God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  There was one recorded burning in Northamptonshire: John Kurde, a shoemaker from Syresham, perished ‘in the stonepits’ just outside the north gate of Northampton on 20 September 1557.32 It is not known if William, who had become the third Lord Vaux upon the death of his father the previous year, attended. William had recently married Elizabeth Beaumont, the daughter of the lawyer Sir John Beaumont of Grace Dieu in Leicestershire.fn6 She brought to her marriage four hundred pounds and a ‘holiness of life’. According to Edmund Campion, she was noted for her ‘natural ability’ and ‘admirable shrewdness’, qualities that may have reminded William Vaux of his recently deceased mother.33

  Elizabeth bore William four children in four years – Henry, Eleanor, Elizabeth and Anne. The birth of the last may have claimed her life. The register for the Northamptonshire parish of Irthlingborough, where the Vauxes had a manor house, reveals that on 12 August 1562, twenty-four days after Anne’s baptism, ‘Elizabeth, wife of the Lord Vaux’, was buried.34 That same month, William turned twenty-seven.

  He seems to have coped with Elizabeth’s death in the conventional way: after a period of mourning, he went in search of a second wife. He did not have to look far. Mary Tresham was a Northamptonshire gentlewoman of good Catholic stock. Her grandfather, Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton Hall, had given the order for John Kurde’s burning in Northampton’s stonepits. Her brother Thomas would become a prominent recusant in the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign. There was a long history of friendship between the two families, who were already kin due to an inter-marriage in the fifteenth century. Vauxes and Treshams had witnessed each other’s wills, exchanged land, worked together on the county bench and been brothers in arms during the Wars of the Roses.

  Marriage to the third Lord Vaux must have been an attractive proposition for Mary Tresham. Here was a young, good-looking baron with a rich estate and one great mansion, Harrowden Hall. With a male heir and three daughters, he had a good record in procreation. He was convivial and enjoyed music and theatre. Lord Vaux’s players toured the country and his ‘bearward’ was recorded baiting his animals in Bristol, Ipswich and once at Chesterton near Cambridge, where he got into trouble for diverting ‘a great multitude of young scholars’ from the afternoon sermon.35

  William’s piety did not prevent him from revelling in the noble pursuits of the country. He was particularly fond of his hawks. He liked to spend money – ‘thrift,’ his brother-in-law wrote, ‘is with him against the stream.’36 If, like his father, William had no head for business, it seemed to matter little with such a vast estate and sufficient funds to employ those who did. And if, also like his father, he was easily led, then Mary Tresham, who was every bit as shrewd as William’s mother and first wife had been, would just have to keep his inconstancy in check. Marriage was a solemn undertaking for any bride, but seldom would the vows be more straitly tested than those taken by Mary Tresham.

  William and Mary had five children. The first was George, whose baptism was recorded in the Harrowden parish register on 27 September 1564.37 He was followed by Katherine, Edward, Merill and Ambrose. Although the children were privately raised as Catholics, the official registration of some of their baptisms shows that Lord Vaux was using the services of his parish church from time to time.

  He strived to avoid the politics of religion. He had been one of the noblemen appointed to escort Queen Elizabeth from Hatfield to London upon her accession in 1558, but he stayed away from Parliament, despite having taken his seat in Mary’s reign, and gave his proxy to a Protestant.38 This meant that he missed the crucial events of 1559 when England once again broke with Rome and the Elizabethan religious ‘settlement’ was hammered out. He did not witness the uproar in the House of Lords over the bill for the Queen’s supremacy, nor the refusal of all but one of the bishops to take the compromise oath acknowledging Queen Elizabeth as ‘the only Supreme Governor’ of Church and State. Indeed, when Viscount Montague made an impassioned speech against the bill, it was Lord Vaux’s proxy, the Earl of Bedford, who sought to discredit him by asking if Montague had been offered whores by the Roman cardinals when he had delivered Mary I’s submission to the Pope.39

