Margaret Clitherow

Margaret Clitherow (née Middleton, c. 1556 – 25 March 1586) was an English Catholic recusant known as The Pearl of York. She was pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea to the charge of harbouring Catholic priests. She was canonised in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.

Life Margaret Clitherow was born in 1556, the youngest child of Thomas and Jane Middleton née Turner. Her father, a respected freeman, was a businessman who worked as a wax-chandler. He also held the office of Sheriff of York, in 1564, and was churchwarden of St Martin's Church, Coney Street between 1555 and 1558. 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 and she learned to read and write while incarcerated. A frightened boy revealed the location of the priest hole.

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. She was 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 7 or 8 hundredweight of rocks and stones, The English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem honouring "God's daughter Margaret Clitheroe." The poem, entitled "Margaret Clitheroe" was among fragments and unfinished poems of Hopkins discovered after his death and has been called "a tribute to the woman, to her faith and courage, and to the manner of her death".

Clitherow was beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI and canonised on 25 October 1970 by Pope Paul VI among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Their feast day in the current Roman Catholic calendar is 4 May in England and 25 October in Wales. She is also commemorated in England on 30 August, along with martyrs Anne Line and Margaret Ward. The three were officially added to the Episcopal Church liturgical calendar with a feast day on 30 August.

A relic, said to be her hand, is housed in the Bar Convent in York. However, the street was re-numbered in the 18th century, so it is thought their house was actually opposite.

Several schools in England are named after her, including those in Bracknell, Brixham, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Thamesmead SE28, Brent, London NW10 and Tonbridge. The Roman Catholic primary school in Nottingham's Bestwood estate is named after Clitherow. Another school named after her is St Margaret Clitherow RC Primary School, located next to Stevenage Borough Football Club.

The York Catholic secondary school, All Saints, has a form named after the martyr. As it shares its chapel with the Bar Convent also houses her left hand, the school was the first English school founded exclusively to educate Catholic girls. It fulfils St Margaret Clitherow's ambition to educate in the word of God, as she associated with the virtue of truth.

In the United States, St Margaret of York Church and School in Loveland, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, is also named after her.

She is a co-patroness of the Latin Mass Society, which organises an annual pilgrimage to York in her honour. A group of parishes in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Liverpool, Sacred Heart in Hindsford, St Richard's in Atherton, Holy Family in Boothstown, St Ambrose Barlow in Astley, St Gabriel's and Higher Folds in Leigh are now united as a single community with St Margaret Clitherow as its patron. The former parishes of Sacred Heart and Holy Family in Rochdale in the Diocese of Salford have also been united under the patronage of St Margaret.

In 2008, a commemorative plaque was installed at the Micklegate end of York's Ouse Bridge to mark the site of her martyrdom. The Bishop of Middlesbrough unveiled it in a ceremony on 29 August 2008.

Clitherow is the subject of the play Design for a Stained Glass Window by William Berney and Howard Richardson, which played briefly on Broadway in 1950. Martha Scott played Clitherow, with Charlton Heston as her husband and Charles Nolte as her brother-in-law William.