Tudor Times is the online repository for all things Tudor and Stewart (1485–1625)

On 25th March 1586, Margaret Clitherow, wife of a butcher in York, was pressed to death by heavy stones. Pressing was the punishment for an accused person who refused to plead. Margaret was accused of harbouring Catholic priests, contravening the Act of 1581, which outlawed the support of missionaries. Margaret refused to enter a plea, so could not be tried in the usual way. This refusal has been interpreted in a variety of ways, including not wishing to enable the interrogation (and perhaps torture) of her children and her reluctance to see fellow Catholics who conformed outwardly to the law empanelled as jurors. Read more about the situation of Catholics in Elizabeth's reign in Jessie Childs' "God's Traitors", a review of which is here.

On 24th March 1603, Elizabeth I, Queen of England, died in her palace at Richmond. She was sixty-nine years old and had been ailing for at least six months. Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, came to the throne in 1558, aged just twenty-five. For the following forty-five years she ruled England. History has presented her reign as a golden era – it was an age of exploration, of unprecedented literary flowering and of a growing sense of nationhood. It was not all golden – there were difficult times in the 1570s and 1580s when persecution of Catholics increased; in the 1590s, when Parliament and monarch began to clash and in the last years in Ireland when expensive and bloody campaigns laid the groundwork for centuries of conflict. Elizabeth herself is remembered as a clever, pragmatic and politically astute monarch – often reckoned the greatest of all English sovereigns. Much of her policy was developed in concert with Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley.

The image is the Rainbow Portrait, probably by Marcus Gheerhaerts, at Hatfield House, home of Burghley’s son, Robert.

On 17th March 1473, Margaret of Denmark, Queen of Scots, gave birth to her first child, who later became James IV. James was one of the most successful kings of Scotland – he extended Crown authority to the Isles, concluded a peace treaty with Henry VII of England, and encouraged education and industry throughout his kingdom whilst still finding time to joust, pay court to his mistresses, and undertake amateur dentistry. Read more on this busy Renaissance monarch here