Margaret Ball

Margaret Ball, born Margaret Bermingham in 1515 at Corballis near Skryne in County Meath, Ireland, came from a prominent Anglo-Irish family; her father was Nicholas Bermingham. In the early sixteenth century she married Bartholomew Ball, a wealthy Dublin merchant who later served as Lord Mayor of Dublin in the mid-1550s. The couple belonged to the city's civic elite and had several children, among them Walter Ball and Nicholas Ball, both of whom would in time hold the mayoralty. Throughout the religious changes of the Tudor Reformation in Ireland she remained a committed Catholic. She kept Catholic worship in her household, offered hospitality to priests at a time when such acts were increasingly dangerous, and supported the instruction of the young in the Catholic faith.

After her husband's death she continued as a widow in Dublin and as a known recusant. Under Elizabeth I, enforcement of the royal supremacy and of attendance at the services of the established church placed Catholics under growing legal pressure. Margaret's eldest son Walter conformed to the established church, rose in civic life, and was appointed a commissioner for ecclesiastical causes. In 1580 he became Lord Mayor of Dublin. In that office he caused his own mother to be arrested for recusancy and committed to the dungeons of Dublin Castle. She was then advanced in years. Imprisonment was intended to compel her to abandon the Catholic faith and to take the Oath of Supremacy; she refused.

Conditions in the castle prison were severe. Margaret Ball endured confinement for a period of years and died in Dublin Castle in 1584, still a prisoner, without having recanted. Her death was attributed to the hardships of incarceration rather than to a formal public execution, yet she has been regarded as a martyr who died for fidelity to the Catholic faith. Another son, Nicholas, remained a Catholic and himself served as Mayor of Dublin, a circumstance that illustrates how deeply the Reformation divided even a single prominent Irish family. Her place of burial is not securely recorded.

Margaret Ball was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 27 September 1992 together with sixteen other Irish Martyrs of the Reformation era. Their collective feast is observed on 20 June. She is remembered as a laywoman, wife, and mother whose steadfastness, including under pressure from her own son, became a notable example of recusant witness in sixteenth-century Ireland. Surviving evidence for her life is limited and rests largely on later martyrological tradition together with civic records of the Ball family; some details of her early years and of the exact length of her imprisonment are not fully documented, but the outline of her Meath birth, her marriage into Dublin's merchant oligarchy, her arrest at the instance of her Protestant son, and her death in Dublin Castle in 1584 is consistently attested.