Margaret Clitherow

In the life of Margaret Clitherow (b. 1552/3–d. 1586), international Counter-Reformation piety met English national and provincial politics and led to the creation of a Catholic martyr. She was born Margaret Middleton in predominantly Protestant York and in 1571 married a widowed butcher and father of two, John Clitherow. By the end of 1574 she had given him at least two more children but had also embraced Catholicism, refusing to attend prescribed Protestant services. This recusancy resulted in three prison terms, each of six months or more, in 1577–1578, 1580–1581, and 1583–1584. She was particularly inspired by the heroism of missionary priests from the English seminaries in Continental Europe and made a point of sheltering them at the family home in York’s Shambles. One such was John Mush, who returned from Rome to England in 1583 and became her spiritual director from c. 1584. The 1585 Act against Jesuits and seminary priests made it a capital felony to harbor such clerics: the sentence could be death. On 10 March 1586 the Clitherows’ house was searched, evidence of Catholic worship was found and Margaret arrested. Her trial followed four days later, though it was for her refusal to enter a plea that she was sentenced to death peine forte et dure, being crushed to death. Her stepfather was then serving as York’s lord mayor, so it was a high-profile case in a close-knit community. Every effort was made to prevent the law taking its course, but Margaret would not be dissuaded from the path of martyrdom. The sentence was executed on 25 March, crushed to death under a door loaded with weights. Mush was among those who buried her body; he then wrote a life of the martyr. That Life is integral to all subsequent developments: popular Catholic devotion to the “Pearl of York,” her inclusion among the lives of the martyred priests, the opening of a formal process in 1874, beatification by Pius XI in 1929, and canonization—as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales—by Paul VI in 1970. Apart from the pious and the scholarly, there are few obvious divisions within the literature on Margaret Clitherow: Reference Works and an Overview derive from John Mush’s Life. Other Lives either parallel Mush or follow in his wake, though there are many other sources for wider studies of Recusancy in Yorkshire. For the martyr’s Trial and Death one must rely on Mush and his sources. His failure to locate the place of her burial has had diverse consequences, as conveyed in the final section of the present article, Burial and Legacy.