page_title: Margaret Clitherow
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Clitherow / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: The Black Swan, Peasholme Green, York.
context_page_description: Saint Margaret Clitherow is an English saint and martyr of the Roman Catholic Church, sometimes called "the Pearl of York". She was pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea to the charge of harbouring Catholic priests, and canonised in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.
context_section_description: Margaret Clitherow  was born in 1556, one of five children of Thomas and Jane Middleton. Her father was a respected businessman, a wax-chandler and Sheriff of York in 1564, who died when Margaret was fourteen. In 1571, she married John Clitherow, a wealthy butcher and a chamberlain of the city, and bore him three children; the family lived in The Shambles.
  She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1574. Although her husband, John Clitherow, 
  belonged to the Established Church, he was supportive as his brother William was a Roman Catholic priest. He paid her fines for not attending church services. She was first imprisoned in 1577 for failing to attend church, and two more incarcerations at York Castle followed. Her third child, William, was born in prison.
  Margaret risked her life by harbouring and maintaining priests, which was made a capital offence by the Jesuits, etc. Act 1584.  She provided two chambers, one adjoining her house and, with her house under surveillance, she rented a house some distance away, where she kept priests hidden and Mass was celebrated through the thick of the persecution. Her home became one of the most important hiding places for fugitive priests in the north of England. Local tradition holds that she also housed her clerical guests in the Black Swan Inn at Peaseholme Green, where the Queen's agents were lodged.
  She sent her older son, Henry, to the English College, relocated in Reims, to train for the priesthood. Her husband was summoned by the authorities to explain why his oldest son had gone abroad, and in March 1586 the Clitherow house was searched. A frightened boy revealed the location of the priest hole.
  Margaret was arrested and called before the York assizes for the crime of harbouring Roman Catholic priests. She refused to plead, thereby preventing a trial that would entail her three children being made to testify, and being subjected to torture. Although pregnant with her fourth child, she was executed on Lady Day, 1586, (which also happened to be Good Friday that year) in the Toll Booth at Ouse Bridge, by being crushed to death by her own door, the standard inducement to force a plea.
  The two sergeants who should have carried out the execution hired four desperate beggars to do it instead. She was stripped and had a handkerchief tied across her face then laid across a sharp rock the size of a man's fist, the door from her own house was put on top of her and loaded with an immense weight of rocks and stones so that the sharp rock would break her back. Her death occurred within fifteen minutes, but her body was left for six hours before the weight was removed.
caption: The Black Swan, Peasholme Green, York
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