Tony Morgan, Margaret Clitherow an Elizabethan Saint (Pen & Sword, 2022)
It might seem a bit odd that a Sixteenth century butcher’s wife could become one of the forty Catholic martyrs of England and Wales. But Margaret Clitherow was no ordinary woman; she was a person of resolute faith in a time of religious paranoia and persecution, and she paid the ultimate price for her devotion. In this book, Tony Morgan takes you into Elizabethan England and inside the provincial city of York to tell Clitherow’s extraordinary tale.
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Morgan structures most of his book in three layers. The first is at the national level, beginning in Henry VIII’s reign and the cleaving of the English church from Roman Catholicism. The political turbulence that produced ran through the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I then into the long reign of Elizabeth I. Morgan narrows his focus to a Tudor history of York, where the religious turmoil at the national level rippled through local politics. The third level of the story is that of Margaret Clitherow and her family, which was intertwined with city politics – her stepfather at the time of her death was the Mayor. Morgan slices those corresponding stories chronologically with the theme of religious oppression and persecution binding them. He draws them together into a single narrative with the culminating story of Margaret’s arrest, trial, and dreadful execution – she was pressed to death, in March 1586, for refusing to enter a plea to the court.
Margaret Clitherow deserves to have her story told by someone as steeped in local knowledge as Tony Morgan. He is particularly good at explaining the machinations of York politics and the dynamics of religious practice in the city. No matter how the reader views fanaticism and martyrdom, no one deserves Clitherow’s fate, and Morgan brings out the all too human emotional struggle she must have endured. On the wider level, Morgan explores many of the political, economic, and social themes of the Elizabethan period that still resonate. This is a dry read, though, with Morgan offering some commentary but rarely wandering too far from his sources, leaving unanswered some of the big questions that Clitherow’s story elicits. The tiered structure doesn’t help in that regard, with the chapters becoming somewhat repetitive until Morgan unifies the narratives upon Clitherow’s arrest. Nevertheless, students of Elizabethan and religious history, in particular, will enjoy Morgan’s book.
