St Margaret of York

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Margaret Clitherow, a butcher’s wife from York, was one of only three women martyred by the Elizabethan state. Her execution in 1586 was considered gruesome, even by the standards of the time. Peter Lake and Michael Questier tell her story.

'The Martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow', from Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum Nostri Temporis by Richard Verstegan, Antwerp, 1587On March 25th, 1586, naked but for a linen shift, Margaret Clitherow was crushed to death in the Toll Booth on the Ouse Bridge in the city of York. The sanction was known as the peine forte et dure. She was, we are told, ‘in dying one quarter of an hour. A sharp stone, as much as a man’s fist’, was ‘put under her back’. Upon her, or rather, onto the door placed over her, were put stones ‘to the quantity of seven or eight hundred weight at the least, which, breaking her ribs, caused them to burst forth of the skin’.

Sentence had been pronounced against her in highly controversial circumstances a few days before. While Clitherow and the sheriff, Mr Fawcett, bickered in her last moments over whether she died as a martyr for Christian faith and the true (Catholic) church or as a traitor to her husband, children and country, the undersheriff, Mr Gibson, stood sobbing in the doorway. Clitherow’s was an extraordinary fate – she was one of only three women martyred by the Elizabethan state – and her execution was the product of an extraordinary confluence of circumstances. The proceedings against her had spun out of control, culminating in a show trial, which backfired against the local regime that initiated it and gained both sympathy and notoriety for Mrs Clitherow herself.
Margaret Clitherow (born c.1552) was a butcher’s wife and a relatively well connected member of York society. Her stepfather, Henry May, was a coming man. A protégé of the so-called ‘Puritan Earl’ and lord president of the council of the North, Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon, May’s rapid and seemingly irresistible rise took him to the lord mayoralty of York in early 1586.
York might have been the seat of royal government in the North, but it also harboured many prominent Catholics among its governing elite. These were people whose Catholicism was often as covert as it was enduring. Many Catholics had gone along to get along, mimicking conformity to the national Church while they continued to harbour Catholic beliefs and contacts. Sometimes they slipped over the line into overt separation and then lapsed back again into some form of conformity (compliance with the 1559 Act of Uniformity) in order to avoid the toils of the law and to retain their hold on local office and influence.

