One story is that he was indeed John Amias or Amyas, born at Wakefield in Yorkshire, England, where he married and raised a family, exercising the trade of cloth-merchant.

Regardless of his actual name, on 22 June 1580, a widower calling himself "John Amias" entered the English College at Rheims to study for the priesthood.

On 5 June of that year Amias, set out for Paris and then England, as a missionary, in the company of another priest, Edmund Sykes.

Given the 1585 Act making it a capital offence to be a Catholic priest in England the sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering was inevitable.

Amias was beginning to address the assembled people, and explain that it was for religion, and not treason, that he suffered, but was not allowed to proceed.