Introduction

Abstract

Before Margaret Clitherow, a York butcher’s wife who harboured priests and was well-known for her unfaltering adherence to Catholicism, was executed on 25 March 1586 she sent her hose and shoes to her eldest daughter as a reminder to serve God and to follow in her virtuous steps. This final advice was not lost on the 12-year-old Anne who subsequently ran away from home, and after imprisonment for her religious beliefs, travelled overseas to become an Augustinian nun in 1598. Both John Mush, her mother’s confessor and biographer, and her religious sisters in Louvain recognised the symmetry in the lives of Margaret and Anne Clitherow. The martyr had given up her family and her life for her faith, and Anne likewise relinquished her kin to ‘die to the world’ through a life

You may tell unto men, how dishonourable a thing it were unto them, for a woman produced out of the weakest part of nature, to outgoe them not onlie in morall, and supernaturall verrues; but in suffring death also for the constant profession of the Catholike faith: and before woemen you may advance this royall standard of your victorious Mother, inviting them like stoute Amazons, to bidde batayle unto the worlde, and their spirituall enemies. For I doe not reade of a more heroicall act performed by any either in our time or many ages before, then this of your Mother. Wherefore we have just cause to say, that yow are nobly discended, since yow are the daughter of her, whom God hath inriched with the crowne of Martyrdome, you tracing her steppes in a most contemplative course of lyfe: In which I do wish you, the increase of spiritt, and perseverance.

(John Mush, An Abstracte of the Life and Martirdome of Mistres Margaret Clitherow)¹