God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  It is highly unlikely that Vaux was aware of what was, in all probability, the arrogation of his name. Ridolfi undermined his claim by further asserting that ‘many’ Protestants would afford aid, ‘being concerned rather with the question of succession than with that of religion’. He even named the Earl of Leicester as a fence-sitting ‘neutral’. A thorough investigation into the Ridolfi Plot implicated the Catholic peers Arundel and Lumley, but Vaux was not mentioned in the associated intelligence. The following year, however, a priest on his pension, who had been ‘resorting familiarly to the French ambassador’, was named by one of Burghley’s spies as a person of interest in the ongoing investigation into Mary Stuart. Committed to prison by the Bishop of London, the priest, ‘one Dowglas’, was briefly suspected of ‘familiarity’ with some of the Scottish Queen’s supporters and ‘hath confessed somewhat of them’.76 The spy does not elaborate and ‘Dowglas’ does not appear in his later reports. Burghley, it seems, did not pursue the matter, but any perceived association with Mary Stuart, even by several degrees of separation, did not augur well for Lord Vaux.

  Whatever secret sympathies he may or may not have harboured, Lord Vaux was, on the face of it, a loyal and trusted citizen. Not only did he attend Parliament in 1572, but he also sat on the county commission for musters in 1569 and 1570, on a committee dealing with vagabonds in 1572, and on the commission for gaol delivery in 1579. Indeed, for much of the decade, it was county business that dominated his agenda. When Parliament met again in 1576, he nominated Lord Burghley as his proxy – an unlikely choice in terms of religion, but Burghley was a close neighbour who could be relied upon to defend local interests.77

  Vaux could not avoid religious controversy by withdrawing from Westminster, however. Another near neighbour was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, an outspoken Protestant who liked to lambast ‘the usurped tyranny of Rome’ at any given opportunity.78 There was a strong Puritan element in the county. Indeed, it was a Northamptonshire Puritan, Percival Wiburn, who would coin the phrase ‘the hotter sort of Protestants’ to describe those godly activists who sought further reform in Church and society and campaigned for a preaching ministry throughout the realm.79

  There were some very substantial Catholics in the shire too. In addition to the Treshams, Lord Vaux could find allies among the Mordaunts of Drayton, the Griffins of Dingley and the Brudenells of Deene, but their influence was counterbalanced by men like Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton and Sir Richard Knightley of Fawsley – Puritan sympathisers who came to dominate the county bench. The religious polarisation of the region did not correspond with any clear-cut geographical division. Puritans and recusants lived side by side and although there were moments of friction, harmony was the norm.

  Lord Vaux and Sir Edward Montagu, for example, shared many local interests and seem to have spoken with one voice when they bailed poachers and punished vagabonds in the 1570s. Indeed, the two were good friends and Montagu entertained Vaux ‘many times’ at Boughton House.80 The Vauxes were also welcome at Fawsley, Sir Richard Knightley’s home, where, on one occasion, Henry Vaux composed a Latin poem ex tempore at the encouragement of a fellow guest. The proposed theme was the Ciceronian maxim Honos alit artes (Honour nourishes the arts).81 Fawsley would become a Puritan stronghold under Knightley’s patronage, but at least in this instance, the religious differences of the neighbours did not prevent them from enjoying some traditional pastime with good company.

  Occasionally, however, simmering religious tensions boiled over. On Friday, 13 April 1576, for instance, Henry Norwich, a Protestant, was badly beaten up by a group of Catholics that included two of his nephews and Lord Vaux’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Tresham. According to Norwich, his assailants, ‘arrayed with swords, bucklers, daggers, long-picked staves, cudgels, bastinadoes and sundry other weapons, as well invasive as defensive’, had set upon him in Kettering market and would have killed him had he not escaped to a nearby house. He alleged that other attempts had been made on his life before and since. He sought redress at the Northampton quarter sessions, but was not happy with the verdict delivered by Lord Vaux and his fellow officials there. He claimed that the defendants were ‘supported by some in authority’ and in 1578 he appealed to the Star Chamber. The case evidence exposes the murderous divisions within the Norwich family. Henry Norwich testified that his assailants were utterly contemptuous of the law:

