God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  Through the fissures and fractures, the recusant women slipped; not many – a minority of a minority of a minority – but their influence was disproportionate. They undertook whatever role was required of them and adapted to circumstance. On the ground, where resourcefulness and spontaneity were essential, common sense might prevail over canonical procedure. A quick-witted lady could be the difference between the capture and concealment of a priest. Or, indeed, the salvation and damnation of a soul, if, like Dorothy Lawson from Newcastle, she was instrumental in conversions and played the catechist to the extent that her chaplain had ‘no other share in the work but to take their confessions’. In emergencies, she even performed baptisms ‘with her own hand’.20

  Catholic women were conduits and fixers. John Donne had a childhood memory of going to the Tower of London with his mother to visit her imprisoned brother, Jasper Heywood. He was the senior Jesuit in England in 1584 and another visitor was his successor, William Weston. Elizabeth Donne had provided the first contact between the two priests and arranged for their eventual meeting, perhaps even helping to allay Weston’s ‘great trepidation as I saw the vast battlements, and was led by the warder past the gates’.21

  Women with autonomy at home were the custodians of household religion, and of the young, and of the priests they decided to take in. Then, as now, the ‘gatekeeper’ was in a privileged position and that made Anne Vaux and Eleanor Brooksby very influential indeed. The priest who had griped at the lack of access to Garnet also vented his spleen at ‘the elder gentlewoman’, who had ‘refused to take notice’ of him and treated him as ‘a person justly to be mistrusted’. He identified Eleanor so closely with the Jesuit superior that he considered her snub a reason to take offence at him.22 Other Catholics sought Anne’s advice. Garnet would convey instructions and even appoint his temporary successor through her.23 The sisters knew where the bodies were buried – figuratively and, in the case of ‘fresh green new relics’, quite literally.24

  The special conditions of the English mission presented women like Anne and Eleanor with opportunities for influence and action that would have been unthinkable in the more disciplined countries of Tridentine Europe. The Yorkshire Catholic, Mary Ward (1585–1645), would realise quite how different those conditions were when her attempts on the Continent to establish a female religious institute outside the cloister were met with suspicion and derision.fn3

  Contemporary portraits of recusant women were not always flattering. Alongside all those edifying reports of perfectly pious ladies – like Mary Gifford, who wore her dresses out at the knees from so much praying25 – are ones where they were depicted as either too much of a woman, or not quite a woman at all. A staple of anti-Catholic, especially anti-Jesuit, discourse was to lampoon the recusant woman as a silly slut, who sated her lust by keeping a priest in her closet. Richard Sheldon, author of A Survey of the Miracles of the Church of Rome, proving them to be Antichristian (1616), suggested that cosy households were not good environments for chastity. ‘Is it not a miracle,’ he asked,

  that so many of your priests, Ignatiansfn4 and monks feeding here in England daintily, arrayed gallantly, lodging softly, should be very domestically and privily conversant with ladies, dames, matrons, maids of all sorts, and yet none of all these be scorched?26

  At the other end of the scale was the image of the virile woman: the exceptionally heroic lady who could, in special circumstances, assume the qualities of a man (strength, aggression, fortitude, rigorism, rationality and so on) and thereby transcend the perceived limitations of her gender. ‘Though she has all a maiden’s modesty and even shyness,’ Garnet wrote of Anne, ‘yet in God’s cause, and in the protection of His servants, virgo becomes virago.’27 The image was neither new, nor confined to England. Like Martha, the New Testament hostess who was transformed in medieval legend into the dragon-taming hero of Provence, or Teresa of Ávila (1515–84), a patron saint of Spain, who ‘ceased to be a woman, restoring herself to the virile state to her greater glory’, it seemed that some women could only be privileged with a man’s praise if safely stripped of their femininity.28 Queen Elizabeth would work the same prejudices with her heart-and-stomach-of-a-king wartime rhetoric. It was made clear by the priests who wrote about them that these women were not typical. They were temporary aberrations in a patriarchal world and only impressive because, like Dorothy Lawson, their ‘masculine spirit’ had been inflamed by ‘divine fire’.29

