Ballard was also named as one of the exorcist-priests who had practised their ‘devil work’ at various Catholic homes throughout the autumn, winter and spring of 1585–6. Samuel Harsnett later tried to claim that the exorcisms, which he wanted everyone to think were fraudulent, were part of the Babington Plot. According to the dubious testimony of Anthony Tyrrell, an exorcist who quickly turned informant after his arrest in July 1586, the dispossessions ‘procured unto ourselves very great favour, credit and reputation, so as it was no marvel if some young gentlemen, as Master Babington and the rest, were allured to those strange attempts which they took in hand by Master Ballard, who was an agent amongst us’. Tyrrell, who recanted his faith on several occasions, claimed that the exorcisms were part of the battle for ‘the hearts and minds of Catholics’, so that ‘when such forces as were intended should have come into England, they might have been more readily drawn … to have joined their forces with them’.14
Sara and Friswood Williams were less keen on making a direct connection between the exorcisms and the plot, noting only that Babington and ‘most of the rest that were executed’ had sometimes watched. It is hardly surprising that in the small world of Catholic recusancy, Babington and his crew had heard about, and been attracted to, an aggressive counter-reforming initiative. It may even be the case that the spectacular scenes they witnessed contributed to the reckless optimism that would draw them into the plot some months later. This cannot be proven and even if it could, it would by no means follow that the Vauxes, as hosts to several exorcisms including that of Babington’s servant Marwood, were party to the plot.15
Try as it might, the government could find no formal connection between the exorcisms and the Babington Plot. ‘In all their most detailed examinations of the prisoners,’ William Weston recalled, ‘there was nothing they could find against me.’16 Another Hackney exorcist, Thomas Stamp, whose ‘flearing countenance’ Sara would never forget, was, upon his arrest in September 1586, ‘specially to be dealt withal and touched for this last conspiracy’. It was noted that he ‘did much harm in the Lord Vaux his house’, but he could not be implicated in the conspiracy and was soon carted off to Wisbech Castle in Cambridgeshire, where he joined several of his fellow exorcists, none of whom was brought to trial for involvement in the Babington Plot.17
If there was any hard evidence to substantiate Tyrrell’s claim that the exorcisms at Hackney and elsewhere were deliberately staged to win ‘hearts and minds’ in advance of invasion; if it could be proven that Lord Vaux and Anthony Babington had ever discussed treason during their property negotiations; if it could be stated with any kind of certainty that Henry Vaux had known about Ballard’s plans when he had given him (via Weston) some of the mission’s funds, then a case linking the Vauxes to the Babington Plot might be more substantial. As it stands, all is suspicion and circumstance. It is little wonder that Babington, Ballard and several of their accomplices had crossed paths with members of the Vaux family. George and Ambrose had mingled with exile communities on their travels abroad and Henry had worked alongside several conspirators in the early days of the Jesuit mission. Indeed, Lord Vaux’s eldest son was such a crucial cog in the machinery of the Catholic underground that the real shock would have come from finding no link. One can hardly be deemed guilty of plotting for knowing a conspirator, still less for knowing the associates of a conspirator. While the Vauxes clearly hung from the fringes of the Babington Plot, they cannot, or at least not now unless new evidence comes to light, be woven convincingly into its fabric.
