by Nick Holland
Dorothy Vavasour was the wife of a man who had become the most famous Catholic in York: Dr Thomas Vavasour. The Vavasours were a well established family in Yorkshire, and Thomas studied first at Cambridge University and then in Venice before becoming a licensed physician. He was most known for being a vociferous Catholic who had spoken out against Elizabeth and her reforms. This made him a prime target for Henry Hastings, but Dr Vavasour eluded him time and time again, sometimes having fled from York and at other times hiding within his own house.
With her husband so often away, or at least appearing to be away, Dorothy Vavasour had to make her own way in the world, and she did this by becoming an unofficial midwife for the women of York. It was commonly whispered, however, that Dorothy was herself an ardent Catholic who not only helped women prepare for childbirth but also indoctrinated them in the Catholic faith.
It’s intriguing to note that the infamous Vavasours of York whose fate became entwined with Margaret Clitherow may also have been related to Guy Fawkes, with an Anthony Fawkes of York marrying Frances Vavasour of Weston in the first half of the sixteenth century. After Anthony’s death in 1551, Frances married Philip Bainbridge of Wheatley Hall.9 Their son Denis would later become stepfather to Guy Fawkes.
It was to Dorothy Vavasour that Margaret Clitherow turned to as she prepared to give birth to her first two children, a son Henry named after his godfather Henry May, and a daughter Anne. It seems inconceivable that Margaret didn’t know of Dorothy’s reputation, so it could be assumed that she had already begun to think of converting to Catholicism, perhaps in response to the growing persecution of the faith.
The truth of the matter was that the Vavasour house was not simply one where pregnant women could find help, rest and advice, it was a clandestine centre for Catholic mass. Dorothy, and her husband Thomas when in residence, sheltered priests there and did all they could to spread their faith while at the same time avoiding capture. It was a dangerous tightrope to walk.
In 1574 the Vavasour house was raided, not for the first time, but on this occasion Dr Thomas Vavasour gave himself up for arrest. This resulted in imprisonment for both Thomas and Dorothy, with Thomas adjudged to be too dangerous to be kept in York and transferred to Hull Castle. He had influential connections, however, and was later released, only to be imprisoned twice more before eventually dying in Hull Castle in May 1585.
Dorothy’s stay in the York Castle prison was a brief one on this occasion, but the raid, arrests and imprisonment of her friend stirred Margaret Clitherow’s growing beliefs in Catholicism. Shortly before her death, Margaret avowed that she had ‘been within the Catholic faith twelve years’. That is, her final conversion to Catholicism, the step that Guy Fawkes took in 1586, happened in 1574, after the arrest and imprisonment of Dorothy Vavasour.
As with converts to many different faiths throughout the centuries, Margaret’s faith was unshakeable and stronger than many of those who had been born into Catholicism, and she refused to attend Church of England masses from that moment onwards. It was this act that would lead to Margaret’s first, but not last, arrest.
Edwin Sandys had taken over as Archbishop of York in 1575, and if anything he was even more puritanical and authoritarian than his predecessor Archbishop Grindal. Within a year of taking his seat, he and the Lord President Henry Hastings demanded that a list of all the recusants in York be put together. There were 67 names on the list, 55 of them women: among them, the butcher’s wife Margaret Clitherow.10
At the women’s trial on 2 August 1577, the husbands were ordered to pay fines and told to ensure that they attended Church of England services in the future. The husbands however, including John Clitherow, refused to pay the fines levied by the court, and while they were taken to be imprisoned in the Kidcote on Ouse Bridge, the women were jailed in the city’s main prison, York Castle.