  If the thought of a divinely administered shot of testosterone was one way for a man to bestow acceptance upon a recusant woman, often it was better for the woman to go the other way: to make a great show of her femininity and play up to the Pauline stereotype. ‘Oh! put up your swords!’ cried Eleanor’s eleven-year-old adopted daughter Frances, when pursuivants crossed the family threshold, ‘or else my mother will die, for she cannot endure to see a naked sword.’ At the sight of the little girl and her swooning ‘mother’ (who could have been Eleanor or Anne impersonating Eleanor), the men were momentarily abashed and under the guise of fetching some wine, off trotted Frances to see the priests safely hidden.30

  Distraction, delay and feminine outrage were deployed on another occasion when Anne accused a pursuivant of indecorum. ‘Do you think it right and proper that you should be admitted to a widow’s house before she or her servants or children are out of bed? Why this lack of good manners,’ she enquired, ‘why come so early?’ Breakfast and a bribe could not prevent a thorough search of the house, but in those vital seconds Garnet, Southwell, three other Jesuits, two secular priests ‘and all other signs of our religion’ were stowed away.31

  Not all women succeeded in hiding behind feminine modesty. When the wife of Mr Bentley of Little Oakley, Northamptonshire, stayed in bed during a raid in 1595, the pursuivants searched her bedchamber and found ‘near the bed’ a small coffer containing a ‘chalice of silver, a crucifix of jet, a surplice, a Mass book, and divers other vain things belonging thereto’. Mr Bentley was promptly declared a ‘true prisoner’ and bound by a one thousand-pound recognisance to present himself at the sign of the Swan in Kettering the following morning.32 The husband was punished for the contents of his wife’s bedchamber because he was their legal owner. Upon marriage, he assumed her property and, so it was commonly believed, responsibility for her conduct. Such inequality in the law gave a recusant wife a degree of immunity from prosecution. Elizabeth Moninge of Kent, questioned in 1591 about her refusal to go to church, claimed that ‘as a wife under subjection, she had no ability to give an answer’.

  There seemed little point in going to the trouble of securing indictments and convictions for recusant wives if there could be no pecuniary pain or, indeed, no financial reward for the state. Some women, especially the poor, were imprisoned. Of the twenty-five recusant prisoners in Ousebridge gaol in York in 1598, eleven were women. But this was not considered viable in the long term as few female prisoners could afford the upkeep.

  In 1593, Parliament tried to solve the problem of the recusant wife by making her husband pay for her nonconformity, but it was not a popular measure – not least because some members feared for their own purses – and despite an initial flurry of prosecutions, there remained a general awkwardness at state intrusion of family life. Even in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, there would be ‘much dispute’ and dilatoriness in Parliament over the question of a husband’s exact liability.33

  Of course, not all wives were safe and not all women were wives. Spinsters and widows could own property and were theoretically liable for prosecution. In practice, however, a great many of them also seemed to slip through the net. Eleanor had her widow’s jointure, a portion of the Brooksby estate in Leicestershire, while Anne was, for a time, cash rich, her brother Henry having ‘dealt very bountifully with her’ just before his death. She could also draw on an allowance from her father (twenty pounds a year) and, soon, the ‘great plenty of wealth’ bequeathed by her grandmother.34 We know this because Sir Thomas Tresham wrote ab
out it in a letter to his wife, detailing a financial dispute he was having with Anne. It is unlikely that the authorities charged with collecting recusancy fines knew much about it. Indeed, only in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot and only after torture would one of Anne’s servants admit that he had heard that ‘she had a stock of money of some five hundred pounds and an annuity out of Leicestershire by the death of her grandmother.’35

  The crisis of the Gunpowder Plot would also lead to the revelation that Anne had donated what seems to have been a substantial part of her fortune to the Jesuit mission. Indeed, because the Society’s rules forbade the mission from having a regular source of income, Anne seems to have handled the money herself, parcelling it out in loans and investments and giving the incoming annuities as alms. There is a vague reference to these investments in an intercepted letter from Garnet to Anne that under normal circumstances he would never have risked writing.36 The point here is that with no obvious fixed assets and no neat paper trail linking Anne to her money, it was very difficult for the authorities to assess her wealth, let alone get their hands on it.

