Swithun Wells was born in 1536 at Bambridge in Hampshire to a Catholic recusant family. Trained as a schoolmaster, Swithun served as tutor to noble English Catholic recusant families.
Around 1585 Swithun and his wife Alice established their London house at Gray's Inn Fields — as a systematic Mass-house for the London Catholic recusant community, hosting secret Catholic Masses celebrated by continental-Douai-Rheims priests.
On November 8, 1591, during a secret Mass at the Wells London house, the priest St. Edmund Gennings was arrested along with the congregation. Swithun himself was away at the time of the arrest but was subsequently arrested.
Swithun and his wife Alice were imprisoned. Alice was sentenced to death but reprieved — she died in prison years later. Swithun was condemned to death for the treason of providing the Mass house.
On December 10, 1591, Swithun was hanged at Gray's Inn Fields — the execution site deliberately chosen outside his own London house — alongside Edmund Gennings. Swithun's famous last words at the scaffold: 'Farewell, dear London! Farewell, thou noble land! Farewell, my Alice!'
Canonized on October 25, 1970 by Pope St. Paul VI.