While it’s true that some prisoners died in York Castle throughout its use as a jail, conditions for the inmates were far less harsh than you might imagine. Inside the castle walls were a collection of dilapidated old buildings, and it is in these that the women were imprisoned, rather than in any kind of cell or dungeon.11 The guards could easily be bribed, and as Catholic priests were also frequently interned there, Catholic prisoners could celebrate mass with more freedom and regularity than they could outside the castle’s walls.12
John Clitherow was released from the Kidcote after three days, but his wife Margaret remained inside York Castle until February 1578 when she was released on bail. Her bail conditions stipulated that she could only leave the house to attend church, but as Margaret refused to enter a Church of England service she remained a prisoner in her own home. Even so, it meant that she was reunited with her young family, and could once more oversee the running of the family business.
If York’s authorities, under constant pressure from Hastings and Sandys, thought this long incarceration would make Margaret Clitherow and others see the error of their ways, they were to be disappointed. If anything, it only served to make Margaret more devout and more rebellious, and the influx of Catholic priests into Yorkshire in the 1580s further fuelled their faith.
At some time in the 1570s, Margaret arranged for a secret room to be built on her Shambles premises above the normal living quarters. The carefully concealed entrance opened into a room containing an altar, books and everything needed for a Catholic mass. The room extended above a neighbour’s house too, but by then Margaret had converted both Millicent and Ellen Calvert to Catholicism too.
In the following years, priests would hold regular Catholic masses above the butcher’s shop on the Shambles. How did Margaret get away with this for so long, and how was the room kept secret, from customers of the shop like the Fawkes family, and possibly even from her own husband John?
John Clitherow was often away on business, or overseeing his farming operations near Cornborough, while others must have simply turned a blind eye to activities in the Shambles, but with agents of Hastings across the city, Margaret was treading a dangerous path.
In their efforts to clamp down on Catholicism in York, Hastings and Archbishop Sandys had adopted a two-pronged approach – people caught harbouring offenders or concealing what they knew could be punished, while rewards were offered to people who helped them catch Catholic priests and those supporting them.
There were plenty of warning signs for Margaret Clitherow to consider, if she chose to: Anne Foster who died in the Ouse Bridge jail, and whose body was then dumped on the bridge because she had refused a Protestant burial;13 Robert Cripling, who was the city’s Lord Mayor in 1579, but that didn’t stop Hastings jailing him for not collecting enough fines from recusants;14 William Hutton, the Protestant church warden, who was jailed with his pregnant wife Mary in April 1581, after being caught attending a Catholic mass at the Vavasour house.15
Rather than being deterred, the 1581 arrest of Dorothy Vavasour spurred Margaret on to open a second mass centre in York in addition to the one that already existed above her home and that of her neighbour. Oral tradition in York states that the new mass centre was at the Black Swan Inn at Peasholme Greene just outside the city centre; a strange choice as a place to harbour priests, as it was also frequently used as lodgings by agents of Queen Elizabeth.16
While these activities went undetected initially, her refusal to attend church could not be explained away, and on 8 March 1583 she was once more arrested. Margaret remained inside York Castle until May 1584, when her husband John was asked to post a bond of one hundred pounds. John was not the only family member who was being put under strain by Margaret’s arrest and reputation, as her stepfather Henry May was rising through the ranks of York society. His concern that she would bring discredit or disgrace to his name, and derail his political career, would have dreadful consequences.
After her release from prison in 1584, Margaret took her subversive activities still further by opening a secret school in her home where local children could be taught the Catholic faith
rather than having to be sent to France, as she had by then done for her own son Henry who was at the English college in Rheims (which had temporarily replaced the Douai college).
This greatly increased the risk that Margaret was taking, as it meant not only relying on her servants and neighbours to keep quiet, but also the pupils. Things came to a head on 9 March 1586. Margaret’s mother Jane had died a year previously, leaving Henry May free to remarry, but it also removed any impediment to him taking action against his step-daughter. Henry was made Lord Mayor of York in January 1586, and one of his primary concerns was how to prevent Margaret from blackening his reputation. Whether he meant to simply frighten Margaret Clitherow into submission or to remove her threat completely we can’t be sure, but it was Henry himself who ordered the March raid on Margaret’s house.17 The priests and the teacher Henry Stapleton escaped through a secret exit, but under pressure from the officials one of the children revealed the entrance to the hidden mass centre.
