a renunciation of his religion and an acknowledgement of the supremacy of the queen as head of the church. Declining both offers, he kissed a copy of the Bible, declaring that, "the queen neither ever was, nor is, nor ever shall be, the head of the church of England". He was not allowed to speak to the crowd but only to say his prayers quietly. It is unclear if he died on the gallows but all agree that he was unconscious, or almost so, when he was drawn and quartered. One source states that he was cut down alive, but in falling struck his head against the scaffold. Political considerations A. L. Rowse sees the condemnation of Mayne as arising from local rivalries between Protestant coastal and Catholic inland interests. Grenville had been unsuccessful in his attempts to arrange a marriage between his daughter and the Tregian heir. The coming of Mayne and others made the English government fear the possibility of papal agents coming to the island to ready the populace to rise up in revolt in support of King Philip II of Spain in an invasion of England. This helped support the case to pass harsher legislation against Catholicism in England. Establishing a threat from subversive Catholic elements also served Elizabeth's counsellors such as Lord Burghley in their attempts to persuade the Queen to support the Dutch Revolt against Spain. Legacy Mayne was beatified "equipollently" by Pope Leo XIII, by means of a decree of 29 December 1886 and was canonised along with other martyrs of England and Wales by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970. Mayne was the first seminary priest, the group of priests who were trained not in England but in houses of studies on the Continent. He was also one of the group of prominent Catholic martyrs of the persecution who were later designated as the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Relics of Mayne's body survive. A portion of his skull is kept at Lanherne Convent in Cornwall. Christopher M. B. Allison suggests that the silver reliquary discovered in 2015 at Jamestown, Virginia in the grave of Captain Gabriel Archer (died 1609/10) may contain a relic of Mayne. There are many memorials to him in Launceston, and in 1977 the name of the Roman Catholic church on St Stephen's Hill there was changed from the Church of the English Martyrs to the