[1] The Jubilee Year of 1350, which had seen the influx of over a million pilgrims anxious to gain the Plenary Indulgence offered by Pope Clement VI, had exposed the notorious shortcomings of accommodation in the Eternal City.

English pilgrims had paid extortionate prices to stay in damp and filthy hostels far from St Peter's Basilica and the Holy Door through which they had come to pass.

The foundation of the Hospice was in direct response to this situation, with the stated aim of caring for "poor, infirm, needy and wretched persons from England".

Evidence of this early royal connection may be seen in the present-day building, which contains a corbel of fumed oak and a stone shield, both bearing the arms of the Plantagenet Kings.

Robert Neweton, described in 1399 as chaplain procurator of the Hospice of the Holy Trinity & St Thomas the Martyr, may have been a warden[2] as might William Holdernes (fl.

During the Sack of Rome in 1527 troops of the Holy Roman Emperor broke into the Hospice and carried away the greater part of its gold and silver ware, its movable property and its extensive archive of papers and manuscripts.

When Pole returned to England as Archbishop of Canterbury under Mary I, it seemed that the Hospice would revive as a pilgrim institution, but the accession of Elizabeth I brought darker days.

A Welshman, Maurice Clenock (Morus Clynnog), was made perpetual warden in 1578, an appointment unpopular with both the students and the Hospice chaplains, whom he had just expelled.

However, many of the students shared the missionary ideals of the Society of Jesus, equating the jungles of heathen South America with the woods of Protestant England.

For over a year, the two factions circulated petitions and memorials, including one that called the Welsh barbarous savages who dwelt in a remote mountainous corner of Britain.

Students waylaid the Pope to ask for his assistance, and the future Martyr, Ralph Sherwin, drew his sword in the refectory (the kitchen of the present-day building).

Here he describes a typical dinner at the College; “Every man has his own trencher, his manchet, knife, spoon and fork laid by it, and then a fair white napkin covering it, with his glass and pot of wine set by him.

The last College martyrdoms were in 1679 during the anti-Roman Catholic hysteria following the "Popish Plot", when David Lewis, John Wall and Anthony Turner suffered.

St Philip Neri, the "Second Apostle of Rome", who lived opposite the College at S. Girolamo della Carità, used to greet the students with the words "Salvete Flores Martyrum" (Hail!

Between 1682 and 1694 part of the College site was rebuilt as a Palazzo by the Cardinal Protector of Great Britain, Philip Howard, third son of the Earl of Arundel.

They encouraged a highly Anglicised type of Romanitas in which a consciousness of Imperial superiority was tempered by a deep affection for Italy and all things Italian.

Students put on concerts, plays and Gilbert and Sullivan operas, organised debates and societies, and ran a successful in-house journal, The Venerabile, as well as the periodical Chi Lo Sa?

In 1926, with the help of front page support from The Times, Hinsley saved the College from a scheme of the Rome city planners to destroy some of the buildings to make room for a covered market.

Dressed in civilian clothes, courtesy of the stageman, the house left Rome on 16 May 1940 and narrowly secured places on the last boat for England from Le Havre, which was about to fall.

Students continued classes and seminary life first at Ambleside in the Lake District and then at the Jesuit Stonyhurst College, returning to Rome in the autumn of 1946.

In 1979, on the College's fourth centenary, John Paul II celebrated Mass in the Church and joined the students for a festive banquet in the refectory.

On 1 December 2012 (Martyrs' Day – its annual commemoration of former students who had suffered martyrdom), the College celebrated the 650th anniversary of the foundation of the original hospice on the site with a concelebrated Mass at which the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were present as representatives of the Queen, together with the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, and the Cardinal Archbishop Emeritus of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, a former Rector of the College.

The two Lions Rampant come from the arms of Edward III, representing in some sense the patronage bestowed on the College by every English king between the fourteenth century and the Protestant Reformation.

Although located in central Rome, the College possesses an extensive garden (laid out substantially as it was in the days of the Martyrs) and a swimming pool, recently refurbished with the aid of the Friends of the Venerabile.