Margaret Ward

Life and Ministry

Margaret Ward was a gentlewoman of Cheshire, born about AD 1550, in the service of a Lady Whitall in London during the AD 1580s, and a known recusant Catholic. She regularly visited the Catholic priests held in Bridewell Prison, including a young secular priest named William Watson who had been confined and tortured there since AD 1586 and was breaking under the strain. To rescue him she arranged for a rope to be smuggled into the prison concealed in a basket of supplies, and on the night of the escape (10 August AD 1588) waited with a boatman she had hired below the prison wall.

Circumstances of Death

Watson made it down the rope but injured himself in the descent and broke his arm; the noise of the fall woke the guards. Ward managed to lead him to her hired boat and away across the Thames, but the rope was traced to her purchase, and she was arrested the next day. Examined at Bridewell and ordered to reveal Watson's whereabouts, she refused. She was whipped, hanged by the wrists for nine days at a stretch in the manacles, and finally told that she would be released if she would attend the Anglican service at Bridewell chapel; she refused this also. She was tried at the Old Bailey for the felony of aiding and abetting the escape of a priest from prison, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn on 30 August AD 1588 with the laymen John Roche (her boatman), Richard Lloyd, John Beche, and Edward Shelley.

Legacy

Margaret Ward was canonized in AD 1970 with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Her witness is the witness of the laywoman whose Catholic loyalty was not a private interior conviction but a practical engagement with the persecuted clergy — she did not preach, she rescued. She is the patron, in a particular sense, of the small concrete deeds done at risk of life for the imprisoned: the smuggled rope, the boat ready at the riverside, the nine days of refusal to give a name. The Pearl of Tyburn was the pearl she had bought at the cost of her own life — and the priest she saved went on saying Mass for another fifty years.