  And such is their liberty and especially the said Simon [his nephew] that he dare openly profess popery or any superstition and to manifest the same he hath not been at any divine service nor received any sacrament sithence your Majesty’s reign, unless it have been at any armitage [Hermitage] in the woods near his house where sometimes, with divers vagrant persons known to be massing priests, he heareth Mass.82

  Henry Norwich was an informer against Catholics, all Catholics it seems, even those who happened to be his nephews. He also accused Simon of smuggling papal bulls into the country, defaming the English Bible and supporting Catholic priests both at home and abroad. Evidently his nephews felt that Uncle Henry had meddled one time too many in their affairs and at Kettering market they had meted out their own brand of rough justice. The case is a reminder not only of local resentment to the implementation of the recusancy laws, but also to the inherent violence of the age.

  Henry Norwich won his case in the Star Chamber and continued to hound local Catholics. Sixteen years after the affray at Kettering, ‘her Majesty’s servant’ would be ‘assaulted and wounded’ again, this time ‘by the procurement’ of George and Ambrose Vaux, two of Lord Vaux’s sons by his second marriage. The cause was the same: ‘for splena [sic] and displeasure borne by them unto him for prosecuting some of their friends for recusancy’. As before, Norwich was dissatisfied with the reaction – or rather inaction – of the local authorities and complained to the Privy Council that his assailants were persisting in ‘their riotous and disorderly proceedings’.83 Despite the law of the land and the ferocity and ubiquity of anti-Catholic rhetoric in Elizabethan England, it seems that, in Northamptonshire at least, informing on one’s neighbours with what was deemed unnecessary fervour was an unpopular and risky endeavour.

  In 1580 Lord Vaux turned forty-five. This was around the time, according to contemporary experts, of the onset of old age. It was believed that the body would begin to dry up, strength would decline and the mind would become ‘more sedate and quiet in its motions’.84 Wisdom and discretion would replace the passion and folly of youth. This probably suited Vaux just fine.

  He had lived through three changes of monarch (four if one includes the abortive reign of Lady Jane Grey). He had seen the Mass abolished, restored and abolished again. He had subscribed to a religious settlement, in which he did not believe, and promised to defend a Church whose authority he did not recognise. He had witnessed the publication of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and the excoriation of his faith. He had been forced to serve God in secret and conceal aspects of worship of which he was proud. Priests, whom he revered, had been exiled, imprisoned and even put to death. He had buried his parents and his first wife. He had sired nine children and was the grandfather of two. Towards the end of the decade, his daughter Eleanor, who had married Edward Brooskby, had a boy and a girl, William and Mary. Raised from birth as Catholics, they joined an embattled minority. It has been estimated that by 1580 more than half of the population had been baptised in the Elizabethan Church.85

  ‘Learn thou hereby not to faint,’ Lord Vaux may have read in The Exercise of a Christian Life issued from a secret Catholic press in England in 1579,

  or to be discouraged when thou art persecuted, tempted and afflicted, but with faith to expect our good Lord his hour, who after a tempest sendeth fair weather, after troubles quietness.86

  Lord Vaux knew all too well that the better part of valour was discretion. Even the hardest heart might have forgiven him for wanting to live out the rest of his days in quiet expectation of future fair weather: to enjoy his
hounds and hawks, to muddle along with Puritan neighbours and to let the next generation champion the cause with the vigour of youth. Then a familiar friend turned up at his gates and Lord Vaux, ever the hospitable nobleman, welcomed him inside. In so doing, he condemned the rest of his life to imprisonment, pecuniary pain and ‘inspeakable misery’.87

  The tempest was only just beginning to stir.

  fn1 Lady Guildford was attendant on the young Catherine of Aragon on the night of her wedding to Prince Arthur (Henry VIII’s older brother). According to her later testimony, made during Henry VIII’s annulment proceedings, Lady Guildford had seen the young couple ‘lying in bed together alone and sole, and in mind and intent, as she believeth, to have carnal cognition together as man and wife’. (PRO SP 1/65, f. 19r)

  fn2 Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1. Two centuries later Goethe would use two stanzas of Vaux’s poem in Faust (Part II, v. 6).

  fn3 The seventeenth-century term hocus-pocus may be a corruption or parody of the words of consecration: ‘hoc est (enim) corpus (meum)’.

  fn4 In terms of aesthetics, it is easy to lament what was lost, but modern sensibilities should be resisted. Edward VI’s iconoclasts were not artistically motivated. Their God was a jealous God who had forbidden graven images. Similarly, it was to destroy the idols of false gods that the Catholic conquistadors demolished the monuments of native religion in the New World.