  Lord Vaux’s surrendered vote went towards the imposition of what was, in essence, a variant of Edward VI’s Church, watered down and frozen in time.40 The Mass, for example, was abolished – there was to be no Latin canon, no sacrificial altar, no elevation of the host, no clerical exclusivity – but the new communion service was circumlocutory enough to hint at the possibility of Christ’s ‘real presence’ for those wishing to find it. Any attempt to shunt the Church either back or forth risked prosecution. Criticism of the prayer book or the maintenance of any other form of liturgy incurred a fine of 100 marks for the first offence and 400 marks for the second. Forfeiture of goods and life imprisonment awaited anyone who dared offend a third time. Subjects were required to attend their parish church every Sunday and holy day upon pain of a twelve-pence fine. The royal supremacy had to be declared, on oath, by all those holding office under Church or Crown. Defence of the spiritual primacy of the Pope incurred forfeiture of goods and, if possessions were worth less than twenty pounds, prison for a year. Serial offenders ran the risk of a traitor’s death.

  Subjects who failed these tests of allegiance came to be known as recusants. At this stage, Lord Vaux was not of their number. Noble privilege exempted him from the oath of supremacy and allowed him to worship in his private chapel. The official prayer book had to be used, of course, but as long as Vaux remained quiescent and discreet – and his father had taught him well – his inner sanctum was not violated. He probably hoped that the Queen, like her siblings, would not live long enough for the ‘alteration of religion’ to take hold. He had, after all, seen it all before.

  For the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign the letter of the law was not rigorously enforced. Those who raised their heads above the parapet were usually shot down, but the majority of Catholics avoided confrontation and were not subjected to unnecessary scrutiny. Queen Elizabeth, in common with most of her leading ministers, had conformed during Mary’s reign, and she seemed genuine in her reluctance to intrude on private thoughts.fn7

  The Queen was also acutely aware of her vulnerability on the international stage. According to the leaders of Catholic Europe, she was not the rightful ruler of England, but the bastard child of an invalid union that had subsequently been recognised as such by her own father. (Although Henry VIII named Elizabeth in the 1544 Act of Succession, and in his last will, he never formally repealed the Act of 1536 that had declared her illegitimate.) The 1559 treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis ensured that France and Spain were no longer at loggerheads, thus opening up the terrifying prospect, to Elizabethan eyes, of a Catholic world order.

  In the event, both countries would have their own domestic trials. France would be destabilised by four decades of religious civil war and Philip II, upon returning to Spain in the autumn of 1559, initially poured his energies into the Inquisition and his battle against growing Protestant activism in the Low Countries. Yet he was always very interested in English affairs, not just because he was the self-styled champion of Catholic Europe and because Dutch Protestant exiles found a safe haven across the North Sea, but also because he had been married to Mary I for four years and enjoyed the ‘crown matrimonial’ of England. ‘God has already granted that by my intervention and my hand that kingdom has previously been restored to the Catholic Church once,’ Philip later declared in an ominous statement of chutzpah and intent. He did not mourn Mary much or his departure from the country that had received him with such ill grace, but he had relished his role as joint Defender of the Faith and even contemplated reclaiming the title long after Mary’s death.41 Elizabeth I was wise indeed to avoid making waves at the start of her reign.

  She was, nevertheless, determined to kill off Catholicism in her kingdom. She was happy to procure a slow death by gradually starving the community of its sacraments. Once the old generation of Mari
an ‘mass-mongers’ had died out, and once the schoolmasters, who after 1563 were required to take the oath of supremacy, had worked on the next generation, the demand for the Catholic sacraments would dwindle. That was the theory. It did not take into account the resilience and resourcefulness of the Catholic community. Nor the efforts of an Oxford academic in exile called William Allen, who circumvented the ban on domestic ordination by setting up a seminary in Douai, Flanders. Within six years of its foundation in 1568, Allen was sending newly trained priests across the Channel for the sustenance of hungry Catholic souls.

