york00orns

'
"Depositions
3S8
YORK.
appalling barbarities inflicted upon the priests, whose
crime was adjudged to be treason. Amongst the
lay persons who suffered, the account ot none is so
piteous as that of Mrs. Clithero, a gentlewoman of
good Yorkshire descent. She was charged with
relieving priests, and refused to plead, that others
might not be brought into peril of their lives by her
conviction. Under the brutal law then in force in
such cases she was pressed to death, a fate which she
endured with wondrous constancy and patience.
But the number on whom death was inflicted by
no means exhausts the list of sufferers. Forty are
recorded by Chaloner as having died in prison ; in
almost every case the result of disease occasioned by
the filthy and abominable state of the dungeons in
which they were confined :
" Some of which," says
Canon Raine, " had no light and no ventilation ;
several were partly under water whenever there was a
flood."!
It may easily be imagined that there was a fearful
amount of suffering endured by those who escaped
the hangman's cord and the butcher's knife. Torture
was not unfrequently applied; the rack and the
scourge added their horrors to the miserj' of the
prison-house, to say nothing of the spoiling of their
goods and possessions and the enormous fines imposed
upon them.
The descent of the Armada upon the coasts of
England intensified the feeling of the queen and her
advisers against the unhappy Romanists ;
although
from York Castle" (Pub. Surtees Soc),
Pref., p. xxxii.