Saint Margaret Clitherow

She was born Margaret Middleton, in York, in about 1556; the York Oratory and the Grahame Park parish give the year as 1556 without qualification. ¹²³ Her father, Thomas Middleton, was a wax-chandler and served as Sheriff of York in 1564 and 1565. ¹ She was raised a Protestant. ³

On July 8, 1571, at St. Martin's church in Coney Street, she married John Clitherow, a well-off butcher who served as one of the city's chamberlains. ¹ She was about fifteen. ³ They lived in the Shambles, the butchers' street, which the encyclopedia in 1908 called "still unaltered." ¹ Her husband stayed in the Established Church all his life, though he had a brother who was a priest. ¹ The Grahame Park parish calls the marriage a happy one and says John was sympathetic to her faith. ³

About three years after the wedding, in 1574, she became a Catholic. ¹²³ At the time, as the York Oratory puts it, it was treason to be a Catholic priest in England or to shelter one. ² She did both things that were forbidden: she kept priests and she had Mass said. ¹

The encyclopedia says she kept two rooms for the purpose, one next to her house and another elsewhere in the city, where priests were hidden and Mass was "continually celebrated through the thick of the persecution." ¹ The York Oratory says Mass was said above the family's shop, and adds that she ran a small school to teach the faith to children. ² She was imprisoned again and again, the encyclopedia says "sometimes for two years at a time," and the parish adds that her husband was heavily fined for what she did. ¹³

Some of the priests she knew were executed. The encyclopedia says that she wanted the same death "above all things," and that she made secret pilgrimages by night to the gallows at York Tyburn to pray beneath it for that grace. ¹

The house was raided in 1586. ²³ The parish says the priest got away, but that a frightened boy staying with the family told the searchers what they wanted to know, and that vestments and altar bread were found. ³ She was arrested on March 10 and arraigned on March 14 before the judges at the York assizes, charged with harboring priests and hearing Mass. ¹

She refused to plead, and the sources give different reasons. The encyclopedia says it was because the only witnesses against her would have been "her own little children and servants, whom she could not bear to involve in the guilt of her death." ¹ The York Oratory says she did not want to expose her family, friends or the children of her school to giving evidence, in which they "may have betrayed others or denied their faith in public." ² The Grahame Park parish quotes a member of the Knights of St Columba who believes she was protecting her husband. ³

The law for a prisoner who would not plead was the peine forte et dure: to be pressed to death. ¹ "God be thanked, I am not worthy of so good a death as this," she said. ¹ The parish quotes her words to a friend after the sentence: "I feel the weakness of my flesh which is troubled at this news, but my spirit rejoices greatly. For the love of God, pray for me." ³

The sentence was carried out on March 25, 1586, Lady Day, the feast of the Annunciation. ¹² The York Oratory says it was also Good Friday; the encyclopedia says it was Good Friday "according to New Style," a qualification the Oratory does not make. ¹² The encyclopedia says she was probably pregnant. ¹ She had spent the night before in "an agony of fear," it records, but in the morning she was "calm, joyous, and smiling." ¹ She walked barefoot to the tollbooth on Ouse Bridge, having sent her shoes and stockings to her daughter Anne as a sign that Anne should follow her. ¹

Asked once more to confess her crimes, she answered: "No, no, Mr. Sheriff, I die for the love of my Lord Jesu." ¹ She was laid on the ground with a sharp stone under her back and her arms stretched out and tied in the form of a cross, and a door was laid on her and weighted until she died. ¹ It took about fifteen minutes. ¹³ Her last words were "Jesu! Jesu! Jesu! have mercy on me!" ¹³

Her sons Henry and William became priests, and Anne became a nun at St. Ursula's in Louvain. ¹ The York Oratory says Henry trained abroad and came back to work on the English mission. ²

Where her body lies is unknown. ¹ The parish says it was likely buried in secret to keep it from being venerated, and that about six weeks later, by tradition, it was taken up, a hand removed, and the body reburied with reverence somewhere hidden. ³ The encyclopedia placed her right hand at St. Mary's Convent, York; the York Oratory and the parish say the hand is venerated at the Bar Convent. ¹²³

There is a shrine to her in the Shambles where Mass is said every Saturday. ² The parish notes that the street was renumbered in the eighteenth century and her real house was probably the one opposite. ³ Her confessor, John Mush, wrote her life, which survives in two versions. ¹ Pius XI beatified her in 1929, and Paul VI canonized her on October 25, 1970. ²³

None of the sources used for this page names a patronage for Saint Margaret Clitherow, so this page does not list one. ¹²³ The York Oratory calls her "one of the best known and loved of the English Martyrs." ² John Paul II, preaching in York in 1982, named her among the "holy women" who "inspire women today to take their rightful place in the life of the Church," and said that for many people, "as for Margaret Clitheroe," God's call "comes in and through marriage and family life." ⁴

She is honored with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, whose feast the York Oratory gives as May 4 in England and October 25 in Wales. ² The Oratory adds that she is also commemorated in England on August 30. ²

John Paul II brought her up at a Mass for families, which is worth noticing. ⁴ She was a wife and a mother of young children, running a household in a busy street, and the risks she took were taken from inside that life. ¹²

Her refusal to plead was, on every reading the sources give, a decision about other people: the children who would have been made to testify, the servants and pupils, perhaps her husband. ¹²³ She took the worst death the law offered to keep them out of it.

She was not fearless. The encyclopedia says she spent her last night in an agony of fear, and she told a friend that her flesh was troubled. ¹³ By morning she was smiling. ¹ Both are part of the record, and neither cancels the other.

There is no comfortable lesson in how she died. What the sources leave is a woman who kept faith with God and with the people in her house at the same time, and who would not trade one for the other.