The History of the Sufferings of Eighteen Carthusians in England by Chauncey Maurice

About the book: The History of the Sufferings of Eighteen Carthusians in England Who Refusing to Take Part in Schism, and to Separate Themselves from the Unity of the Catholic Church, were Cruelly Martyred is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1890.

The tragedy of the fall of the Charterhouses of England began with the martyrdom at Tyburn of the three Carthusian Priors: Blessed John Houghton of London; Blessed Augustine Webster of Axholme; and Blessed Robert Lawrence of Beauvale on 4 May 1535.

Of the forty-eight members who remained in the London Charterhouse after Houghton's death, thirty were choir monks, and eighteen lay brothers.

On 18 May 1537, the Royal Commissioners came to their monastery and exacted the Oath of Supremacy from the Prior and twenty of his subjects. Of the twenty-eight others, seventeen died for the Faith, and all the others were expelled with a small pension of £5 a year; among these latter was Dom Maurice Chauncey, a monk of the London Charter House and the principal authority for their history of which a translation is here offered about the year 1539, shortly after the destruction of that House by Cromwell and his agents. 

About the author: Dom Maurice Chauncey was born in Hertfordshire about AD 1513. He was educated at Oxford and Gray's Inn, and entered the Carthusian Order before he was twenty, and was professed in 1534, Blessed John Houghton being then Prior. During the persecution which followed that Martyr's death, Dom Maurice was zealous in resisting the endeavours of Cromwell to induce the monks to acknowledge the supremacy of the King, and was one of four who were sent away from the London House into another House of the Order near Hull, with the object, it would seem, of breaking down his constancy. He returned after a time to London, and partly through the influence of the Monks of St Bridgett at Sion House and partly cajoled by representations and promises which gave him hopes that his taking the oath would preserve the London House, he yielded and took the oath; but speedily repented, and for ever afterwards deeply grieved over what he had done. 

Dom Maurice died on 12 July 1581 in Paris, aged sixty-eight years. On his body being prepared for burial, there was found fastened on it, an iron chain, the instrument alike and the witness of his lasting penance.