The Poet’s Eye: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Margaret Clitheroe”

Of all the books I have read on the lives of saints and holy personages, none has ever moved or inspired me as did Dr. Malcolm Brennan’s Martyrs of the English Reformation. Perhaps it was because, beside such luminaries as Sts. Edmund Campion, John Fisher and Thomas More, Brennan related the stories of men and women like St. Nicholas Owen and St. Margaret Ward. Owen, a carpenter by trade, used his skills to build “priest holes” — hiding places for priests — in Catholic homes. For this, he was hung on the Rack, arms immobilized by iron rings and heavy weights attached to his feet, until he died under such torture. Ward, a servant (or companion) to a lady of distinction in London, helped a priest escape from prison. For this, she was flogged and hung by her wrists until paralyzed, then executed. Margaret Ward could have won her life and freedom by agreeing to attend Protestant services.

What so moved me about these stories was the nobility of these fine Catholic souls, a nobility housed in the most humble and ordinary of frames. These were tradesmen, housekeepers — men and women who could easily have been our neighbors. Trapped in circumstances which would strike a Catholic of today as something out of a gruesome horror story, they persevered with a courage and unartful defiance which define the word “admirable.”

Perhaps the story which moved me the most in Dr. Brennan’s book was the story of St. Margaret Clitherow (also spelled Clitheroe), the “Pearl of York.” Married to John Clitherow, a butcher, Margaret helped her husband run his shop. During the course of her life, she was often imprisoned for her fidelity to the Catholic Faith and the “crime” of harboring priests and having the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass offered in her home. In fact, she gave birth to her third child during one of these periods of incarceration. She also taught herself how to read while in prison, in order to pass the Catholic Faith on to her children.

Margaret’s final arrest occurred on March 10, 1586. Knowing that she would be executed whatever the outcome, and wishing to spare her children the grief of having to testify against their mother, she refused to enter any plea on her own behalf. When asked how she pleaded, she replied, “I know of no offense whereof I should confess myself guilty. Having made no offense, I need no trial.” Four days later, on the charge of having “harbored and maintained Jesuits and seminary priests, traitors to the Queen’s majesty and her laws,” Margaret was condemned to the peine forte et dure — sentenced to be pressed to death. The sentence was read by Judge George Clinch of the Court of York:

You shall return to the place from whence you came, and in the lower part of the prison be stripped naked, laid down on your back to the ground, and so much weight laid upon you as you are able to bear, and thus you shall continue three days; the third day you shall have a sharp stone put under your back, and your hands and feet shall be tied to posts that, more weight being laid upon you, you may be pressed to death.

When her sentence was pronounced, Margaret Clitherow exclaimed, “God be thanked, I am not worthy of so good a death as this.” The diabolical cruelty was carried out on March 15, 1586. When officials tried one last time to get  her to confess her “crimes,” Margaret replied, “No, no, Mr. Sheriff, I die for the love of my Lord Jesu.” Finally, she was laid out on the ground, her hands stretched out in the form of a cross and bound with cords, and a sharp stone was placed underneath her back. Then, a door was placed upon her, and stones were piled upon it until she was crushed to death. The torment lasted fifteen minutes. Her last words were, “Jesu! Jesu! Jesu! Have mercy on me!” Margaret was 33 years old and pregnant with her fourth child when she died. As a final indignity, Margaret’s body was left in the press for six hours, and then buried near a dunghill. Her right hand is preserved at St. Mary’s Convent in York.

The only aspect of her sentence that perturbed Margaret was the part about being stripped. So, she spent the days before her martyrdom making a shift to wear during the ordeal. Although she was not permitted to wear the shift, her persecutors allowed her to cover herself with it when the time arrived for her execution.

