The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (review)

Margaret Clitherow was executed in York on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1586, by the ancient, barbaric method of peine fort et dure because she had refused to plead to the indictment brought against her of harboring a seminary priest—an act that, under the statute of 1585, was deemed to be a felony. Such an outcome to her trial was entirely expected, and for the Protestant regime in the persons of the earl of Huntingdon and the Council of the North, it was highly embarrassing. The execution of a young, pregnant woman—the wife of a respected tradesman, mother of a young family, and stepdaughter of the mayor—by stripping her and then crushing her to death under a heavy door, weighed down by rocks, was an act, irrespective of its legality, which could never be construed in a favorable light. They were so embarrassed by this outcome that they had her executed early in the morning with only the minimum number of necessary witnesses and executioners present. Nor did the Catholics come out of it well; to have allowed the case to get so out of hand was utterly irresponsible. Their first reaction was to construct Clitherow as a martyr. Her spiritual adviser, the seminary priest John Mush, immediately began to write an account of her life, trial, and death in the form of her Vita for circulation within the community. Titled "A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow," it is the only source (other than a brief, illustrated account by Richard Verstegan) that we have of the woman and the events that culminated in her execution. In it, she emerges as a symbolic figure; a shining example of Catholic womanhood whose virtuous life ended in a martyr's death at the hands of the antichrist of the Protestant Church. Margaret Clitherow, the flesh-and-blood woman, was thus transfigured into an iconic figure of Mush's making.

Peter Lake and Michael Questier take Mush's manuscript account and, drawing upon the analysis and commentaries of scholars, in particular the meticulous work of Katherine Longley, use it as the starting point of their investigation—hence the title of the book. They argue that, by reading Mush's narrative "against the grain," it is possible to uncover and identify in it the arguments about conformity that had, at the time of the trial, split the Catholic community into two bitterly opposing factions as they attempted to reconcile the demands of conscience with their sovereign's demand for obedience in the matter of church attendance. Such a reading, they maintain, in exposing how readily the Protestants exploited this rift, also reveals the ideological disputes that were challenging the English Protestant community in the second half of the sixteenth century.

To some extent they succeed in this, but not entirely. They demonstrate efficiently the intrinsic political radicalism of Catholic recusancy and its impact on contemporary political and social orders. Their examination of the respective strategies of the two Catholic factions, represented by the seminary priest Mush and the Jesuit Henry Garnet on the one hand and by the eventual defector to Protestantism Thomas Bell on the other, dominates the second part of the book and is particularly well researched and handled. They conclude that these same entrenched, diametrically opposed arguments lay at the heart of the later Archpriest Controversy.

This is not, however, a book about Margaret Clitherow; it is a study of the religious politics of the Elizabethan period. Her case was, and is still, well known, and it is therefore an attractive starting point. However, the enigmatic figure and case of Clitherow and Mush's manuscript account constitute too problematic and fragile a source on which to build such a detailed and complex analysis...