When Cuthbert Mayne was executed in 1577 it seemed a simple matter. Like so many who were to follow him, he had fallen foul of the law and had suffered the penalty - a public execution in all its horrific detail.  Was it, in fact, so simple?

Fascinated by the area and subject Helen Whelan’s detailed study gradually uncovered the intriguing truth which shows that, far from being the central character, Cuthbert Mayne was a mere pawn. Richard Grenville used this pawn so skilfully that he was able, in one move, to bring about the downfall of Catholicism in the West Country for centuries and to ruin the recusant families he saw as rivals for power and position, both locally and at court, and to gain for himself the title Sir Ricchard Grenville.  His pawn, the first of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, is now widely looked to as an example and patron by priests throughout the country

 Helen Whelan was born in Bradford in 1899. Having taught in Bradford, Huddersfield and Luton, she moved to Yeovil in Somerset in the late nineteen forties. Here she started her studies of Tudor Cornwall and of St Cuthbert Maybe, and her life as Music Inspector in the West Country greatly facilitated her research throughout the area. She had a life-long interest in the English martyrs and had published a short work on them as early as 1928. Before her death in 1981 she gave the manuscript, Snow on the Hedges, to the Carmelite Monastery at Poole.