(This information is taken from and attributed to Wikipedia. For the full version and more details including authors please see Anne Line – Wikipedia )
Anne Line (c. 1563 – 27 February 1601) was an English Catholic martyr. After losing her husband, she became very active in sheltering clandestine Catholic priests, which was illegal in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Finally arrested, she was condemned to death and executed at Tyburn. The Catholic Church declared her a martyr, and Pope Paul VI canonised her in 1970.
Anne is believed to have been born in Dunmow, Essex as “Alice Higham” or “Heigham”, the eldest daughter of the Puritan William Higham of Jenkyn Maldon. At some time in the early 1580s she converted to the Roman Catholic Church along with her brother William, and Roger Line, the man she married in February 1583. Both Roger Line and William Higham were disinherited for converting to the Roman Catholic Church and Alice Higham lost her dowry. Among Catholics, the married “Alice” became known as “Anne”, presumably a name she took at her conversion.
Roger Line and William Higham were arrested together while attending Mass, and were imprisoned and fined. While William Higham was released on bail in England, Roger Line was banished and went to Flanders. Line received a small allowance from the King of Spain, part of which he sent regularly to his wife until his death around 1594. Around the same time, John Gerard opened a house of refuge for hiding priests, and put the newly widowed Anne Line in charge of it, despite her chronic ill-health. For about three years Anne Line continued to run this house while Fr John Gerard was in prison. He was eventually transferred to the Tower of London where he was tortured, and from which he escaped. In his autobiography he writes:
After my escape from prison [Anne Line] gave up managing the house. By then she was known to so many people that it was unsafe for me to frequent any house she occupied. Instead she hired apartments in another building and continued to shelter priests there. One day, however (it was the Purification of Our Blessed Lady), she allowed an unusually large number of Catholics in to hear Mass … Some neighbours noticed the crowd and the constables were at the house at once.
Arrest and execution
Line was arrested on 2nd February 1601. The priest, Fr Francis Page, managed to slip into a special hiding place prepared by Anne Line and afterwards to escape, but she was arrested, along with another gentlewoman called Margaret Gage. Gage was released on bail and later pardoned, but Line was sent to Newgate Prison.
She was tried at the Sessions House on Old Bailey Lane on 26th February 1601 and was so weak from fever that she was carried to the trial in a chair. She told the court that, so far from regretting having concealed a priest, she only grieved that she “could not receive a thousand more.” Sir John Popham, the judge, sentenced her to death for the felony of assisting a seminary priest.
Line was hanged at Tyburn on 27th February 1601. At the scaffold she repeated what she had said at her trial, declaring loudly to the bystanders: “I am sentenced to die for harbouring a Catholic priest, and so far I am from repenting for having so done, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand.”