August 30 -- Feast of Saint Margaret Ward

It is the feast of Saint Margaret Ward. She shares it with several beati: Richard Leigh, Richard Martin, Richard Lloyd, Edward Shelley, and John Roche. They were all executed on this day in 1588, twenty-two days after the battle that destroyed the Spanish Armada. Spain had attempted to invade England with plans to force it back into the Catholic sphere. Queen Elizabeth and her government were in no mood to put up with Catholic rebels and traitors (and all Catholics were rebels and traitors, of course) so after they had tortured the prisoners in an unsuccessful attempt to get their submission, they hanged, drew, and quartered them.

A studio called Mary's Dowry Productions has made a film about Saint Margaret Ward, who landed in the Tower for helping a priest named William Watson escape. Mary very precisely measured a rope and smuggled it in to him. (live by the rope, die by the rope) She had also arranged that a boatman (John Roche) would ferry Father Watson to safety and then switch clothes with him. This allowed Watson to beat feet to someplace safe (maybe the Netherlands?) while Roche led the authorities on a false trail.

Watson got away and neither Roche nor Ward gave him up, though the tortures were pretty brutal. When the English officials were satisfied that they weren't getting anything more out of the prisoners, they gathered them up with the other Catholics they were keeping and held their hanging.

Watson winds up being a fairly unsympathetic figure, and although he too is hanged by the English (December 9, 1603), he is not canonized, beatified, nor even venerated as a martyr. He scooted back in 1588, but returned to England (if he ever left). He tried to use King James as a lever in his dispute with the Jesuits (he was a secular priest, i.e. one who is not in an Order of one kind or another). Unsuccessfully in this, he continued to weave webs, eventually forming something called the Bye Plot (to distinguish it from the Main Plot). It involved presenting a petition to King James as a device to get close enough to kidnap him. Once he was in custody, he could then be re-Catholicized (really?) and released to steer England back into the Holy Fold. I can't imagine how it failed.