Cheevers, Blessed Edward (d. 1581), Irish martyr, was a sailor in Wexford port. In 1581 he was one of a number of sailors who attempted to find passage to the Continent for Viscount Baltinglass (qv), then in rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I, and his Jesuit chaplain Robert Rochford. Arrested for this act along with Patrick Cavanagh (qv) and four others, he was found guilty of treason and was hanged, drawn, and quartered in July 1581. A Wexford Jesuit, John Howlin (qv), wrote what appears to be an eye-witness account of their execution. Cheevers was one of the seventeen Irish martyrs beatified by Pope John Paul II in Rome on 27 September 1992.
Sources
P. F. Moran, Spicilegium ossoriense (1874), i, 103–4; Kevin Whelan (ed.), Wexford, history and society (1987), 224; Desmond Forristal, Seventeen martyrs (1990), 17–19; Ir. Times, 26 Sept. 1992; Patrick J. Corish, ‘The beatified martyrs of Ireland, 2: Matthew Lambert, Robert Meyler, Edward Cheevers, Patrick Cavanagh and companions’, Irish Theological Quarterly, lxiv (1999), 179–87