Blessed release

From the 1570s a core of ‘recusants’ (refusers) emerged, people who would not attend the services of the heretical church at any price. Mrs Clitherow was one of these. Her recalcitrance was established in the face of (but also, ironically, in part enabled by) the conformity of her husband, John Clitherow, who paid the fines levied on her for her disobedience and seems to have tolerated, without enthusiasm, her periodic spells in prison. Clitherow herself appears to have regarded her confinements as a blessed release from her taxing daily round as a wife, mother and local businesswoman. She used her time in jail, among other things, to teach herself to read.
In spite of her husband’s conformity, Clitherow’s house in the Shambles became a centre of Catholic activity. It functioned as a safe house for priests who had been trained in the new seminaries on the Continent; it also served as a small Catholic school. It was a place where Mass was said and confessions were heard.
Clitherow’s refusal to go to church and her consequent periods of imprisonment ensured that her defiance was a matter of public knowledge. But in the early 1580s, as the authorities’ crackdown on Catholic separatism intensified and many of the priests she harboured were arrested, indicted for treason and hanged, drawn and quartered at the Knavesmire (the usual site of public execution in York), her non-compliance became more overt. It culminated in her making regular night-time pilgrimages to the  Knavesmire itself. According to John Mush, the priest who acted as Clitherow’s confessor for the last two years of her life, here she would kneel and pray at the killing ground for as long as the nerves of her accomplices would allow her: a semi-private devotion but also an extremely bold, semi-public and provocative performance.
Mush’s subsequent account of Mrs Clitherow’s life, The Life and Death of Mistris Margaret Clitherow, on which much of this narrative is based, suggests that her existence in the butcher’s shop in the Shambles in York was not one of unmitigated serenity. He muttered darkly about the crosses she had to bear on account of her marriage. More controversial was Mush’s claim that Clitherow’s gestures of defiance, her public performances of principled Catholic recalcitrance, were directed not only at the Protestant authorities. They were aimed also at her fellow Catholics who had taken the line of least (or less) resistance and in some sense had conformed to the demands of the regime: in other words, obeying to various extents the requirements of the Act of Uniformity. Such people did not see themselves as having sold out. But that was precisely what more zealous Catholics thought that they had done. Indeed, the more extreme among them insisted that attendance at the services of the national Church constituted the heinous sin of schism. This had, for example, been a central claim in the recent mission of the two Jesuits, Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons. Campion had passed through York a few years earlier. Mrs Clitherow would not have met him because she was in prison at the time but her public defiance clearly rendered her something of a poster girl for these rigorist clergy, a standing rebuke to her less confrontational co-religionists. It did not make her popular with those quieter Catholics whose position she challenged. John Mush reports that some of them responded to her Christian admonition on this subject with the equally charitable suggestion that her confrontational stance was making matters worse by attracting the hostile attention of the authorities, while depriving her husband and children of the services of a wife and mother.
Illustration from 'A Thankfull Remembrance of God's Mercy' by George Carlton, 1627, showing the Jesuits Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion at a monstery. Parsons holds a papal licence. Campion is also show on a gallows in the background his ultimate fate. British MuseumSo bitter did these clashes of opinion become that they provoked a series of rumours that Mrs Clitherow was far too close to her priestly house guests and far too disobedient to her husband to qualify as the sort of saint that her supporters said she was. Claims to heightened sanctity were met with accusations of hypocrisy, pride and corruption.
By the mid-1580s Mrs Clitherow had become a local cause célèbre. For their part, the authorities were armed with new anti-Catholic legislation passed during the 1585 Parliament and they now decided to move against her. In this they were responding both to the obvious tensions within the local Catholic community and to the activism of a minority of that group. They were also, undoubtedly, considering the recent spate of plotting against Elizabeth in favour of Mary Stuart, underwritten by Mary’s Guise relatives in France and some of the representatives of the Spanish monarchy, plotting that threatened the security of the English Protestant state.
In Margaret Clitherow’s case wider national and international issues were refracted through the micro-politics, indeed through the family politics, of York. The death of her mother and the rise of her step-father, Henry May, to the mayoralty deprived Mrs Clitherow of a major source of protection and gave the ambitious May a personal as well as an ideological motive to put her in her place. Accordingly, on March 10th, 1586 John Clitherow was suddenly summoned to appear before the Council of the North (as he thought, to answer for the fact that his wife had sent their son abroad to be educated). In fact this was a ruse to get him out of the way while his house was searched. The resident priest and the schoolmaster managed to escape but Mrs Clitherow and a large amount of liturgical paraphernalia were seized. Margaret was charged with the new capital offence of harbouring priests. Since the priest had vanished, the only witness against her was a 14-year-old boy who had been frightened into admitting that she had been harbouring seminary clergy.
The authorities decided that Mrs Clitherow should be brought to book in a show trial designed to demonstrate to the Catholics of the North the price of defying the law. It is unclear whether the ultimate aim was to kill her or frighten her into some sort of submission. Presumably the latter was the preferred option, but the former must have been an acceptable outcome if she proved obstinate. That was precisely what she proved to be, not merely by refusing to conform but by refusing to plead to the charge against her at all. Margaret’s refusal to be tried by jury left the authorities with no legal option but to punish her by the medieval torture of being pressed beneath weights until either she submitted with a plea or she died.

