God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  It was reported that ‘to more weighty questions she responded very sensibly’. She revealed the names of some of her house guests, though was hazy on ‘needless’ details, and she admitted that her suspicions had been raised on the pilgrimage, when she had feared that ‘these wild heads had something in hand’. But when her interrogators accused her of impropriety with her priest, Anne’s manner shifted. She ‘laughed loudly two or three times’, then rounded on them:

  ‘You come to me with this child’s play and impertinence, a sign that you have nothing of importance with which to charge me.’

  Of course, she sneered, she had known about the powder treason. She was, after all, a woman, and women make it their business to know everything. And of course Garnet had been involved: since he was the greatest traitor in the world, he wouldn’t have missed it. Then she thanked her guards for giving her board and lodging, as no one else in London was prepared to put her up.

  ‘She is really quite funny and very lively,’ wrote an admirer. ‘She pays no attention whatsoever to them, and so she has them amazed and they are saying, “We absolutely do not know what to do with that woman!”’

  *

  That woman was one of several ardent, extraordinary, brave and, at times, utterly exasperating members of the Vauxfn1 family. In many ways they were perfectly typical of the lower ranks of the Elizabethan aristocracy. They owned grand houses and estates. They patronised local people and places. They married folk similar to themselves. William, third Baron Vaux, was a gentle soul, seldom happier than with his hounds and hawks. He was a proud father, an affable host, a bit deaf and not good with money. His eldest daughter, Eleanor, was a ‘very learned and in every way accomplished lady’; his youngest, Merill, ran off with her uncle’s servant. One grandson inherited the barony and married the daughter of an earl; another murdered a merchant in Madrid.

  There were squabbles within this family and disputes without it. There were heady romances, clandestine marriages and some very embarrassing lawsuits. There was even the proverbial black sheep: ever-indebted Ambrose, ‘an untoward and giddy headed young man’, who took to brawling at Shakespeare’s Globe.2 The private lives of other Elizabethan families were probably just as entertaining, if not so well documented. The Vauxes were not, in other words, unique. But there was something that made them remarkable, that defined them and in turn helps them define the age in which they lived, for it was the ill fortune of the Vaux family, at a time of Protestant triumphalism, to be Roman Catholic.

  Specifically, the Vauxes were ‘recusants’. They refused to go to church every Sunday (the word stems from the Latin recusare: to refuse). Not for them the awkward compromises, the crossed fingers and blocked ears at official service, the hasty confession and secret Mass at home afterwards. Once the men in Rome decreed that it was not good enough to be a ‘church papist’, as those who chose outward conformity were derisively termed, the Vauxes stayed at home. They needed the sacraments. They needed to confess their sins and consume what they believed to be the real presence of Christ at the Sacrifice of the Altar, but this required an agent of sacramental grace. Here was another problem, since Catholic priests were effectively outlawed. So for upholding their faith, the Vauxes committed the passive crime of not going to church and the more active one of harbouring priests. Other laws passed during the reign of ‘Good Queen Bess’ banned the receipt of images, crucifixes, rosaries and other ‘popish trash’ that was so ingrained in the Catholic way of life.

  The penalties for disobedience – for what was widely perceived as a challenge to monarchical authority and a deliberate fracturing of society – were fines, controls on movement, the loss of public office, property, liberty and, in some cases, loss of life. Few Elizabethans would have disputed that obedience was a Christian duty, but after the Pope excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570, it became increasingly difficult for English Catholics to maintain a dual allegiance to their God and their Queen.

  The international situation hardly helped. The Protestant Reformation may have taken root in England, but in other parts of Europe the Counter-Reformation was rampant. Protestants were massacred in France and the Low Countries, Armadas were launched from Inquisition Spain, rebellion was fomented in Ireland and, from across the Scottish border, a rival queen with Tudor blood pitched up and became the willing instrument of Elizabeth’s enemies. Militant religious orders were sent on missions to save souls, both in the New World and in the Old. The Queen and her Council felt under siege from Catholic Europe. This was the age of assassination; with every attempt on Elizabeth’s life, fears for national security grew and increasingly draconian laws were passed to protect it.