Nevertheless, the assumption certainly existed in some exile circles that Lord Vaux could be relied upon ‘if any foreign power should come to invade this realm’.18 His brother-in-law, Tresham, was also claimed as a potential insurgent. In August 1586 Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, who had liaised with the plotters earlier in the year, reported to Philip II that Vaux, Tresham and three other recusant gentlemen, ‘have not been informed of the business, as they are declared Catholics and are consequently held prisoners by the Queen and under very heavy money penalties, but it is confidently assumed that, as others far less interested are joining the design, they certainly will do so’.19
Mendoza was misinformed. Ballard had attempted to recruit Tresham the previous month and not only had Tresham refused to hear him, but he had also ‘threatened to discover him’.20 Perhaps Tresham really was the loyal Elizabethan that he always claimed to be, or perhaps he had suspected ‘latet anguis in herba [a snake in the grass]’. If not at the time, then certainly seventeen years later, he was of the opinion that ‘atheistical Anthony Babington’s complotment’ was a ‘cursed Machiavellian project’ of the government’s making.21 Whatever Tresham’s motives, he was wise to stay out of the conspiracy and so, it seems, were his Vaux relations. ‘Of all the plots they have hatched these many years past,’ Mendoza informed his master in August, ‘none have been apparently so serious as this.’ Let God ‘dispose as He will,’ he continued, ‘but if for our sins He should decree that it shall not succeed, there will be much Catholic blood spilt in England.’
‘Yes,’ Philip II scribbled on the letter, ‘that is what is to be feared.’22
*
The day is gone and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live and now my life is done.
Thus wrote Babington’s accomplice, Chidiock Tichborne, just days before his execution. Once again, youth and talent had fallen at the feet of fanaticism. It seems a terrible waste:
The spring is past and yet it hath not sprung,
The fruit is dead and yet the leaves are green,
My youth is gone and yet I am but young,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen.
My thread is cut and yet it was not spun,
And now I live and now my life is done.23
fn1 The apprentice seems to have resented Wolsley’s clumsy attempt to convert him: Wolsley had taken out an old devotional manual ‘and of purpose laid it open in the window’. The apprentice recalled that it contained advice on confession and fasting, as well as ‘divers printed pictures of the Virgin Mary, of saints and other superstitious toys, which book this examinate [the apprentice] misliking threw aside.’
8
Lambs to the Slaughter
It was a period of very great confusion for us all. Every road, cross-way and port was watched night and day, and sealed off so effectively that no person could pass without the most rigorous examination. Lodging-houses, private homes, rooms were searched and examined with minute thoroughness; neither friend nor acquaintance could escape without being forced to give an account of himself. In this way many priests were captured, and Catholics filled the prisons throughout the country.
William Weston, S.J., Autobiography
Just before sunrise on 7 July 1586, a Kentish shepherd stood on a bluff and looked out to sea. His eye fixed on a small boat sailing smoothly towards the shore. It was a strange place to land, so far from the harbour. At length, one of the sailors alighted and, taking a passenger upon his back, waded ashore. He set him down, returned to his vessel, conveyed a second man over the water, then struck sail. The shepherd continued to stand and stare. ‘He was scrutinising us carefully,’ one of the travellers recalled, ‘and was obviously asking himself who were these people who landed at this unusual place.’1
They were Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell, Jesuit emissaries from Rome. By putting priestly foot to English sand, they were committing high treason. Derbyshire-born Garnet was in his early thirties and possessed of a fair complexion, a ‘comely’ gait and a hairline that might already have begun to recede. He was the son of a schoolmaster and had been a scholar at Winchester and an employee at Richard Tottel’s famous printworksfn1 before going abroad to study for the priesthood. At Rome, where he became a Jesuit priest, he was known as the ‘poor sheep’ on account of his shyness.2 It had been eleven years since he had seen his homeland.