  Another event in 1568 caused even graver consternation. Mary Queen of Scots, the young Catholic widow of Francis II of France, and the great-niece of Henry VIII, sailed into England seeking refuge from the Scottish Protestants who had forced her abdication. Elizabeth I was in a bind. Until she married and had children, her cousin Mary was the heir presumptive to the English throne. By quartering her arms with those of England, Mary had signalled her desire to be enthroned at Westminster. Whether she hoped to achieve this by deposition or succession was unclear, but many of her supporters, including militant leaders in Spain, Rome and France, seemed to favour the former.

  Elizabeth’s Secretary, William Cecil (Lord Burghley from February 1571), was convinced that Mary posed a mortal threat to his Queen. Five years earlier, he had even tried to introduce a bill that would have given the Privy Council, in the event of Elizabeth’s death, temporary control of government, allowing time for Parliament to elect a suitable (Protestant) successor. It was a radical proposal and ahead of its time. The Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 would later justify Cecil’s vision, but in 1563 Queen Elizabeth was far too wedded to the concept of inviolable hereditary monarchy to legislate for such a provision.42 The bill was dropped, but Cecil never gave up and nor did Mary or her supporters. ‘There is less danger in fearing too much than too little,’ Francis Walsingham wrote to Cecil towards the end of 1568.43

  Despite noble privilege and official reluctance to intrude upon private worship at Harrowden, Lord Vaux was doubtless observed with a weather eye. He was known on the Continent as a friend of Rome: a document in the Vatican archives from December 1567 lists him as one of thirty-one English Catholic peers.44 Two years earlier he had granted the advowson of a church living to a ‘clarke’ who subsequently ‘changed his habit’ and ministered as a priest to the Catholic community. From 1571, the priest was receiving ten pounds a year from Lord Vaux. The following year, he was imprisoned by the Bishop of London. One of Burghley’s spies, who suspected the priest of associating with confederates of the Scottish Queen, reported from London that he had been living ‘very gentlemanlike in this town, resorting familiarly to the French ambassador & is favoured of a great number of papists’.45 Lord Vaux may have been adopting a conformist pose, but it must be wondered how many other priests were receiving his aid behind the scenes.

  The letter that Edmund Campion wrote to Lord Vaux’s first son, Henry, is suggestive: ‘During the period of several months when I was a guest at your father’s house,’ he wrote, in reference to his sojourn at Harrowden Hall around 1568, ‘his daily speech and intimate conversation brought home to me the great work he was doing for all men of learning.’ Campion concluded by sending his infinite good wishes to Henry ‘and your family, by whom I am so sumptuously maintained and so honourably encouraged’.

  Within a month of writing this letter, which he addressed from Oxford on 28 July 1570, Campion had left England for Ireland, where he wrote Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland, dedicated to the Chancellor of Oxford University, and Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester. The following summer, he travelled to Allen’s seminary in Douai, where he studied scholastic theology for nearly two years before moving to Rome and joining a religious order, the Society of Jesus. He was ordained in Prague in 1578 and celebrated his first Mass on 8 September. Two years later he returned to England ‘to cry alarm spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance wherewith many my dear countrymen are abused’.46

  It would be putting the cart before the horse to anticipate all this in the summer of 1570 when Campion gratefully acknowledged Lord Vaux’s continued support. However, he did write his letter at a crossroads. In the late 1560s, the Oxford scholar had composed a long Latin poem on the tribulations of the early Church that juxtaposed the permanence of the Roman Church with the transitoriness of the Empire. ‘The strong pillar of faith stood firm,’ Campion wrote, ‘and the sure barque of Peter, never to sink, sailed bravely forward despite the tyrant.’ He wrote in the classical hexameters of Virgil and dedicated his work to ‘one of the most heroic men alive’: Viscount Montague, a prominent Catholic nobleman, who had spoken against the oath of supremacy in Parliament, but retained the favour of the Queen.47

  Towards the end of 1568, Campion had sacrificed his exhibition with the Grocers’ Company because he had not fulfilled their request to ‘utter his mind in favouring the religion now authorised’ in a public sermon. On 19 March 1569, after five years studying theology at Oxford, he had supplicated for the degree of Bachelor of Theology, something that he was unlikely to have done had he been unable to defend the established Church (the degree required public disputation). It seems that around this time Campion also ‘suffered himself to be ordained’ into the Anglican Church. Yet he did not take his degree in the summer, possibly, as his fellow missioner Robert Persons maintained, because of ‘a remorse of conscience and detestation of mind’ against his ordination, which prompted him to forsake the established Church and, for a time, his country. According to one scholar, Campion was ‘an avowed Catholic’ when he arrived in Ireland on 25 August 1570.48

