54 x 41, oil on canvas, 2010        sold

Margaret Clitherow, otherwise known as the Pearl of York, converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 18 after Henry VIII of England had split the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church.  Her husband John was supportive, though he remained Protestant.  She then became a friend of the persecuted Roman Catholic population in the north of England. Her son, Henry, went to Reims to train as a Roman priest and she regularly held Masses in her home in the Shambles in York.

In 1586, she was arrested and called before the York magistrate for the crime of harbouring Roman Catholic priests. She refused to plead to the case so as to prevent a trial where her children would be forced to testify against her.  She was therefore automatically found guilty and condemned to be executed by being crushed to death – the standard punishment for refusal to plead. She was killed on Good Friday of 1586.  She was stripped and had a handkerchief tied across her face then laid out upon a sharp rock the size of a man’s fist, a door was put on top of her and slowly loaded with an immense weight of rocks and stones.

After Clitherow’s execution, Elizabeth I wrote to the citizens of York to say how horrified she was at the treatment of a fellow woman: due to her sex Clitherow should not have been executed.