Anne Line

Anne Line was an English Catholic martyr executed in 1601 for harbouring a priest during the Elizabethan penal years. She was born Alice Higham (also spelled Heigham), daughter of William Higham, a gentleman of Dunmow in Essex and a committed Calvinist. As a young woman she converted to the Catholic Church, a decision that led her father to disinherit her; her brother William likewise converted and was cast off. She married Roger Line, himself a convert. He was imprisoned for recusancy and then banished from England, and he died in exile in Flanders in the mid-1590s, leaving her a widow of limited means.

After her husband's death she devoted herself to the underground Catholic community in London. In close association with Jesuit missionaries, especially Father John Gerard, she kept a house that served as a lodging and Mass centre for priests who, under the statute of 1585, were guilty of high treason merely by remaining in the realm. Harbouring such a priest was itself a capital felony. Contemporary Jesuit accounts describe her as devout, austere, and willing to live in poverty in order to sustain this work. As a widow she is recorded as having taken private vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, though she never entered a religious order and remained a laywoman.

On Candlemas, 2 February 1601, pursuivants raided the house while Mass was being celebrated. The priest, Father Francis Page, escaped, but Anne Line was arrested. Already in poor health, she had to be carried in a chair to her trial at the Old Bailey on 26 February. She was indicted under the act of 1585 for feloniously harbouring a Catholic priest. She did not deny the charge; reports of the trial have her declaring that her only regret was that she had not been able to harbour a thousand priests. She was condemned to death.

On 27 February 1601 she was hanged at Tyburn, together with the priests Mark Barkworth, a Benedictine, and Roger Filcock, a Jesuit who had been her confessor. Before the execution she kissed the gallows and again professed that she died for harbouring a priest. She was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 and canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Her individual feast is kept on 27 February; in England she is also commemorated with the other English and Welsh martyrs.