  Tracing the sisters was almost as challenging. Both used aliases: Anne was sometimes Mistress Perkins and Eleanor, in homage to her late husband, was Mrs Edwards. Independent women, if they had the means and the stamina, could live peripatetically, moving their households and crossing counties whenever they sensed danger. When, in 1592, Eleanor (‘Mrs Elizabeth Brookesbye alias Edwards’ of the parish of Tanworth) was presented in Warwickshire as ‘a most wilful and seditious recusant’, she ought to have appeared at the county assizes for judgement. Instead, a note was added that she had ‘removed from thence: it is thought she is gone into Leicestershire’.37

  Even with very little notice, recusants with good contacts and deep pockets could often make good their escape. In 1588 the Sheriff of Leicestershire admitted that some of those he had been ordered to detain had ‘removed & gone from their habitations before the coming of the sheriff his men & officers (though with great secrecy & speed they were sent)’. He reported that most of the women ‘rest unapprehended until your honours’ pleasures be further known’. The Sheriff of Cambridge and Huntingdon, responding to the same command, admitted that he ‘durst not presume to apprehend’ the women without further direction.38 It was no ordinary year, 1588, and yet even at that time of heightened security, the thought of dragging women away from their families made some officials squeamish.

  So, some recusant women enjoyed a degree of latitude in the law and there seems to have been a vague but quite deeply ingrained feeling in society that private women and their private consciences should not be exposed to public prosecution. However, the exigencies of time and place, the peculiarities of character, tensions from within and pressures from without could all combine to blow a vapid generalisation out of the water. On 25 March 1586 a butcher’s wife from York was pressed to death by the hand of the law. For her general defence of the recusant cause and, specifically, her refusal to plead to the charge of priest-harbouring, Margaret Clitherow was sentenced to the gruesome medieval penalty peine forte et dure. In the tollbooth on the Ouse Bridge in York, she was stripped and ordered to lie down. A large sharp stone was placed under her back and ‘seven or eight hundred weight’ was piled on top of her. Her ribs shattered and ‘burst forth of the skin’.

  Clitherow’s gender could not save her. On the contrary, her overt defiance of male authority almost certainly contributed to her fall. Contemporaries and historians have discussed the Clitherow case and the ‘remarkable confluence of circumstances’ that produced it.39 Some hailed her as a selfless martyr, others denounced her as a showboating suicide. Quite a few thought she was just plain mad. She was the first of three women put to death in Elizabeth’s reign for allegedly giving aid to outlawed priests. The others were Margaret Ward, executed in 1588 for helping a priest escape from prison, and Anne Line, hanged for harbouring on 27 February 1601. None was the daughter of a peer. None could boast in her corner a Burghley or a Beaumont or any of the connections that seem to have afforded the Vauxes a measure of protection. The nobility, regardless of faith, tended to view the molestation of their own as ‘a common insult to their grade’. Anne and Eleanor would never have ‘kissed the gallows tree’ like Anne Line, or had their ribcages crushed on the Ouse Bridge.40 Their commitment was unswerving and they made hard sacrifices, but they were undeniably more secure in their activities than the unfortunate butcher’s wife from York.

