Margaret Clitherow

Life and Ministry

Margaret Middleton was born in 1556 to a wax-chandler's family in York, raised as a Protestant in the Elizabethan settlement, and married the prosperous butcher John Clitherow at fifteen. She was reconciled to the Catholic Church around 1574, three years into her marriage, and began the work for which she is remembered: hiding seminary priests in her house in the Shambles, maintaining a Mass-room behind a false wall, and educating her children in the Catholic faith. Her husband, who remained at least nominally Protestant, knew of the priests but did not betray her — Catholic priests' status was a capital offense, but the harboring of one was punishable only by fine, and John was prepared to pay. Margaret was imprisoned three times for nonattendance at Anglican services between 1577 and 1584.

Circumstances of Death

A Flemish boy in the Clitherow household, threatened with stripping and questioned alone, revealed the location of the Mass-room, the priests' vestments, and the identities of three priests who had used the house. Margaret was arrested on March 10, 1586 and arraigned in the York court two days later on a charge of harboring priests. She refused to enter a plea — entering a plea would have meant a jury trial in which her own children would have been required to testify against her, which she would not allow. The legal consequence of refusing to plead in Elizabethan English law was peine forte et dure: pressing under heavy weights until either a plea was entered or death resulted. She was pressed in the toll-booth on Ouse Bridge in York on the morning of Good Friday, March 25, 1586. She died in fifteen minutes under a board loaded with seven hundredweight of stones. She was thirty years old, and pregnant.

Legacy

Margaret Clitherow was the only English woman pressed to death under the Elizabethan recusant statutes and one of only a small number of women in any era subject to peine forte et dure. The court that condemned her was so disturbed by the impending execution that one of the judges withdrew and refused to sign the warrant. Her shrine in the Shambles in York, in a half-timbered house close to the spot where she lived, is one of the most-visited recusant pilgrimage sites in northern England. She was canonized as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales by Pope Paul VI in 1970.