In 1586, she was arrested and called before the York, charged with the crime of harboring a Roman Catholic Priest. She refused to plead to the case so as to prevent a trial that would involve her children having to testify, so she was immediately subjected to torture. She was executed by being crushed to death – the standard punishment for the refusal to plead. She was executed on Good Friday, 1586 at the age of thirty. The two sergeants who were assigned to kill her, could not, and hired four desperate beggars to kill her. 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. Her death occurred in fifteen minutes, but she was left as an example for six hours before the weight was removed from her corpse. After her death, her hand was removed and the relic is now housed in the Chapel of the Bar Convent, York. After her execution, Queen Elizabeth I, wrote to the citizens of York to say that she should never have been executed due to her being a woman.
A plaque was installed at the end of the Ouse Bridge in 2008, to mark the site of her martyrdom. She was beatified in 1929, by Pope Pius XI and canonized in 1970 by Pope Paul VI along with martyrs from England and Wales. This group of candidates that were canonized are commonly called, “The Forty Martyrs of England and Wales”. A number of schools in England are named after her, as well as St. Margaret of York Church and School in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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