While she lived, amidst persecution and danger, Margaret broke the “law” by hiring a Catholic tutor for her two younger children, Anne and William. In addition, she had sent her oldest child, Henry, to study at the Catholic college at Douai in France. In truth, the earliest fruits of St. Margaret Clitherow’s glorious martyrdom could be found among her own three children. Henry and William became priests. Anne became a nun.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born at Stratford in the year 1844. Inspired by the “Oxford Movement,” which found Anglican clergyman turning to the Roman Catholic Church for inspiration, as well the many conversions to Catholicism which followed in its wake, Hopkins entered the Catholic Church in 1866 and was eventually ordained a Jesuit priest, laboring among the poor in Liverpool and, later, preaching in London. He died in 1889. As a poet, Hopkins seemed more Modern than Victorian, as evidenced by his “experimental” approach to prosody. There was a dynamic element to his work, which shines through in one of his most popular poems, God’s Grandeur:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Among the fragments and unfinished poems of Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins discovered after his death is one titled, Margaret Clitheroe. These verses are a tribute to the woman, to her faith and courage, and to the manner of her death. As we ponder the imagery of Margaret Clitheroe, the intervening centuries melt away, and the holy Martyr stands before us, radiant in both her humanity and her virtue, a virtue which could only be feared and loathed by the powers of Hell:

The Christ-ed beauty of her mind
Her mould of features mated well.
She was admired. The spirit of hell
Being to her virtue clinching-blind
No wonder therefore was not slow
To the bargain of its hate to throw
The body of Margaret Clitheroe.

Hopkins effectively employs the imagery of “weight” to impress on his readers the severity of Margaret’s punishment and the nature of her torments:

GOD’S counsel cólumnar-severe
But chaptered in the chief of bliss
Had always doomed her down to this –
Pressed to death. He plants the year;
The weighty weeks without hands grow,
Heaved drum on drum; but hands also
Must deal with Margaret Clitheroe.

She was a woman, upright, outright;
Her will was bent at God. For that
Word went she should be crushed out flat….

She held her hands to, like in prayer;
They had them out and laid them wide
(Just like Jesus crucified);
They brought their hundredweights to bear.

Details of Margaret’s ordeal are included in Fr. Hopkins’ poem. He recalls the simple covering she sewed for herself:

The last thing Margaret’s fingers sew
Is a shroud for Margaret Clitheroe.

Margaret’s unborn child, murdered along with her by the proponents of the new religion, is also remembered:

Within her womb the child was quick.
Small matter of that then! Let him smother
And wreck in ruins of his mother.

The wolves in sheep’s clothing, who visited Margaret before her execution in an attempt to weaken her resolve by feigning concern for her, appear as well, but as crocodiles, their mechanical smiles recalling the actions of the winches which operated the Racks upon which so many noble souls perished:

Fawning fawning crocodiles
Days and days came round about
With tears to put her candle out;
They wound their winch of wicked smiles
To take her; while their tongues would go
God lighten your dark heart – but no,
Christ lived in Margaret Clitheroe.

Undaunted, Margaret left behind the world, her husband, her children, her life — all for the love of Christ. But, the scene of Margaret’s cruel death is viewed not only by her murderers. No, a “cloud of witnesses” above watches and contemplates the martyrdom of this grand soul:

And every saint of bloody hour
And breath immortal thronged that show;
Heaven turned its starlight eyes below
To the murder of Margaret Clitheroe.

And then, it was time. “God’s counsel, cólumnar-severe, had always doomed her down to this,” wrote the poet at the start of Margaret Clitheroe. The moment of Margaret’s death is rendered by Fr. Hopkins with a solemnity and poignancy which makes the verses worthy of meditation:

When she felt the kill-weights crush
She told His name times-over three;
I suffer this she said for Thee.

After that in perfect hush
For a quarter of an hour or so
She was with the choke of woe. –
It is over, Margaret Clitheroe.

How does one react to the death of a friend? What manner of rage seeps into the soul when one sees a good, true person suffer at the hands of monsters? Is it not then that we understand the fervor and desire for action that animated St. Peter? When Jesus spoke to the Apostles of His impending Passion, Peter cried out, “Lord, be it far from Thee, this shall not be unto Thee.” In Gethsemani, when the servants of the high priest attempted to lay hold of Jesus, Peter drew a sword and cut off the right ear of Malchus. It is a far cry from the attitude of the men — if men they still were by then — who stood by and watched an honest, pregnant woman be crushed to death, or the beggars who earned a few coins by heaving the stones upon her.

