(ib. 2919), was appointed commissioner of sewers for Suffolk in December 1534, and died on 2 March 1535–6 (ib. vii. 596, viii. 75). He was buried in St. Mary's Church, Bury St. Edmunds, under a stone monument, the wooden palisade of the tomb bearing the inscription, ‘Such as ye be some time were we, such as we are such shall ye be. Miserere nostri.’ Drury married twice. By his first wife, Anne, daughter of Sir William Calthorpe, knight, of Burnham-Thorpe, Norfolk, he had issue (besides daughters) Sir William Drury, who succeeded him at Hawsted, and Sir Robert Drury of Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire, father of Sir William Drury [q. v.], lord president of Munster, and of Sir Dru Drury [q. v.] By his second wife, Anne, relict of Edward, lord Grey, he had no issue.
[Cullum's Hawsted, pp. 131, 142, 145; Cooper's Athenæ Cantabr. i. 56; Manning's Lives of the Speakers.]
DRURY, ROBERT (1567–1607), catholic divine, born of a gentleman's family in Buckinghamshire in 1567, was educated in the English College of Douay, then temporarily removed to Rheims, where he arrived 1 April 1588. He received the minor orders at Rheims on 18 Aug. 1590, and on the 17th of the following month he, with several other students, was sent to the college lately founded at Valladolid by Philip II of Spain for the education of the English clergy. After being ordained priest there, he was sent in 1593 to England, where he zealously laboured on the mission, chiefly in London and its vicinity. He was one of the appellant priests who opposed the proceedings of the archpriest Blackwell [see Blackwell, George]; and his name occurs among the signatures attached to the appeal of 17 Nov. 1600, dated from the prison at Wisbech (Dodd, Church Hist. ii. 259). He was also one of the thirteen secular priests who, in response to the queen's proclamation, subscribed the celebrated protestation of allegiance (31 Jan. 1602–3), which was drawn up by William Bishop [q. v.], afterwards bishop of Chalcedon (Butler, Hist. Memoirs of the English Catholics, 3rd edit. ii. 56–65). In 1606 the government of James I imposed upon catholics a new oath, which was to be the test of their civil allegiance. About this time Drury was apprehended, brought to trial, and condemned to death for being a priest and remaining in this realm, contrary to the statute of 27 Eliz. He refused to save his life by taking the new oath, and consequently he was drawn to Tyburn, hanged, and quartered on 26 Feb. 1606–7. ‘A true Report of the Arraignment, Tryall, Conviction, and Condemnation of a Popish Priest named Robert Drewrie’ appeared at London, 1607, 4to, and is reprinted in the ‘Harleian Miscellany,’ vol. iii.
[Challoner's Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1742), ii. 16; Douay Diaries, pp. 218, 232, 234; Morris's Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, iii. 329; Gillow's Bibl. Dict.; Panzani's Memoirs, p. 85.]
DRURY, ROBERT (1587–1623), jesuit, born in Middlesex in 1587, was son of William Drury [q. v.], D.C.L., judge of the prerogative court (who was converted to the catholic faith in articulo mortis), and his wife, Mary, daughter of Sir Richard Southwell of Woodrising, Norfolk, a relative of Father Robert Southwell the poet. He was educated in London, and at the age of fourteen was sent to the English College at Douay, where he began his course of humanities, which he completed at St. Omer. On 9 Oct. 1605 he entered the English College, Rome, for his higher course. After receiving minor orders he joined the Society of Jesus in October 1608, and subsequently he repaired to Posna to finish his theology, arriving there 28 Feb. 1611–12. In 1620 he was rector of the college at St. Omer, and afterwards was sent on the mission to his native country, where he became a distinguished preacher. He was professed of the four vows 8 Sept. 1622. Occasionally he went under the names of Bedford and Stanley.
He lost his life on Sunday, 5 Nov. (N.S.) 1623, at the ‘Fatal Vespers’ in Blackfriars. On the afternoon of that day about three hundred persons assembled in an upper room at the French ambassador's residence, Hunsdon House, Blackfriars, for the purpose of participating in a religious service by Drury and William Whittingham, another jesuit. While Drury was preaching the great weight of the crowd in the old room suddenly snapped the main summer-beam of the floor, which instantly crashed in and fell into the room below. The main beams there also snapped and broke through to the ambassador's drawing-room over the gate-house, a distance of twenty-two feet. Part of the floor, being less crowded, stood firm, and the people on it cut a way through a plaster wall into a neighbouring room. The two jesuits were killed on the spot. About ninety-five persons lost their lives, while many others sustained serious injuries. The bigotry of the times led some people to regard this calamity as a judgment on the catholics, ‘so much was God offended with their detestable idolatrie’ (Lysons, Environs, iv. 410). Father John Floyd met the reproach by publishing ‘A Word of Comfort to the English
