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Saint Margaret Clitherow and Alexander Pope: An Unexpected Link
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
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FATHER JOHN MUSH, biographer of Saint Margaret Clitherow, the quater-centenary of whose martyrdom has been commemorated this year, recorded within three months of her death that after her condemnation her kinsfolk and friends ‘laboured much’ to persuade her to claim a respite on account of a pregnancy of which she was uncertain. He had no need to identify these anxious and distressed persons, for his earliest readers in York and its neighbourhood would be aware of their identity. When, however, his True Report began to spread secretly in manuscript to other parts of the country where its subject was unknown, the circumstances of the saint's life and the almost unique nature of her constancy were less well understood and appreciated. Fr. Mush tells us that Margaret, whose mother was ‘a rich widow’, had ‘many worldly friends’; her maternal kinsfolk, it has now been discovered, were among the élite of York at a time when the Queen's Council in the North Parts, which had its headquarters in that city, was one of the most active instruments in the country for the suppression of the ‘old religion’.
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References
Notes
1 Joseph Hunter, Pope: his descent and family connections; facts and conjectures (1857); Robert Davies, Pope: additional facts concerning his maternal ancestry (1858).
2 Valerie, Rumbold ‘Alexander Pope and the religious tradition of the Turners’, in Recusant History, 17, pp. 17–37.Google Scholar
3 Register of the Freemen of the City of York (ed. Francis, Collins Surtees Society, 102) p. 29.Google Scholar As Professor David, M. Palliser has pointed out in Tudor York (1979) p. 153,Google Scholar n. 2, all the dates in the headlines in this work are slightly more than one year behind the correct date. (The regnal years in the headings do not appear in the original.)
4 YCA, B 31, f. 55.
5 Davies, op. cit., p. 33.
6 Rumbold, art. cit., pp. 17, 21, 28–9, 31, 34.
7 id., p. 22.
8 YCA, B 31, ff. 53v., 54r-v. The Act Book of the Privy Council covering the period from the end of August 1593 to the end of September 1595 is missing, but B.L. Add. MSS. 11,402 (Abstracts from the Privy Council Registers), f. 60, contains a minute of the sending of similar letters to the Lord-Lieutenants ‘of the several counties within the Realm’.
9 YCA, B31, f. 53v.
10 Rumbold, art. cit., p. 22.
11 ibid
12 ibid
13 BIHR, CP. G 3054, 3111.
14 BIHR, Wills 26, ff. 382v.–384.
15 YCA, B 24, f. 107v.
16 BIHR, Wills 21, ff. 416–417v
17 BIHR, Wills, 17, f. 661r.–V.
18 BIHR, Wills, 11, ff. 104v., 465v.
19 BIHR, CP. G 1331.
20 BIHR, Register of St. Martin's church, Coney Street, 8 Sept. 1567.
21 BIHR, D/C Wills 5, f. 9r.–v.
22 BIHR, Wills 11, f. 267v.
23 J. & Venn, J. A. Alumni Cantabrigienses, Pt. I, 4 (1927) p. 276.Google Scholar
24 Adam Hamilton, O.S.B. (ed.) The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St. Monica's in Louvain … [1], 1548 to 1625 (1904) p. 33.Google Scholar
25 YCA, B 31, f. 20.
26 BIHR, Wills 36, ff. 285–287. The legatee is described as Isabel Fawcett, daughter to Mrs. Kay, wife of Mr. Thomas Kay of York, merchant. Administration of the goods of Roland Fawcett was granted on 7 March 1606/7 to Peter Wilkinson and Isabella Kay alias Fawcett, relict (BIHR, Administration Act Book, City).
27 John Mush, A True report of the life and martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow, in John Morris, S.J. (ed.), The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, related by themselves, 3rd ser. (1877) pp. 430–2.Google Scholar
28 An outline pedigree of Turner, Middleton and Pope forms Appendix IV of my St. Margaret Clitherow (1986) pp. 202–3.