Ralph Sherwin was born in 1550 at Rodsley in Derbyshire to an Anglican family. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, he received the Master of Arts and became a fellow of Exeter College — a rising Elizabethan Oxford academic.
Around 1575, Ralph converted to Catholicism and travelled to the continental English College at Douai (the English Catholic seminary in exile founded 1568 by William Allen) to study for the Catholic priesthood. He was ordained Catholic priest on March 23, 1577.
In 1580, Ralph joined the Jesuit mission to England led by St. Edmund Campion SJ and Robert Persons SJ. Arriving in England on August 1, 1580, Ralph undertook the systematic Catholic-priest-recusant ministry to the hidden English Catholic community.
Arrested at Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire on November 4, 1580 (just three months into his ministry), Ralph was imprisoned at the Tower of London and repeatedly tortured on the rack. Under torture Ralph famously said: 'This rack is my mistress; it takes me to my sweet Christ.'
On November 20, 1581, Ralph was condemned to death for the treason of Catholic priesthood (under Queen Elizabeth I's 1571 Recusancy Act that had made Catholic priesthood in England a capital offense).
On December 1, 1581, Ralph was hanged, drawn, and quartered at the Tyburn Tree in London — alongside St. Edmund Campion SJ and St. Alexander Briant SJ (the three companions martyred simultaneously). Ralph was the first English seminary priest to be martyred — the proto-martyr of the English College at Douai.
Canonized on October 25, 1970 by Pope St. Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.