Reasons for resistance

Why exactly did Margaret Clitherow resist in this way? In public she claimed that her decision not to plead was motivated by Christian charity; she did not want her blood to be on the consciences of the jurors. It seems she anticipated (and local historical research supports this) that, if she did comply with established court procedure, some of the more conformist of York’s Catholics (exactly the ones who tended to criticise her zeal) would have been empanelled as jurors to sit in judgment on her, in the formal legal sense but in a moral sense, too. This was something she absolutely would not countenance.
Clitherow’s refusal to plead entirely turned the tables on the authorities. Seeking a trial to demonstrate the extent of local popish superstition and sedition and to illustrate the price of further defiance, the authorities got more than they bargained for. They got the trial but it was now one that could all too easily be used to demonstrate the tyranny of the regime, as it prepared to have an innocent wife and mother pressed to death, in effect without a trial at all.
This situation seems to have caused considerable consternation on the bench. The judges redoubled their efforts to get Margaret to bend before the law. She was visited in prison by some of York’s godliest Protestant clergy, at least one of whom, a Puritan, Giles Wigginton, may even have felt some sympathy for her. Members of her family tried to persuade her to bow to authority. Even her stepfather, now aware of just how bad things were beginning to look, went down on his knees, begging her to make some small gesture towards conformity, so that he could get her  freed. One of the judges, John Clench, was clear in his own mind that the case against Clitherow was sufficiently weak, that if she would just agree to be tried, she would indeed get off.
But Clitherow was having none of it. It was put to her that she might be pregnant, on which grounds she might at least be reprieved. A jury of women was convened to examine her and they gave it as their opinion that she probably was with child. Still Clitherow would not capitulate beyond saying that she might be, but that it was for others to decide.
At this point Clench began to insist that they could not execute a pregnant woman. But then, if they took this course, Clitherow would have appeared to have won. Whether she was pregnant or not, some of the hard men on the Council in the North insisted that she had to die. Mush narrates a scene in which some of the more hawkish members of the council crowded in on Clench in his chamber one evening and told him in no uncertain terms that the death sentence would be carried out whether he liked it or not. Ralph Hurlestone added that, if Clitherow was pregnant, then let the sin of the child’s death be upon his own conscience. And so the affair played itself out to its grisly conclusion in the Tollbooth.
Throughout, Mrs Clitherow played the martyr with alacrity and conviction. It was a role for which she had been prepared by watching various of her priestly mentors and charges go to their deaths at the Knavesmire. At one point Mush told her that, if she continued to behave as she was doing, she should prepare herself for martyrdom. Her conduct at her trial suggests that she had taken these words to heart. She made a point of displaying a smiling insouciance in the face of the authorities and her likely fate.