  Distrust and hatred from both sides fed each other. ‘Only the question is,’ wrote the Queen’s godson Sir John Harington, ‘(which in my conscience I cannot certainly decide): which was first? I mean, whether their sinister practises drew on these rigorous laws, or whether the rigour of these laws moved them to these unnatural practises. But thus, in the end, acts of religion became to be treasons.’3

  For many Catholics the Elizabethan ‘Golden Age’ is an alien concept. Almost two hundred of their co-religionists were executed.4 Others perished in prison. Torture, though formally unlawful, was used more than at any other time in England’s history. One Catholic woman, destined for the gallows for organising the escape of a priest, protested that ‘the Queen herself, if she had the bowels of a woman, would have done as much if she had known the ill-treatment he underwent’.5 But it was the heart and stomach of a king that were required for England’s defence. It was the Queen’s sworn Christian duty to protect the Church and extirpate heresy. Toleration was unthinkable.

  This book attempts to go some way towards explaining how ‘acts of religion became to be treasons’ and why ‘unnatural practises’ were motivated by faith. It follows the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall into the heart of the underground movement and explores the conflicts of loyalty that they, as Catholics and Englishmen, faced in a violent, volatile world. It is a story of stately homes and Thames-side taverns, spy rings and torture chambers, priest hunts, exorcisms and a swashbuckling escape from the Tower of London: sensational stuff that was sensationalised at the time and has proved a rich seam for historical novelists. But it also seeks to enter the shuttered world of the Elizabethan recusant household and look at how parents, children and servants tried to keep the faith on a daily basis. Their lives were not reflective of the common Catholic experience; there was no such thing and the Vauxes took more risks than most in their zeal to preserve and promote Catholicism in England. But I hope that for the general reader it might throw a shaft of light on a rather murky corner of England’s past, one that was for a long time kept hidden.

  Recusant families would conceal their papers (as well as their priests) under floorboards and in cavity walls. Centuries might pass before workmen or curious children pulled them out again. The Tresham Papers, which contain wonderful details about the Vaux family, were only exposed when builders knocked through a wall at Rushton Hall in 1828. Around seventy years later, a secret room with a swinging-beam entrance was discovered by a boy exploring a derelict wing of Harvington Hall, near Kidderminster. In 1959, electricians working in the attic at Lyford Grange found a small box containing an Agnus Deifn2 and papers dated 1579. One contemporary recorded his plan to bind up his documents ‘with the string of secrecy & for a time to bury & entomb them in their sepulchre, till some joyful day cause their happy resurrection, that then with free egress they may pass uncontrolled’.6 They were preserved for years by the Brudenells of Deene, and now, as long as the rules of the Bodleian Library are observed, ‘may pass uncontrolled’ to all readers.

  It is impossible to know how many Catholics there were in Elizabethan England – more at the beginning than the end, certainly, but they did not advertise their membership. John Bossy estimated some forty thousand in 1603, less than one per cent of the population. The recusants, the ‘obstinate papists’, were a tiny, noisy fra
ction of that minority: thousands rather than tens of thousands.7 More were dreaded. Seemingly backed by the powers of Catholic Europe, they aroused fears of a fifth column poised to strike at the heart of the commonwealth. ‘Anti-popery’ became an ideology, a cultural force. Not only did it shape the life and policy of Elizabeth I, but also those of her successors. It was a contributory factor in the Civil War and left some weeds in the British constitution. It needs to be looked at in the context of its time, not ours, but if we are to gain a rounded sense of our past, it is important to know about the priest-holes as well as the palaces.

  fn1 The name is pronounced ‘Vorx’.

  fn2 A small wax disc made from the paschal candle, bearing the imprint of a cross and a lamb, and blessed by the Pope. The Agnus Dei (‘lamb of God’) was usually worn round the neck and was thought to protect its bearer from evil influences. After 1571 anyone caught bringing one into the country risked forfeiture of lands and goods.

