10 December - John Roberts was born in 1577 in Trawsfynydd, a small village in Snowdonia, North Wales. Roberts was baptized in the Protestant faith in the local church of St Madryn but is believed to have received his early education from an elderly former monk who had been a member of the Cymer Abbey community.
He attended St. John's College, Oxford in February 1595 before leaving after two years to study law at Furnival's Inn, London. During his travels in Europe he left behind the law and his old faith by converting to Catholicism during a visit to Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. He moved to Spain and joined the Monastery of St. Benedict in Valladolid, and became a member of this community in 1598, where he was known as Brother John of Merioneth in reference to his birthplace.
From Valladolid, he was sent to make his novitiate in San Martín Pinario, Santiago de Compostela, where he made his profession towards the end of 1600. After completing his studies, he was ordained and left for England on 26th December 1602. Although observed by a government spy, Roberts and his companions managed to enter the country in April 1603, where he was appointed vicar of the English monks of the Spanish Congregation on the Mission. He was arrested and banished on 13 May. He reached Douai, in the north of France, on 24 May. Soon he managed to return to England; he worked among the victims of the plague in London. In 1604, when he set sail for Spain with four postulants, he was arrested again. Unrecognized as a priest, he was released and banished again, but returned to England immediately. On November 5, 1605, as Judge Grange searched the house of Mrs. Percy, first wife of Thomas Percy, who was involved in the Gunpowder Plot, he found Roberts there and arrested him. Although acquitted of any complicity in the conspiracy itself, Roberts was imprisoned in Gatehouse Prison in Westminster for seven months and then exiled again in July 1606.
This time he was away for about fourteen months, which he spent in Douai where he founded and became the first prior of a house for Benedictine monks. This was the beginning of the monastery of Saint Gregory in Douai. Roberts returned to England in October 1607 and in December he was again arrested and placed in the Gatehouse at Westminster, from which he escaped a few months later. After his escape he lived in London for about a year, but in May 1609 he was taken to Newgate Prison. He could have been executed, but Antonie de la Broderie, the French ambassador, interceded on his behalf and his sentence was reduced to banishment. Roberts visited Spain and Douai again, but returned to England for the fifth time within a year. He was captured again on 2 December 1610, just as he was finishing saying mass. On 5 December he was tried and found guilty under the law prohibiting priests from practising in England, and on 10 December he was hanged and quartered, at the age of thirty-three, in Tyburn, London. The introduction of the cause of beatification was approved by Pope Leo XIII in his decree of 4 December 1886. On 25 October 1970, Roberts was canonized by Pope Paul VI as one of the forty representative martyrs of England and Wales.
