[6] 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.

One day, however (it was the Purification of Our Blessed Lady), she allowed in an unusually large number of Catholics to hear Mass … Some neighbours noticed the crowd and the constables were at the house at once.

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.

She was executed immediately before two priests, Roger Filcock and Mark Barkworth, who received the more severe sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering.

It has been argued that Shakespeare's poem The Phoenix and the Turtle was written shortly after her death to commemorate Anne and Roger Line, and its setting is the Catholic requiem held in secret for her.

It has been extended by Martin Dodwell to suggest that Shakespeare takes the fate of Anne and Roger Line to symbolize the rejection of Catholicism by England, and he then returns to this allegorical scheme in the play Cymbeline.

[5] A series of other Shakespearean allusions to Anne Line have been proposed by various scholars (Colin Wilson, Gerard Kilroy) most notably in The Tempest and in Sonnet 74.

[14] Additionally, the Catholic parish of St Anne Line in South Woodford, London, also is named after the saint and possess a large stone carved statue of her inside the church.