26 Jun 2026

Powel, Philip (1594 – †30 June 1646)

Memoria – 26 June

Philip Powel, a monk of the monastic community of St Gregory the Great, was martyred for the Faith in 1646. Powel was born in Tralon, Brecknockshire, and went to school in Abergavenny. He was sent to study law at the Temple, with the great Benedictine mystic, Dom Augustine Baker, at the age of sixteen. He was solemnly professed as a monk at the priory of St Gregory’s, in Douai in 1620. He started his missionary work on the English Mission in 1622. Powel spent the 1620s through to the 1640s as a missionary in Somerset. Powel served under the Royalist Lord Goring, during the English Civil War, as a military chaplain. He was arrested by the Parliamentarian, Vice Admiral, Captain Crowder in the Irish Sea, declaring himself a priest of the Order of Saint Benedict.

In June 1646, he was tried for High Treason (being a priest) before Judge Roules, at Westminster Hall. Powel declared that ‘I am a Priest, I did freely confess and now acknowledge again, but guilty of any crime or treason against the state, I am not.’

On 12 June 1646 he was tried before the King’s Bench: he declared that the court had no power to try or convict him, as the King had given them no authority to do so, and that, during the current civil war, as, ‘his Majety’s flag flying in a civil war, all trails of life and death cease.’ The court found him guilty.

Powel expressed his Benedictine vision for the English Mission, to the crowd, before his execution at Tyburn:

I am a Roman Catholic Priest, and a monk of the Order of St Bennet. And this I freely confessed myself. This confession and cause only bringeth me hither to execution. I give God thanks, that he has honoured me with the dignity of a Priest, and I glory that I am a monk of this holy Order, which first converted this kingdom from being heathens and infidels, to Christianity and the knowledge of God; St Augustine being their leader sent by St Gregory the Great, Pope of Rome, with forty other monks.

Powel was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929.

A reliquary, containing the hair of Blessed Philip Powel, alongside his pectoral cross that he wore at his execution, are part of Downside Abbey’s Special Collections.