  Keith Thomas makes an interesting point: ‘Nowadays, when we gaze happily and indiscriminately at altarpieces of the virgin Mary and Greek statues of Apollo and Hindu sculpture and Japanese Buddhas and masks from Benin, are we showing the catholicity of our taste or simply our indifference to religious values? For it would still be almost impossible for us to appreciate an artefact, however exquisite, if we found its symbolic overtones too repugnant. What would we do if we were given, say, a beautifully carved and bejewelled swastika? … Perhaps the gulf separating us from the Tudor and Stuart iconoclasts is narrower than we think.’ (Thomas, ‘Art and Iconoclasm’, p. 40)

  fn5 As with much of 1066 and All That (1930), Sellar and Yeatman’s gentle parody of posterity’s verdict is astute: ‘Broody Mary’s reign was … a Bad Thing, since England is bound to be C of E, so all the executions were wasted.’

  fn6 Sir John Beaumont, a bencher of the Inner Temple, had attained the office of Master of the Rolls in the reign of Edward VI, but lost it, along with his estate, under charges of corruption and fraud.

  fn7 The famous, but often misquoted, assertion that Queen Elizabeth did not like ‘to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts’ was made by Francis Bacon towards the end of the reign. As Diarmaid MacCulloch points out, ‘the heart is not the seat of salvation as is the soul. It would not be inconsistent with protestantism for the Queen to care less about feelings or opinions than about salvation.’ (J. Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, I, 1861, p. 178; MacCulloch, ‘Latitude’, p. 49)

  fn8 Memories of the mistimed Bull took a long time fading: ‘Pius’s action was so generally recognized as a political blunder that it was even remembered in the 1930s when the papacy considered how to react to Adolf Hitler’s regime: discreet voices in the Vatican privately recalled the bad precedent, and behind the scenes it was a factor in preventing a public papal condemnation of Nazism.’ (MacCulloch, Reformation, p. 334)

  fn9 This is an arresting image. The cockle was a purple-flowering weed that blighted the cornfields. In the Parable of the Weeds (Matthew 13:24–30), Jesus advised against uprooting the weed too soon, ‘lest perhaps, gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it. Suffer both to grow until the harvest, and in the time of the harvest, I will say to the reapers: Gather up first the cockle and bind it into bundles to burn, but the wheat gather ye into my barn.’

  fn10 A century later, the massacre, along with the Marian burnings, was still used to stir up a visceral fear of Catholicism. In order to fathom ‘the last time Popery reigned amongst us,’ wrote Charles Blount in 1679, the reader must imagine a town in flames, ‘at the same instant, fancy amongst the distracted crowd you behold troops of papists ravishing your wives and daughters, dashing your little children’s brains out against the walls, plundering your houses and cutting your own throats … Then represent to yourselves the Tower of London playing off its cannon and battering down your houses about your ears. Also, casting your eye towards Smithfield, imagine you see your father or your mother or some of your nearest and dearest relations tied to a stake in the midst of flames, when with hands and eyes lifted up to heaven, they cry out to God for whose cause they die.’ (Justin Champion, ‘Popes and Guys and Anti-Catholicism’, in Buchanan et al., Gunpowder Plots, pp. 93–6)

  PART ONE

  WILLIAM AND HENRY

  1

  The Enterprise is Begun

  And touching our Society, be it known unto you that we have made a league – all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England – cheerfully to carry the cross that you shall lay upon us and never to despair your recovery while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or to be consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted, so it must be restored.

