a Royalist Roman Catholic, and Alice Rawstone, a family thus persecuted for both their religious and political beliefs.
He was educated by the Jesuits at Scarisbrick Hall, then at the Royal College of Saint Alban at Valladolid, Spain, and then at Saint Omer Seminary in France.
He is now honored as one of the Roman Catholic Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. He was ordained in Segovia, Spain, on 25 March 1662. He returned to England in 1663 ministering to covert Catholics in the areas of Holywell and Cheshire, often hiding under the name William Scarisbrick.
He was also tutor at Puddington Old Hall near Chester.
Upon arrest in Chester during the Popish Plot scare caused by Titus Oates, he was imprisoned for two months, and then hanged, drawn and quartered for the crime of being a Catholic priest. From the scaffold at Gallow"s Hill in Boughton, Cheshire, he spoke the following:
Plessington was beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI, and canonized and made one of the Forty Martyrs on 25 October 1970 by Pope Paul VI.
John Plessington Catholic Priest, martyred here on 19th July 1679.
Canonised Saint 25th October 1970
In the early 21st century, a set of human bones found in an old trunk in Wales came to be regarded as possibly being Plessington"s remains. They had been found in the late 19th century, wrapped in 17th-century clothing, in a public in Holywell, Flintshire, which had been known to be a secret gathering place for the Catholics of the region to worship covertly.
This had been the region where he had carried out his ministry before his arrest.
When a grave believed to have been Plessington"s was opened in 1962 as part of the process for his beatification, it was found to contain the remains of a younger manitoba Interest later focused on this set of remains. In 2015, the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Mark Davies, started a campaign to raise the funds for the testing of the deoxyribonucleic acid of the bones.