  Prelude: The Calm before Campion

  When Henry Vaux’s old tutor returned to England in the summer of 1580, he was disguised as a jewel merchant. On reaching London, he changed his outfit, acquired arms and a horse, and became a gentleman. He later toured the English countryside ‘in apparel to myself very ridiculous; I often change it and my name also’.1 The subterfuge was necessary because he was a Roman Catholic priest. He was a member of a new religious order called the Society of Jesus and he had undergone several years of intensive training to prepare for this moment. In a previous incarnation he had dazzled Queen Elizabeth at Oxford University. Now he aimed to employ his rhetorical skills in a more expansive arena. He was forty years old, his name was Edmund Campion and his mission was the restoration of the Catholic faith in England.

  One of the first people to welcome him home was his former pupil Henry, now a member of an underground group helping priests evade arrest. When Campion came to Northamptonshire, Henry’s father, William, third Baron Vaux of Harrowden, offered him hospitality ‘sundry times’ and invited influential neighbours to hear Mass.2 The last time Campion had been at Harrowden Hall was as a tutor just over a decade earlier. It had been a short tenure, but left a lasting impression. ‘From the day your father first asked me to see you and superintend your education,’ Campion had written to Henry in 1570, ‘I have become amazingly attached to you, for I marvelled and was almost perplexed when I saw a boy who had not yet completed his ninth year, scion of a notable family, of such pleasant demeanour and refinement.’ Campion had been touched by Lord Vaux’s ‘fatherly pride’, his ‘anxious and solicitous care for you all’ and ‘his pleasant and easy manner’. Indeed, ‘a more illustrious example of affability and integrity than your father,’ Campion informed Henry, ‘I do not think it is possible for you to see.’3

  Lord Vaux faced a dilemma in 1580. Campion was no longer the darling of Oxford. Nor was he a client of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester, as he had been in the late 1560s. Having him at Harrowden then had been a matter of good patronage. In 1580 it was a controversial and defiant act. Father Edmund Campion, S.J., was a wanted man. His mission to reconcile Elizabeth’s subjects to Rome was potentially treasonous. Anyone who harboured or aided him was liable to loss of goods and life imprisonment. When Lord Vaux decided to open his gates in 1580, it wasn’t just Campion he was letting in, but the wrath of the law. For a man so ‘anxious and solicitous’ for the care of his children, the decision could not have been easy. Vaux knew he was taking a risk in 1580, but he could never have foreseen quite how dramatically his life, and the lives of those around him, would change.

  Forty-five years earlier, in 1535 when William Vaux was born, the prospect of a Catholic priest being a fugitive for his faith in England would have been greeted with derision. Priests were regarded by most Englishmen as the indispensable channels of saving grace and no matter how far some individuals fell short of the ideal, they represented an institution that was revered. The Mass remained the cornerstone of Christian worship. Denial of the Real Presence – that is, the physical body and blood of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine – was a capital offence and continued to be for the rest of Henry VIII’s reign.

  But change was afoot. On 6 July 1535, the month before William’s birth, Thomas More had climbed the scaffold for his refusal to endorse Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. He had been willing to pledge allegiance to Queen Anne Boleyn, but not to renounce the spiritual primacy of the Pope. New legislation declared that England was ‘governed by one Supreme Head and King’, who was furnished with ‘plenary, whole and entire power, pre-eminence, authority, prerogative and jurisdiction’ over Church and State. No interference from ‘foreign princes or potentates’ would be countenanced. The ancient problem of dual allegiance had resurfaced. ‘Render unto Caesar,’ Christ had counselled, ‘the things which be Caesar’s and unto God the things which be God’s’ (Matthew 22:21). It had never been an easy distinction to make in practice. Henry VIII’s welding of the spheres, and assertion of supremacy over both, made it even harder.

  The Vauxes had more reason than most to acknowledge England’s Caesar as God’s chief spokesman. They owed everything to the Tudors. The Northamptonshire family, which could trace its descent at least as far as the thirteenth century, was staunchly Lancastrian. Attainder in 1461 under the Yorkist Edward IV had taken away their fortune – a sizeable living accrued from solid county service and canny marriages to local heiresses. The Battle of Tewkesbury a decade later claimed the life of Sir William Vaux (1437–71) and left his widow, Katharine, destitute with ‘none earthly thing for her and her children to live upon’.4 When her mistress, Margaret of Anjou (Shakespeare’s ‘she-wolf of France’), went into exile, Katharine was one of the few ladies by her side. Steadfast loyalty to unpopular causes would prove to be a family trait.