Margaret’s arrest was the talk of York; surely even her husband’s money couldn’t save her this time?
Margaret was quickly brought to the court, before judges John Clench and Francis Rhodes, who asked her, ‘how will you be tried?’, to which the prisoner replied, ‘I will be tried by none but God and your own consciences.’
Clench and Rhodes blanched at this answer; learned in the law they knew the implication of it much more than Margaret did. If she had pleaded guilty she would have faced a quick and simple execution, and there was always a remote possibility that clemency could be offered. But by refusing to enter a plea, Margaret would automatically be judged guilty, and sentenced to the worst death possible: ‘peine forte et dure’, death by being slowly crushed to death.
Clench especially seemed reluctant to pass this sentence on her and he sent her back to her prison cell, encouraging her to make a plea on the next day. The next day however found Margaret equally stubborn. After arguments in court, Margaret said, ‘I think you have no witnesses against me but children, which with an apple and a rod you may make to say what you will.’
It was at this point that Judge Rhodes spoke out: ‘Why stand we all this day about this naughty, wilful woman? Let us despatch her.’ The terrible sentence of peine forte et dure was pronounced, to which Margaret responded, ‘I thank God heartily for this.’ On her way back to her cell, this time the New Counter prison hanging over the River Ouse, it is said that Margaret handed out money to crowds who had gathered.
Even now, many in authority were reluctant to pass the sentence, possibly through sympathy for the woman who was to die, maybe because of feelings of guilt, or possibly because they were afraid of her becoming a figurehead for the oppressed. It was for this reason that Margaret was questioned as to whether she was pregnant; if she was found to be with child the sentence would be delayed, and in time it may even have been rescinded. The examining midwives pronounced that they did believe Margaret to be pregnant, but Margaret herself said that she was unsure whether she was or wasn’t, and the hope of clemency passed away.
The full sentence stated that the punishment would be as follows: ‘You must return from whence you came, and there, in the lowest part of the prison, be stripped naked, laid down, your back upon the ground, and as much weight laid upon you as you are able to bear, and so continue three days without meat or drink, except a little barley bread and puddle water, and the third day to be pressed to death, your hands and feet tied to posts, and a sharp stone under your back’.18
Despite the wording, it was made clear to Margaret that only the final part of the sentence would be carried out, and that she would not have to spend three days under stones. Nevertheless, the days leading up to the execution must have been ones of dreadful torment and anguish, even to one as sure in her faith as Margaret Clitherow. She spent the time creating a simple gown that she hoped to be allowed to wear, and onto the sleeves of which she helpfully sewed lengths of tape that they could use to tie her to posts.
The day of execution was Friday, 26 March 1586: the Feast of the Annunciation, or Lady Day, a feast day for Catholics who celebrated the Archangel Gabriel’s visit to Mary, and in the Tudor calendar the official start of the new year. Margaret had a short distance to walk from her jail to the tollbooth at the end of the bridge, where she was to be killed, but the gathered crowd was so large that her guards had to push their way through it. En route, once again Margaret handed out money to those she passed.
There would have been no school on that day, so we can easily imagine that the headmaster of St. Peter’s School John Pulleyn would have been among the onlookers. So too would have been Jack and Kit Wright, and with them their friend Guy Fawkes, silent, stern faced, angry, vengeful. This was the moment that twenty years later Guy Fawkes, then undergoing his own tortures, would tell his interrogators made him become a Catholic.
Once in the tollbooth, Margaret was ordered to strip naked, but she was then allowed to don her hand-sewn garment before being placed upon the sharp stone. A door was then lain on top of Margaret, ready for heavy stones to be loaded on top of it. The guards themselves could not bring themselves to carry out the task, and four beggars had to be paid and brought in to do it. One of the watching sheriffs, William Gibson, collapsed to his knees by the door in tears.19
Margaret’s last anguished cry was, ‘Jesu! Jesu! Jesu! Have mercy on me!’ It took around fifteen minutes for her to die: fifteen minutes of agony, under eight hundred pounds of stone that somehow had to be borne, with a sharp stone digging into her back, all under the gaze of guards and vagrants.