  The chronology is important because it helps to assess Campion’s frame of mind when he wrote his letter to Henry Vaux from Oxford on 28 July 1570. We cannot know what ‘intimate conversation’ Campion and Henry’s father had shared in 1568, nor the exact nature of ‘the great work’ Lord Vaux had been doing for ‘all men of learning’. But if, as now seems likely, Campion was a recent convert to Catholicism when he wrote his letter, then his gratitude to Lord Vaux for his sumptuous maintenance and honourable encouragement well over a year after he had left his employ is intriguing. The two men had not seen each other for a while – ‘I have been separated from him longer than I anticipated (not my by own wish, but by reason of my way of life),’ Campion wrote, possibly in reference to his acceptance of the Anglican diaconate, which may have temporarily alienated Lord Vaux.49 But they had recently been in touch as Campion had written the letter at Vaux’s request – ‘your Father (by whom I am dearly loved, and whom I particularly revere) has easily persuaded me that my voice and advice should come to you.’

  Whatever Campion’s subsequent vocation and whenever he resolved upon it, his job at Harrowden Hall had been to tutor Henry Vaux. He was hugely impressed with the boy, who at nine had already mastered Latin and was composing poetry. This was astonishing to Campion because:

  among men of your rank we very seldom come across any who have even a slight acquaintance with literature. Many are overburdened with leisure; they concern themselves with trifles, waste the possessions of others and squander their own; they ruin the prime of life with women and pleasure. All the more rightly, then, do I congratulate you on your intellectual outlook.

  Campion also had high praise for Henry’s sister, ‘your rival in study and work’. This was probably the eldest Vaux girl, Eleanor, who was about eight in 1568. If Henry continued to fly ‘the flag of promise’ and encourage his sibling, then Campion predicted great things:

  You and your sister will be a matchless pair; you will reach the delights you so eagerly seek for, you will shine with marvellous lustre, you will be filled with the desire to do your duty and act generously, and you will be surrounded by fame and affection in the sight of all men.

  It might seem a curious letter to write to a young boy, but such compositions, offering students praise and advice in elegant Latin, were fairly commonplace in
sixteenth-century England. We cannot now know if the lessons at Harrowden Hall strayed towards issues of faith. Campion’s language is suggestive, but circumspect. Any direct references to religion are neutral: ‘Love God and serve Him.’ Henry and Eleanor would both commit their lives to the Catholic cause and, if not exactly regarded with affection ‘in the sight of all men’, to many Catholics at least, Campion’s words were prophetic.

  The turn of the decade was not a good time to be a Catholic peer. National security was under threat. A series of diplomatic skirmishes damaged the uneasy relationship between England and the Catholic monarchy in France, while the English seizure of a treasure fleet destined for the Spanish Netherlands in November 1568 brought latent hostility between Elizabeth I and Philip II of Spain into the open. Early in 1569 Secretary Cecil wrote a memorandum outlining his fears of an international Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth. Everywhere he looked – Rome, France, Spain, the Low Countries, Ireland, Scotland, even at home, where Mary Stuart now resided – he saw ‘perils … many, great and imminent’.50

  In November 1569, there was a rising in the north of England. The causes were as much political as religious, but the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland had rallied their tenants under a Catholic banner and heard Mass in Durham Cathedral. The plan, in as much as there was one, was to free Mary Stuart from house arrest in Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, and ‘thereby to have some reformation in religion’.51 The Duke of Norfolk, already in prison for conspiring to marry Mary, was implicated. Spanish aid was sought, but not forthcoming, and the rising was crushed with ruthless efficiency. Retribution was swift and terrible. Hundreds of rebels were executed under martial law; 450 dead is the conservative estimate, though a convincing argument has been made for the figure to be doubled.52