Anne Line

Life and Ministry

Anne Line was the daughter of an Essex Calvinist named William Heigham, converted to Catholicism in her late teens together with her brother William, and on her conversion was disinherited and turned out of her father's house. She married Roger Line, a fellow recusant convert; the two were soon arrested and Roger was exiled to Flanders, where he died in AD 1594. Anne Line, widowed and impoverished and supporting herself on a small pension from continental Catholic friends, was approached by the Jesuit Father John Gerard to keep one of his safe houses for the hidden priests of the English mission. From AD 1595 until her arrest in AD 1601 she ran a series of these houses, first in Old Bailey and then in Stepney, sheltering the priests, organizing the Masses, and feeding the congregations.

Circumstances of Death

On Candlemas Day (2 February) AD 1601 the local constables, alerted by an informer, raided her Stepney house mid-Mass. The priest Mark Barkworth escaped through a hidden door Nicholas Owen had built. Anne Line did not — she stayed to delay the searchers, and was arrested with the others present. At the Old Bailey on 26 February she was charged with the felony of harboring a Catholic priest. Asked if she pleaded guilty, she answered (as the court record preserves): My Lords, nothing grieves me more than that I could not receive a thousand more. Convicted, she was hanged at Tyburn on the following morning with the priests Mark Barkworth and Roger Filcock.

Legacy

Anne Line was canonized in AD 1970 with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Her witness is the witness of the keeper of the safe house: she did not preach, she did not write, she sheltered. The work of harboring priests was, in Elizabethan England, a felony that carried the death penalty for the laywoman exactly as for the priest. Her line in the dock — I would have wished a thousand more — is one of the most quoted in the English recusant tradition. She was hanged the day after she said it; she did not have to wait long for the thousand more company she had asked for, on the other side of the rope.