Martyrs remembered (From York Press)

Martyrs remembered

2:07pm Wednesday 22nd August 2012 in Letters

CONGRATULATIONS on your coverage of the service for the martyrs of York at the Tyburn (The Press, August 17).

As a relative newcomer to York, I’ve been puzzled by the fact that the city seemed, at least officially, to give more honour to poor Dick Turpin – a straightforward rogue – than to one of those martyrs who, according to a celebrated Anglican canon, was ‘judicially murdered’.

St Henry Walpole, the only official ‘saint’ to have been executed on Knavesmire, came from a branch of the same family tree that produced the first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Would the city object if, at no cost to itself, a small memorial was put up on the Tyburn to honour belatedly this martyr, saint and poet?

John Short, Longwood Road, Clifton Moor , York.