What were the motivations behind Margaret’s cruel execution? Did Henry May hope that she would be given a minor sentence that would make her turn away from her brazen and unlawful activities. Did he hope to grab the property that she had inherited upon her mother’s death?20 We can be certain that the authorities, and in particular Henry Hastings, wanted her death to act as a deterrent to others who were actively Catholic or thinking of converting, but in this he was to be greatly disappointed.
Margaret Clitherow’s death, and especially the manner of it, created outrage among the populace of York and beyond, even among those who had little personal sympathy for the Catholic cause. Queen Elizabeth herself condemned the action, and wrote to the citizens of York to say that she was horrified at the treatment of a fellow woman.
The stones remained on top of Margaret for six hours, and then, with the crowds dispersed, the body was taken away in a cart and hidden underneath a rubbish heap, lest Margaret in death should become even more of an inspiration to Catholics than she had been when she was alive. Under cover of darkness, a group of Margaret’s friends, led by one of the priests she had often hidden away, Father Mush, began the search for her body. Eventually it was found and taken to be buried in a location that remains secret to this day.
One tangible reminder of Margaret Clitherow still remains, and I had the honour of seeing it in person while researching this book. Not far from York railway station is the Bar Convent. It is now not only a working convent, but an exhibition centre and a museum of the Catholic persecutions of the sixteenth century, as the convent itself was set up in secret in 1686 – a hundred years after Margaret’s death. There, in the chapel, housed in a small and beautiful reliquary, is the preserved hand of Margaret Clitherow.
The convent was originally founded, at great danger to herself, by Frances Bedingfield. She was a follower of an order founded by Margaret Ward, niece of Jack and Kit Wright, Guy’s school friends and later Guy’s fellow conspirators. Margaret’s story still resounds: in 1970 the woman who became known as ‘the Pearl of York’ was canonised by Pope Paul VI as Saint Margaret Clitherow, one of the forty martyrs of England and Wales. Her shrine stands today as a haven of peace amidst the tourist hurly burly of York’s Shambles.
She had a more immediate impact upon one man, Guy Fawkes, who had watched with growing anger throughout his formative years as he saw Catholics bankrupted, imprisoned, tortured and execu
ted. The stones that broke Margaret’s back were the straw that broke the camel’s back for Guy: this was the moment when he would turn against his father’s example and the faith he was raised in, and take a new path as a Catholic, and one who was prepared to fight for his new beliefs. Guy had now become a man, and he would be driven by an increasing sense of fury and injustice. It would drive him on beyond hope and despair, beyond morality, and beyond the narrow streets and confines of York.
Chapter 6
A Picturesque Scene
I loved her whom all the world admired,
I was refused of her that can love none;
And my vain hope, which far too high aspired,
Is dead, and buried, and for ever gone
Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, To Plead My Faith
The year 1586 had been a momentous one for the city of York in general, and for Guy Fawkes in particular. The horrific execution of Margaret Clitherow had galvanised the youthful Guy into taking a step that would change the whole course of his life. Scholarly pursuits were no longer of interest to him, thoughts of following the family traditions in the ecclesiastical courts were abandoned, there was only one thing that mattered to him now: his new faith of Catholicism, and with it a fight against the injustices that he saw being levied against it and its adherents.
For now the change would be an internal one, one that by necessity he would keep to himself, except perhaps for sharing it with fellow travellers, fellow converts like his schoolmates the Wright brothers. It can easily be imagined, however, that in common with many converts to a new faith, Guy became increasingly pious. In later life he was known for his quiet piety and steadfastness,1 and this may have become apparent to his family and friends from this time on.