And yet, Margaret herself never questioned the mercy of God. When her persecutors brought up the subject of the husband and children she would leave behind if she did not renounce her “crimes,” she replied:

And for this cause I am willing to offer them freely to God that sent them me, rather than I will yield one jot from my faith. I confess death fearful, and flesh is frail; yet I mind God’s assistance, to spend my blood in this faith, as willingly as ever I put my paps to my children’s mouths; neither desire I to have my death deferred.

Can we not hear in this straightforward pronouncement an echo of Our Lord’s rebuke to St. Peter, “Go behind me, Satan, thou art a scandal unto me: because thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things that are of men.” When Fr. Hopkins wrote of “The Christ-ed beauty of her mind,” was he thinking of how deeply Margaret Clitherow’s will was conformed to that of her Redeemer?

Unlike the writer of prose, the poet has the freedom to paint verbal portraits with brushstrokes, not the linear lines of the journalist or biographer. He can change point-of-view at a whim. He can turn the lenses of both microscope and telescope upon his subject as the need arises. He can be both subject and narrator. In Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Margaret Clitheroe, we view both the suffocating horror of the execution chamber …. and the brightness of Paradise. We are made privy to the light that animated St. Margaret Clitherow’s mind, as well as the stygean darkness that engulfed the thoughts of her persecutors. For a few brief, unfinished verses, Margaret Clitherow — the butcher’s wife, loving mother, faithful Catholic — walks upon the Earth once again, and we can be grateful that we, as members of the Church founded by Jesus Christ, can claim such a woman as our “sister.”

Margaret Clitheroe

by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

GOD’S counsel cólumnar-severe
But chaptered in the chief of bliss
Had always doomed her down to this –
Pressed to death. He plants the year;
The weighty weeks without hands grow,
Heaved drum on drum; but hands also
Must deal with Margaret Clitheroe.

The very victim would prepare.
Like water soon to be sucked in
Will crisp itself or settle or spin
So she; one sees that here and there
She mends the ways she means to go.
The last thing Margaret’s fingers sew
Is a shroud for Margaret Clitheroe.

The Christ-ed beauty of her mind
Her mould of features mated well.
She was admired. The spirit of hell
Being to her virtue clinching-blind
No wonder therefore was not slow
To the bargain of its hate to throw
The body of Margaret Clitheroe.

Great Thecla, the plumed passionflower,
Next Mary mother of maid and nun
–   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –
And every saint of bloody hour
And breath immortal thronged that show;
Heaven turned its starlight eyes below
To the murder of Margaret Clitheroe.

She was a woman, upright, outright;
Her will was bent at God. For that
Word went she should be crushed out flat
–   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –

Fawning fawning crocodiles
Days and days came round about
With tears to put her candle out;
They wound their winch of wicked smiles
To take her; while their tongues would go
God lighten your dark heart – but no,
Christ lived in Margaret Clitheroe.

She held her hands to, like in prayer;
They had them out and laid them wide
(Just like Jesus crucified);
They brought their hundredweights to bear.
Jews killed Jesus long ago
God’s son; these (they did not know)
God’s daughter Margaret Clitheroe.

When she felt the kill-weights crush
She told His name times-over three;
I suffer this she said  for Thee.
After that in perfect hush
For a quarter of an hour or so
She was with the choke of woe. –
It is over, Margaret Clitheroe.

She caught the crying of those Three,
The Immortals of the eternal ring,
The Utterer, Utterèd, Uttering,
And witness in her place would she.
She not considered whether or no
She pleased the Queen and Council. So
To the death with Margaret Clitheroe!

Within her womb the child was quick.
Small matter of that then! Let him smother
And wreck in ruins of his mother.
–   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –   –