True martyr or merry devil

The result was a series of contradictory verdicts on her behaviour. Some said she had become suffused with the Holy Spirit and was dying a true martyr’s death. Others claimed that her smiles showed she had been possessed by a ‘merry devil’ and that her recalcitrance represented little short of suicide. When her fate was sealed, in a last desperate attempt to spin the affair in their favour, the authorities had recourse to the tactic of circulating rumours about her. Her stepfather had even spread claims that her spiritual closeness to the priests had taken a carnal, expressly sexual form. In other words, Margaret Clitherow’s disobedience to her husband and disregard for her children had produced a literal infidelity, as the unruly wife and undutiful mother morphed into a fully fledged adulteress and whore, just as contemporary gender ideology predicted it would. This was an attempt to turn Mrs Clitherow’s indifference in the face of her imminent doom, her consummate performance of the martyr’s role, into its polar opposite. It was based on various entirely antithetical accounts of her character that had been circulating among both the Protestants and, crucially, the Catholics of York over the previous few years.
The resulting debates produced the text by John Mush. The Life and Death of Mistris Margarit Clitherow reproduces a great many of the rumours about her. It does so in order to refute them and, of course, in so doing grants us a remarkable insight into the micro-politics of York in the mid-1580s. Mush’s text was designed to confirm Clitherow as a martyr and a saint, the holiness of whose life and death established once and for all the truth of the Catholic rigorism that she had espoused from the moment of her first conversion in the mid-1570s. The account, a masterpiece in its way, was a polemical work directed not only at the regime that had put her to death but also at her less zealous Catholic neighbours, those who were failing to live up to her example and who had actively participated in the smear campaigns against her with slurs of disobedience, selfishness and sexual impurity.
In this light Clitherow emerges as a victim of a frankly intolerant regime. Yet, as we have seen, the events of early 1586 did not occur in a vacuum. It is possible to make the case that Clitherow and her friends’ separatism was political as much as religious (in that those two terms can ever really be kept apart in this period). For example, Mush’s account of Clitherow was only one of a number of manuscript works written by him in the 1580s. It has been possible to prove nearly conclusively that at least two other anonymous major polemical pieces were also penned by him between 1586 and 1588; one is a biting denunciation of the Earl of Huntingdon’s government in the North as a brutal tyranny; the other is a scathing attack on Catholics who were prepared to offer a measure of religious conformity and to claim, on that basis, that they were politically loyal to the queen and were also good Catholics. Significantly, this latter piece, which in effect called on all good Catholics to reject the authority of a heretical and persecuting regime, was completed on  May 10th, 1588, only weeks before the Armada appeared in the English Channel.
In 1587 a depiction of Clitherow’s fate appeared in a tract by Richard Verstegan, a polemicist who worked for what was known as the Holy Catholic League, the union of Frenchmen, supported by Philip II of Spain, who opposed the accession to the French throne of a heretic, Henry of Navarre, in succession to the last of the Valois, Henry III. Included in the same tract was a drawing of the execution of Mary Stuart. The Elizabethan regime could hardly be blamed if and when it concluded that it had to defend itself against popish plotting, whether it was being mounted in places such as York or to fulfil the global ambitions of the Spanish monarchy.
All this serves to point to the wider stakes involved in the Clitherow case. On the one hand it is tempting to see Margaret Clitherow – as a range of earlier commentators have seen her – as a victim, not merely of the tyranny and oppression of the Elizabethan state in general and of Huntingdon’s regime in the North in particular but also, in some sense, of her own clerical minders. Some have argued that, in effect, they manipulated and exploited the natural piety of a simple and unlettered woman to vindicate their own rigorist version of a wholly recusant Catholicism and the cult of martyrdom that underwrote it. She was, after all, heavily influenced by an ardent style of Counter-Reformation piety. After her death Mush sought to enlist her example in his own ideological crusades.
But Clitherow also emerges from Mush’s narrative as someone wholly aware of the stakes, spiritual, individual and political, for which she was playing. Both the form and the timing of her death were a direct product of her own choices, choices which a whole range of people begged and bullied her to reverse but to which, alone in her prison cell and finally in the Toll Booth, she remained true. At the end, we might think of her as almost entirely the mistress of her own fate: fully aware of what her trial and death could be made to mean, convinced that her eternal salvation was at stake and that she was dying for the true faith. In so doing, she certainly believed that she was giving a much needed example to her contemporaries while sending her own soul directly to heaven; thus she shaped her end with all the determination, grace and passive aggression required of a ‘saint’ and martyr.
Yet if she died a victim of a persecuting regime she was also, as we have seen, a victim of the wider political situation of the early to mid-1580s. The significance of this horrible episode is that it enables historians, at the very least, to say something meaningful about the processes of the later English Reformation. It allows us to eavesdrop into the micro-political world of religious change in post-Reformation England. If Mush had not written this account we would have no idea about the traumatic and tension-filled world of gender and family politics that framed Margaret Clitherow’s experience of religious change in Elizabethan York. In fact, if the execution had not happened and we knew about Mrs Clitherow at all, we would probably regard her as just another rather pig-headed, if not empty-headed, recusant wife of a conforming husband. In this scenario she would be a perfect illustration of how there was a kind of continuity of Catholic-style religion in places such as York, regulated by the Protestant authorities but also superintended and controlled through the mechanisms of marriage and other types of family relationship. This, then, would be a perfect exemplar of how moderate the English Reformation was, something that many scholars have taken to be the crowning achievement of the Elizabethan Settlement.
In the world of Margaret Clitherow, however, this is not how things were; and Mush’s account of her life describes the fractious internal politics of the post-Reformation Catholic community as it tried to respond to the regime’s demands for obedience in matters of religion. Some Catholics wanted to accept the conformist olive branch offered to them by the regime, some did not; still others were unsure what to do. But Margaret Clitherow’s fate, and indeed her subsequent identity as a saint and a martyr (she was beatified in 1929 and canonised in 1970 as one of the 40 martyrs of England and Wales) showed the dangers inherent in playing politics with people’s consciences and in redrawing the already contested line between religion and politics, between secular allegiance and religious identity: an issue that is as intractable today as it proved to be in York during the 1580s.

Peter Lake and Michael Questier are the authors of The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (Continuum, 2011).