In his new book on the Douai Martyrs, Fr Gerard Skinner hopes the memory of their sacrifice inspires devotion.
Not for the first time, in the dead of night, Luisa de Carvajal was awaiting the arrival of her guests. The passages and stairs of this Spanish noblewoman’s house in Spitalfields, London, had been strewn with flowers, as had a red carpet laid before a house altar – for this was where de Carvajal’s guests were to rest. Meanwhile, near the gallows at Tyburn, her servants were racing against time to excavate a newly filled pit into which the bodies of those executed that day had been thrown.