Robert Southwell was six years younger than
Garnet and more striking, both physically and temperamentally. He had auburn hair, the bearing of a gentleman and the jagged intensity of a poet. One admirer called him ‘the rarest & most eloquent Ciceronian of our age’. He had left England at the age of fourteen and just before his seventeenth birthday had entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus, ‘that body,’ he wrote, ‘wherein lyeth all my life, my love, my whole heart and affection’.3
They had been travelling for two months, having left Rome at the beginning of May. The Society General, Claudio Aquaviva, had initially been reluctant to give his blessing to this new phase of the English mission. Garnet, in particular, he had thought ‘more suited to the quiet life rather than the unsure and worrisome one that must be lived in England’.4 But even as he lamented that he was sending ‘lambs to the slaughter’, Aquaviva was persuaded of the need for reinforcements in England. ‘Pray send men to help us and someone to take charge,’ Weston had begged in April, ‘then we shall gather in sheaves on sheaves with laden arms.’ Under pressure from Allen and Persons, Aquaviva had relented. Garnet was appointed the senior member on the journey and successor to Weston should the Jesuit superior ever lose his life or liberty. ‘The need for prudence is very great,’ Weston warned.5
Writing ‘from death’s ante-room’, just before his passage to England, the 24-year-old Southwell veered from bullish defiance to blanket fear:
I know very well that sea and land are gaping wide for me, and lions as well as wolves go prowling in search of whom they may devour. But I welcome more than fear their fangs. Rather than shrink from them as torturers, I call to them to bring my crown. It is true that the flesh is weak and can do nothing and even now revolts from that which is proposed … I do not dare to hope what I so violently desire, but if I reach, God willing, the lowest rank of happy martyrs, I will not be unmindful of those who have remembered me.6
The government knew that they were coming, but not where they would land. A special watch had been placed on the ports. ‘I must say,’ Garnet admitted, ‘we felt a thrill of fear’ under the shepherd’s gaze. ‘However, the die was cast, and we must try our luck.’ So they marched up to the man with as much outrage as they could feign and began to rail against their boatman for depositing them in this unlikely spot. The shepherd was ‘a very honest fellow’, Garnet wrote, and ‘most indignant at the wrong done to us’. He pointed out their location – not far from Folkestone – and ‘described to us at length the places round about, and the right way to get to them’.
After this ‘merry’ encounter, the priests received more good fortune. It was the feast day of St Thomas of Canterbury and amidst the crowds flocking to the fair, no one was suspicious of the two Jesuits with oddly cut clothes and slightly strange accents, who ‘made our confessions to each other as we walked along’. They decided to separate and reunite in London with Weston. Southwell found himself a horse and made good progress. Garnet began on foot and avoided the coastal towns ‘like the plague’. Both found the capital safely and hailed each other in the street. ‘For five or six hours,’ Garnet recalled, ‘we walked about the city, but we did not see a single friend. Then, by chance, we met the man we were looking for.’7
It had been agreed at Hoxton the previous year that any priests ‘determined to remain in England, or [who] hereafter shall come into England, shall be relieved at the hands of Mr Henry Vaux, son to the Lord Vaux, or by his assigns’.8 If Henry was not the Jesuits’ first contact, then in all likelihood it was one of his men. They were given breakfast, escorted to an inn and asked to wait for their superior. On 13 July 1586, Weston came and dined with his new recruits. He was delighted to see them, but fretful. As the evening drew in, they changed location. A few hours later, Anthony Babington (under suspicion, but not yet under arrest) arrived and spoke to Weston.9 The following day the three Jesuits, presumably with the help of Henry Vaux, rode out of the city gates and made for the Chilterns. ‘The news of our coming has already spread abroad,’ Southwell wrote in his first letter from England, ‘and from the lips of the Queen’s Council my name had become known to certain persons. The report alarms our enemies, who fear heaven knows what at our hands, so nervous have they now become.’10
The priests and their lay assistants settled in a house, thought to be Hurleyford in Buckinghamshire, where they enjoyed a week of relative calm. On the banks of the Thames, to music by William Byrd,fn2 the company sung Mass, heard confessions, prayed, preached and worshipped together. But this was no summer retreat. The fear of arrest hovered in the air and the practicalities of the mission intruded upon spiritual exercises. Weston briefed his juniors on the strategy for survival in Protestant England. He provided them with the names of friends and the locations of safe houses. He told them about the fund that he had set up with Henry Vaux at Hoxton the previous year. And he directed their onward journeys, Garnet to the country, Southwell to the city. The Vauxes were to be their first hosts, entrusted with the crucial task of keeping them alive long enough for them to make a difference.11 The decision speaks volumes for the Society’s faith in the Vaux family and vice versa.