  Vaux constancy was vindicated at Bosworth Field. Henry VII’s first Parliament restored the family lands to Katharine’s son Nicholas and reversed the attainder. A knighthood quickly followed, reward for Nicholas’s military service against the early pretenders who challenged Tudor rule. His sister Jane, Lady Guildford, became governess to Henry VII’s daughters – Princess Mary called her ‘my mother Guildford’fn1 – and in 1502 Nicholas was appointed Lieutenant of Guînes, a military and diplomatic post that he held till his death.

  Towards the end of Henry VII’s reign, Nicholas married Anne Green, a wealthy heiress, who brought him lands in Northamptonshire and six other counties stretching from Yorkshire to Kent. He consolidated his holdings on the accession of Henry VIII, when he was granted a slew of offices and manors.5 Thenceforth, Vaux prosperity seemed assured. Nicholas served three times as sheriff of Northamptonshire and established the family seat at Harrowden Hall, near Wellingborough. Henry VIII visited ‘Sir Nicholas Vaux place’ once, on 27 July 1511, a Sunday, when he heard Mass and made his usual offering of six shillings and eightpence.6

  At court Nicholas had a fondness for ceremonial and a sartorial flair that was appreciated by the chroniclers. In 1520 he helped organise the Anglo-French conference known as the Field of Cloth of Gold, at which Henry VIII attempted to outdo Francis I in a series of costly spectacles. A fleeting cloud of suspicion passed over Nicholas the following year at the fall of the Duke of Buckingham – it was later discovered that he had employed a chaplain of the executed peer7 (harbouring suspect priests was another family trait) – but he retained the King’s favour. In April 1523, Sir Nicholas Vaux was elevated to the peerage as the first Baron Vaux of Harrowden. His creation was by writ of summons. The following month, he died.

  Nicholas had been a devout Catholic at a time when the term was synonymous with being a devout Christian. It was his son Thomas, second Lord Vaux, and later his grandson William, the third Baron, who had to navigate the treacherous waters stirred up by the Break with Rome and Henry VIII’s peculiarly avaricious brand of Reformation.

  Thomas was fourteen and newly married when his father died in 1523. Four years l
ater, he attended Cardinal Wolsey on embassy in France and in January 1531, having reached his majority, the second Lord Vaux took his seat in the House of Lords.8 In 1532 he accompanied Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn when they crossed the Channel to secure French support for Henry’s campaign to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The following year, on 30 May 1533, Thomas was created a Knight of the Bath in anticipation of Anne’s coronation the following day.

  A gap in the Lords Journal makes it impossible to monitor Vaux’s attendance before 1534, but he was seated in the Upper House many times in February and March that year and was present during several readings of the bill concerning the ‘usurped authority’ of the Pope. He also attended the formal closing of the session on 30 March 1534, when, in the King’s presence, the Lord Chancellor gave the royal assent to the legislation and announced that all members would have to take an oath of allegiance ‘alonely to the King’s Majesty and to the heirs of his body’.9

  There was no sign of Lord Vaux when Parliament reassembled in November. His seat was cold at the next session and the next. Indeed, only once, in order to ensure his wife’s jointure in 1536, would he return during Henry VIII’s reign. He presented himself for one day at the first session of Edward VI’s Parliament in 1547, but ignored all subsequent summons.10 It was only on the accession of Mary I that Thomas’s record improved. It is tempting to infer that faith was a determining factor. He clearly supported Mary more than her father or brother and inclined her way, the Roman Catholic way. But one must beware of reading the Vaux story backwards; that is to say, of tracing the family’s subsequent recusancy and uncompromising attitude to faith earlier than the record allows. If Lord Vaux was not the pliable peer for which the government had probably hoped when he was dubbed a Knight of the Bath before Anne’s coronation, nor was he an engagé. Other Catholics tried to resist reform, either from within or in open opposition. Lord Vaux chose to withdraw from the fray. Apart from seven months in 1536 when he served as Governor of Jersey and two occasions – in 1551 and 1554 – when he sat on county commissions, he seems to have avoided public office.