The Mass and the Missions, Part IV: Margaret Clitherow, the Pearl of York
It must have been a strange, ghostly sight. In the black midnight, thick with an oppressive, sad air, Margaret Clitherow rose from her knees at the tolling of the bell. In silence, she exchanged her woman’s clothes for a shroud that she had sewn with her own hands. Mrs. Yoward, her jailor and sometime companion, carefully observed how the prisoner knelt and prayed in stillness for three hours. As the shadows cast by a thin fire flitted around Margaret, did Mrs. Yoward see an image of Our Lady kneeling before St. Gabriel, or did her soul tremble in the eclipse of Calvary? For the clock told the day of Margaret’s execution, which was both Lady Day and Good Friday of that year.
At three o’clock in the morning, Margaret arose once more from her prayers. She laid herself down flat before the fireside. Mrs. Yoward saw the helpless form of the woman on the floor; but Margaret saw the flames.
White in her shroud and small, she lay like the host on the paten. Hers it had been to mother the priests in hiding, to adorn the secret altars, to hallow the martyr’s bones with repentant, innocent tears. In her agony, the faces of those whom she loved passed before her eyes. She had been separated from a loving husband, and torn from her children, save one, whose tiny heartbeat she could feel in her womb. Margaret and the little child were condemned to suffer death peine forte et dure, that is, the strong and severe death of pressing—a sentence that broke the most cruel and notorious felons.
Few could understand the torment of her womanly heart, and fewer still its mystic secret: love is strong as death, jealousy as hard as hell, the lamps thereof are fire and flames.
Margaret Clitherow had given Christ all. Only one gift remained: the immolation of her life in union with the Immaculate Victim. With the clear-eyed vision that is the reward of the clean heart, she contemplated the wedding feast of heaven, and those happy souls who had made their robes white in the blood of the Lamb. She had often called the day of her martyrdom “her marriage.”
Thus, in the lonely room on the Ouse Bridge, Mrs. Clitherow rehearsed her death while the astonished onlooker watched in the gloom. After fifteen minutes, Margaret returned to her bed. Could Mrs. Yoward have caught a look of joy in Margaret’s eyes as she arose, or heard in that silence an echo of the prayer that shakes the foundation of the world: “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum?”
Fires at Home
The human heart, like the hearth, must be constantly fed and tended in order to produce light and warmth. God has mysteriously made woman the natural custodian of both, granting to her a unique ability to unify the home and to nurture the spirit. By all accounts, Margaret Clitherow excelled at these supremely important tasks, which will be the joy and the glory of womanhood until the end of time.