The missionaries were buoyed by their reception. ‘We have had the happiest possible arrival in England,’ Southwell enthused on 25 July. ‘Things would be terrible here,’ Garnet opined five days later,
if we had only our enemies to think of, and wonderful if there were only the Catholics and their fervour. They show no fear of sheltering us at any time; and so great is our friends’ opinion of the Society that we are forced to conceal that we are of it lest the whole of Jerusalem be disturbed.12
Within a few days, though, Babington was captured and the plot that bore his name was revealed to an outraged public. There were persistent rumours of a Spanish invasion. ‘All highways were watched,’ wrote Southwell, ‘infinite houses searched, hues and cries raised, frights bruited in the people’s ears, and all men’s eyes filled with such a smoke as though the whole realm had been on fire.’13 The prisons overflowed with suspected conspirators and priests. Many Catholics were ‘broken’, Weston recalled:
All men fastened their hatred on them. They lay in ambush for them, betrayed them, attacked them with violence and without warning. They plundered them at night, confiscated their possessions, drove away their flocks, stole their cattle.14
On 3 August 1586, just outside Bishopsgate, Weston was captured. Garnet automatically took over as Jesuit superior. For the next twenty years, while Weston was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Garnet headed the Jesuit mission in England. He would receive considerable assistance from two formidable ladies.
Robert Southwell, meanwhile, had returned to the London area, where he described the pursuivants prowling, ‘lynx-eyed’. He quartered with the Vauxes at Hackney and worked closely with Henry for the relief of the missionary priests. ‘Hemmed in by daily perils, never safe for even a brief moment’, he also heard confessions, prepared sermons and carried out ‘other priestly duties’, including absolving three seminary priests of their sins as they hung from a Tyburn gibbet. ‘Such is the multitude of spies,’ he informed General Aquaviva, ‘that we cannot set foot out of doors, nor walk in the streets, without danger to our lives.’15
The greatest jeopardy, however, was closer to home. Sometime the previous July, a priest called Anthony Tyrrell was arrested, interrogated and turned. He had been involved in the Hackney exorcisms and, in the autumn, gave up ‘the names of divers priests where I understood they did haunt or lie’. On 5 November the Vaux house was raided. Richard Young, a notorious priest-hunter,fn3 led the search in person. He swooped first thing in the morning in an attempt to catch the family at Mass. His prime target was ‘one Mr Sale, a priest that for certain,’ said Tyrrell, ‘did lie at the Lord Vaux his house’.16 This may have been Southwell, who gave an account of a raid around this time:
The pursuivants were raging all around and seeking me in the very house where I was lodged. I heard them threatening and breaking woodwork and sounding the walls to find hiding pla
ces; yet, by God’s goodness, after four hours’ search they found me not, though separated from them only by a thin partition rather than a wall. Of truth, the house was in such sort watched for many nights together that I perforce slept in my clothes in a very strait, uncomfortable place.17
Young was frustrated. He was certain there were priests in the house, ‘conveyed away so that they could not be found’. Henry Davies and his wife, who were operatives in the underground movement and had ridden ‘to my Lord Vaux and to Sir Thomas Tresham about secret causes’, pretended that she was the sister of Mr Marbury of the Pantry. (One of the pursuivants, ‘being greatly beholden’ to this Marbury, ‘passed them over with friendly speeches’.) According to a spy known as ‘II’ (real name: Maliverey Catilyn), Lord Vaux managed to distract another pursuivant long enough for his wife to squirrel away ‘her little casket, which she would not for five hundred pounds had been searched’.18 Indeed, the entire fruits of Young’s fossicking boiled down to some letters, found in a bag belonging to Henry Vaux. They were written in Latin and signed ‘Robert’. Initially thought to signal the return of Robert Persons from Rouen, the letters were subsequently recognised as Southwell’s.19 Henry was taken in for questioning. He refused to give anything away and was committed to the Marshalsea.fn4
God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England Page 17