  Campion’s ‘Brag’, 15801

  Lord Vaux’s first son, Henry, had been eleven when he had left home with his sisters to live with his maternal grandmother in Leicestershire. There was nothing particularly unusual in the arrangement; children often completed their education in the households of their relatives and Lord Vaux could rely on his mother-in-law to bring up his children the right way, which is to say, the Catholic way.

  Elizabeth Beaumont was born a Hastings. She was distantly related to the Puritan Earl of Huntingdon and his brother, Francis Hastings, a fervid Protestant, who was convinced that no Catholic could be a good Englishman. He persistently railed against the ‘viperous brood’ of priests and their ‘popish poison’. Their harbourers, he wrote, were ‘dangerous people (for subjects I cannot call them till they obey better)’, who threatened to ‘infect the heart and mind of many a simple subject’.2 Despite her relation’s best efforts to rid the county of ‘this pernicious sect of papists’, Elizabeth Beaumont, a widow and therefore possessed of a certain amount of independence, continued to worship the old faith in her home.

  Henry Garnet, the Jesuit leader who was active in England from 1586, would praise Elizabeth’s service to the mission. ‘It was her pleasure,’ he wrote, ‘to look after the priests’ rooms and to cook their food so that their presence might be kept more secret. And she showed great devotion to me without my meriting it in any way.’ Priests had been resorting to her house long before the first missionaries came to England in 1574. Garnet mentions that her son Francis Beaumont had grown up hearing Mass secretly at home before disappointing them all in adulthood by attending the services of the ‘new religion’.3

  In addition to Elizabeth Vaux, Beaumont had another daughter, Jane, who was the second wife of Robert Brooksby of Shoby, one of those dangerous non-subjects whose ‘obstinacy’ in his faith Francis Hastings deemed so malignant.4 Around 1577, Brooksby’s son by his first marriage, Edward, married the eldest Vaux girl, Eleanor. Little is known about the middle Vaux girl, Elizabeth, who sailed away to France in 1582 to become a nun, but Eleanor and the youngest, Anne – of whom much more later – would both dedicate their lives to the English mission. The little evidence that survives suggests that the girls, whose mother had died within a month of Anne’s birth, were devoted to their only living grandparent. When she lay dying in 1588, it was a priest under their care who would administer the last rites. Many years later, Anne was still in possession of some of her grandmother’s greatest treasures: ‘a tawny rouge mantle’ and ‘a gold cross full of relics’.5

  Henry Vaux’s erstwhile tutor, Edmund Campion, also approved of Elizabeth Beaumont. ‘I congratulate you on your intellectual outloo
k,’ he wrote in his letter to Henry of July 1570, ‘your distinguished father, your grandmother, your relations and kinsfolk: all of them are and were your teachers.’

  I congratulate you on the result of their teaching, namely, that you truly count it a thing admirable and splendid, excellent and glorious, to consider the ornaments of virtue and not fleeting imaginings to be the real fame; not to waste your talents in idleness, not to gamble away your life, not to be puffed up, not to live licentiously and for pleasure; but to serve God, to avoid vicious practices, to seek the best in culture and in art.6

  Henry, who may have inherited his literary skills from his father’s father, the second Lord Vaux, was a precocious student. Campion noted that he was composing verse at the age of nine. Three surviving poems, including a Latin meditation on the Passion of Christ, were written when he was thirteen.7 The priest John Gerard described Henry as ‘a very scholarly man, well known for his piety’,8 but this was not just the pensive piety of his grandfather, who had deemed it ‘the sweetest time in all his life in thinking to be spent’. Henry’s was the active, determined piety of a young man. There was no question of him sitting out Elizabeth’s reign in the safe house of his grandmother. Latin meditations, even on the Passion, could only exercise him so far. But Henry and other young Catholics who resolutely adhered to the Church of Rome had to accept a life of diminished scope. If they refused to take the oath renouncing papal sovereignty, they could not graduate from university or hold office under the Crown. They could not be magistrates or members of Parliament or command the Queen’s forces. Prominent public roles, in any case, made absenteeism from church more visible and harder for the authorities to disregard. Nor was overseas travel an easy option as a licence was required and tricky questions were asked.