  In the early hours of 29 July 1588, Anne and Eleanor’s grandmother Elizabeth Beaumont died at home in Leicestershire. It was apposite that she expired on the feast day of St Martha because, Garnet noted, she had been a great hostess herself, tending to the needs of the priests in her house and even cooking and cleaning for them ‘so that their presence might be kept more secret’. The sisters had spent their formative years with their grandmother and they continued to live nearby, often visiting with Garnet, to whom she had showed ‘great devotion’. Indeed her deathbed request was to see him. Garnet said Mass every day for ten days until ‘her death agony began’. He read the commendation of her soul to God and ‘in the space of four or five Misereres’fn5 she died ‘with the name of Jesus on her lips’. In the evening, the obsequies were performed and the following night, in accordance with her wishes, she was buried in the parish church ‘without the ministers saying their prayers over her body’. In death, if not in life, consecrated ground was consecrated ground, irrespective of the Reformation.fn6

  There was one notable absentee: Elizabeth’s elder son, Francis, who had conformed to the ‘new religion’ for the sake of his career. That was, in any case, the family’s view. Francis was only informed of his mother’s death after Garnet had sung the Requiem Mass and made good his exit. A few months later he organised a memorial service at which his mother’s virtues were praised, but her ‘popery’ was decried. Thus, wrote Garnet, the minister ‘ruined the soup with one ill-chosen herb’. The following year, Francis Beaumont accepted promotion to the degree of serjeant-at-law and on 25 January 1593 he was appointed a Justice of the Common Pleas.41 He seems to have been on good terms with his Vaux nieces, despite their different paths. Perhaps he recognised that ignorance of his mother’s dying days had spared him any career-compromising questions about fugitive priests. Anne and Eleanor, for their part, would have occasion to be grateful for the legal muscle of Justice Beaumont.

  Lord Vaux had not been able to attend his mother-in-law’s obsequies either. In December 1587, after more than six years of confinement, he was transferred to the custody of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The reason was soon clear. ‘Her Majesty,’ the Privy Council informed the county lieutenants, ‘being advertised sundry ways of the great preparations that are made abroad of shipping and men’ was willing to do ‘all things necessary’ for the defence of the realm. Among other things:

  considering how of late years divers of her subjects, by the means of bad instruments, have been withdrawn from the due obedience they owe to her Majesty and her laws, insomuch as divers of them most obstinately have refused to come to the church to prayer and divine service

  it was thought appropriate that ‘those bad members that already are known to be recusants’ should be ‘so looked unto and restrained as they shall neither be able to give assistance to the enemy, nor that the enemy may have any hope of relief and succour by them’.42

  After years of having his coastlines harried, his ships plundered, his rebellious subjects aided and, to paraphrase Francis Drake, his beard singed by Elizabeth’s privateers, Philip II of Spain had decided to call time on his erstwhile sister-in-law and launch the ‘Gran Armada’ that he had long threatened. Pope Sixtus V promised indulgences and a million gold ducats (about £250,000) for a successful invasion. On 25 April 1588, the expedition standard was blessed at a special service in Lisbon Cathedral. By the end of the following month, it was billowing atop the flagship San Martín off the west coast of Portugal. It bore the words: ‘Arise, O
Lord, and vindicate thy cause.’43

  fn1 Modern calculations suggest that just under 1 per cent of mothers died in childbed in Elizabethan England. (Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, p. 30)

  fn2 Virtue (virtus in Latin, deriving from vir: man) was originally a male preserve. It is not known how many contemporaries believed the (quite wrong) assertion in the 1486 witch-hunter’s handbook, the Malleus Maleficarum, that femina (woman) was a derivation of fe + minus (less faith).

  fn3 Ward and her society of English Ladies (later known as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary) settled their first house in St Omer (then in the Spanish Netherlands) in 1609 and expanded throughout Europe. The superior of the house in Perugia was Lord Vaux’s granddaughter Joyce. The English Ladies sought an active apostolate in imitation of the Society of Jesus, but in defiance of the Council of Trent, which insisted upon female claustration. They were branded ‘Jesuitesses’, ‘chattering hussies’, ‘galloping girls’ and ‘wandering nuns’. According to the papal bull that suppressed them in 1631, they were guilty of ‘arrogant contumacy’ and ‘great temerity’, and their work was ‘by no means suiting the weakness of their sex, intellect, womanly modesty and above all virginal purity’ (Lux-Sterritt, p. 50). The Institute finally gained papal approbation in 1877 and on 19 December 2009 Pope Benedict XVI declared Mary Ward ‘Venerable’, thus progressing the cause for her canonisation.