FATHER JOHN MUSH, biographer of Saint Margaret Clitherow, the quater-centenary of whose martyrdom has been commemorated this year, recorded within three months of her death that after her condemnation her kinsfolk and friends ‘laboured much’ to persuade her to claim a respite on account of a pregnancy of which she was uncertain. He had no need to identify these anxious and distressed persons, for his earliest readers in York and its neighbourhood would be aware of their identity. When, however, his True Report began to spread secretly in manuscript to other parts of the country where its subject was unknown, the circumstances of the saint's life and the almost unique nature of her constancy were less well understood and appreciated. Fr. Mush tells us that Margaret, whose mother was ‘a rich widow’, had ‘many worldly friends’; her maternal kinsfolk, it has now been discovered, were among the élite of York at a time when the Queen's Council in the North Parts, which had its headquarters in that city, was one of the most active instruments in the country for the suppression of the ‘old religion’.