Margaret Clitherow

In the life of Margaret Clitherow (b. 1552/3–d. 1586), international Counter-Reformation piety met English national and provincial politics and led to the creation of a Catholic martyr. She was born Margaret Middleton in predominantly Protestant York and in 1571 married a widowed butcher and father of two, John Clitherow. By the end of 1574 she had given him at least two more children but had also embraced Catholicism, refusing to attend prescribed Protestant services. This recusancy resulted in three prison terms, each of six months or more, in 1577–1578, 1580–1581, and 1583–1584. She was particularly inspired by the heroism of missionary priests from the English seminaries in Continental Europe and made a point of sheltering them at the family home in York’s Shambles. One such was John Mush, who returned from Rome to England in 1583 and became her spiritual director from c. 1584. The 1585 Act against Jesuits and seminary priests made it a capital felony to harbor such clerics: the sentence could be death. On 10 March 1586 the Clitherows’ house was searched, evidence of Catholic worship was found and Margaret arrested. Her trial followed four days later, though it was for her refusal to enter a plea that she was sentenced to death peine forte et dure, being crushed to death. Her stepfather was then serving as York’s lord mayor, so it was a high-profile case in a close-knit community. Every effort was made to prevent the law taking its course, but Margaret would not be dissuaded from the path of martyrdom. The sentence was executed on 25 March, crushed to death under a door loaded with weights. Mush was among those who buried her body; he then wrote a life of the martyr. That Life is integral to all subsequent developments: popular Catholic devotion to the “Pearl of York,” her inclusion among the lives of the martyred priests, the opening of a formal process in 1874, beatification by Pius XI in 1929, and canonization—as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales—by Paul VI in 1970. Apart from the pious and the scholarly, there are few obvious divisions within the literature on Margaret Clitherow: Reference Works and an Overview derive from John Mush’s Life. Other Lives either parallel Mush or follow in his wake, though there are many other sources for wider studies of Recusancy in Yorkshire. For the martyr’s Trial and Death one must rely on Mush and his sources. His failure to locate the place of her burial has had diverse consequences, as conveyed in the final section of the present article, Burial and Legacy.

COVID responses will impact Canada provincial politics

Significance Although the pandemic is beginning to recede in much of Canada, the federal and provincial governments are preparing for the onset of winter and its likely impact on case counts and public health measures. They must also assess the changes that COVID-19 has made to the economic, political and social landscape of the country. Impacts Social and economic disparities between those who are vaccinated and those who are not will become more pronounced. Washington’s delay in opening its borders to vaccinated Canadians will add to underlying bilateral tensions. Greater federal fiscal transfers to the provinces for healthcare next year will ease some of the federal-provincial tensions. Governments in Western Canada look vulnerable when facing the electorate amid criticism of their handling of the pandemic.

Māori Election Petitions of the 1870s: Microcosms of Dynamic Māori and Pākehā Political Forces

Māori election petitions to the 1876 Eastern Māori and the 1879 Northern Māori elections were high-stakes political manoeuvres. The outcomes of such challenges were significant in the weighting of political power in Wellington. This was a time in New Zealand politics well before the formation of political parties. Political alignments were defined by a mixture of individual charismatic men with a smattering of provincial sympathies and individual and group economic interests. Larger-than-life Māori and Pākehā political characters were involved in the election petitions, providing a window not only into the complex Māori political relationships involved, but also into the stormy Pākehā political world of the 1870s. And this is the great lesson about election petitions. They involve raw politics, with all the political theatre and power play, which have as much significance in today’s politics as they did in the past. Election petitions are much more than legal challenges to electoral races. There are personalities involved, and ideological stances between the contesting individuals and groups that back those individuals. Māori had to navigate both the Pākehā realm of central and provincial politics as well as the realm of Māori kin-group politics at the whānau, hapū and iwi levels of Māoridom. The political complexities of these 1870s Māori election petitions were but a microcosm of dynamic Māori and Pākehā political forces in New Zealand society at the time.

Governor in the system of state administration at the beginning of the 19th century

Provincial politics in the Russian Empire depended on the personality of the emperor, his views and worldview. During the years of Paul’s Government an extreme form of centralization has been established in the activities of the State apparatus. With the arrival of Emperor Alexander I, there was, in our opinion, a symbolic removal of the distance between the supreme power and its military support, which, in fact, removed obstacles to the spontaneous inclusion of the military in political activity in the next fluctuations of this monarch’s line.

Canada pipeline buy plan will see local controversies

Significance The firm had threatened to mothball the project by the end of May unless assurances were made that it would eventually be built despite opposition in British Columbia (BC) from First Nations, environmental activists and the BC government. The federal purchase comes with a political cost to the Liberals in Ottawa, who now face further legal opposition from BC’s government. Impacts The likely rightwards shift in provincial politics (Quebec and Alberta elections are coming) will see carbon taxes scrapped. Scrapping carbon taxes will hinder federal policy to build pipelines while containing emissions. BC will likely fail to gain legal backing for their constitutional arguments about their right to regulate inter-provincial projects. The Alberta NDP government’s fortunes will be tied to developing the pipeline successfully. The project could cost the Canadian government more than the purchase price in legal fees and construction costs.

‘Cattle Thieves’: Refugee Settlement, Ottoman Governmentality and Biopolitics

This chapter explores the narrative function of the debates and correspondence associated with provincial governance around a particular problem: refugees. During the second half of the 19th century, more than a hundred thousand refugees came to Ottoman Bulgaria because of Russian expansion to the Caucasus. A great majority of these refugees were Circassians. This wave was contemporaneous with other demographic movements: over ten thousand Bulgarian Christians who had left for Russia as part of a population exchange between Ottomans and Russians returned back and had to be re-settled, several thousand Muslim families left a recently independent Serbia for Ottoman Empire. The refugees came at a point of economic growth in Ottoman Bulgaria and many were settled in the Vidin County. By examining how the local agents problematised the refugee settlement process in provincial correspondence, this chapter analyses the parallels between provincial politics and the imperial transformation into a liberal-capitalist social formation, where a presumably autonomous market order determined the limits of governance. This perspective is essential in looking at the empire from the provincial level and challenges the presumed path of reforms as unidirectional from the imperial centre to the provinces.