Margaret Ward

Margaret Ward was an English Catholic laywoman and martyr of the Elizabethan penal laws, born at Congleton in Cheshire. No reliable source records the year of her birth. She came of a respectable family and, as a young woman, entered the household of a lady of distinction in London, living there as a gentlewoman in service. In the later sixteenth century, remaining openly or even privately loyal to the Roman Catholic Church was dangerous: statutes made the Mass, reconciliation with Rome, and the harbouring of seminary priests capital or at least felonious offences. Ward belonged to the recusant world of Catholic households that tried to keep the old faith alive under Elizabeth I’s Protestant settlement.

While in London she learned that a priest, Richard Watson, was confined in Bridewell Prison. She obtained permission to visit him, bringing food and comfort, and over successive visits arranged his escape. She smuggled a rope into the prison; Watson used it to lower himself from a window, but the rope was too short and he was injured in the fall. An Irish waterman, John Roche, met the injured priest, exchanged clothes with him so that Watson might get away, and was himself later arrested in the priest’s garments. Suspicion fell on Ward. She was arrested and tortured: contemporary Catholic accounts state that she was hung up by the wrists, her toes barely touching the ground, and scourged, in an effort to force her to reveal Watson’s hiding place. She refused. The authorities then offered her a pardon if she would attend a Protestant service and conform to the established church. She declined.

Tried for felony in assisting a priest to escape, she was condemned to death. On 30 August 1588 she was hanged at Tyburn, together with John Roche and several other Catholics, among them the priest Richard Leigh. The executions took place in the tense summer of the Spanish Armada, when the government was especially severe against recusants. She is remembered in Catholic tradition as a virgin martyr; no marriage or children are recorded for her, and she belonged to no religious order.

Devotion to Margaret Ward persisted in recusant memory and later Catholic historiography. She was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 among a large group of English and Welsh martyrs, and was canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Her individual liturgical commemoration is kept on 30 August, the anniversary of her death; she is also honoured with the other Forty Martyrs (in England commonly on 4 May).