Derbyshire, 1579. Practicing the Catholic Faith in England has become a crime, priests are hunted like outlaws, and every manor house may hide a secret chapel or a traitor. Robin Audrey and Marjorie Manners, young, devout and promised to each other, are caught in this growing persecution. When Robin hears God calling him to the priesthood, both of them must give up the life they had planned. Robin goes abroad to train in secret and returns as a hunted missionary priest, while Marjorie risks everything to shelter the men the Crown wants dead. Around them the great events of the age play out: the martyrdom of Bl. Edmund Campion, the Babington Plot, the captivity of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the ruthless priest-hunter Richard Topcliffe.

Robert Hugh Benson was a convert, a priest, and one of the finest Catholic novelists of the twentieth century. As he wrote in his preface, “very nearly the whole of this book is sober historical fact.” The FitzHerberts of Padley, the raids, the hiding places and the martyrs of Derby all come straight from the historical record, and the story is filled out with a love story readers won’t soon forget. Its title comes from Blessed Edmund Campion’s own defiant words after he was tortured, and Come Rack! Come Rope! has stirred readers for more than a century with its picture of faith that would not bend under fear, loss or torture. This Glorious Heritage Books edition has been carefully reset and corrected, so a new generation can meet the English martyrs and the people who would not give them up.