God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  There was certainly no love lost between Tresham and Anne, but he believed that the ‘malignity’ stemmed primarily from Eleanor, ‘with whom she liveth and by whom she is speciallest directed’. He traced it back to the help he had given their brother Henry in resigning the patrimony to George Vaux, and not to ‘widow Brooksby’s children’.16 At the end of a letter to his wife of 23 November 1594, Tresham scribbled some notes that reveal a different side of ‘Mrs E.B’, to the timid creature portrayed by Garnet. She had apparently calumniated Tresham ‘in intolerablest terms … in many companies and diverse countries’, including at Harrowden Hall, when Lord Vaux had been seriously ill. Among other insults of which she ‘ungorged herself’ were:

  That [Tresham] was a mere Machiavellian. That he had a face of brass. That his fingers were like lime twigs, for what money he got into his clutches could not thence be gotten forth. That he had wrongfully many, and many years, withheld her sister’s marriage money from her to her infinite hindrance. That he had deceived her father of a thousand pounds by many years since receiving a thousand pounds for the preferment of his two nieces. And, notwithstanding, covinously causeth her said father to sell land to levy money again to that self same use. That her uncle J[ustice] B[eaumont] should coursefn3 TT [tear in manuscript] … Lastly that TT was a scandal to the Catholic religion and to all Catholics and should also speedily be scoured up for it by them that had authority to do it, and should do it.17

  The dispute reached its denouement on 2 November 1594. ‘This present weeping All Souls Day,’ Tresham reported late that night, ‘which exceedeth all the extreme wet days of this long matchless wettest season, here arrived (as my petty Hoxton common was coming for my dinner) my now kind, former unkind, cousin.’ The court had ruled for Anne, but on the condition that she go to Tresham, apologise for her behaviour and ask nicely for the money. She had tried to wriggle out of the meeting, arguing that it was ‘an unseemly action for a gentlewoman’, especially a Lord’s daughter, but the Master of the Rolls said that ‘if she was so stomachful as to refuse to do it’, she would not get her money. Her friends begged her to yield. Her own counsel apparently threatened to ditch her. Even Justice Beaumont grew weary. ‘She held out till the last hour,’ Tresham wrote, but finally pitched up at Hoxton with her entourage. Despite her fragile constitution, Anne had rejected Tresham’s offer of a more convenient venue, preferring to brave ‘the furthest and foulest journey’ in order to catch him alone and have her submission ‘swallowed up in secret, as near neighbouring to auricular confession’ as was possible. After about four hours of ‘verbal combat’, she fulfilled her obligation and was assured of her money. Tresham was satisfied on all points, if still seething. He noted pointedly that Anne had kept him from his dinner just as his malicious keeper at the Fleet had used to do.18 It does not seem to have occurred to him that she might also have been hungry.

  Quite apart from what the case might reveal about the sisters’ characters, it confirms a few truisms: that co-religionists do not necessarily get on (even, or perhaps especially, during oppressive times), that Christians are more than capable of unchristian conduct and that a professed virgin need not be a saint.

  ‘The extreme wet days of this long matchless wettest season’ continued beyond the winter, seeping into the spring and summer months. The harvest failed that year, and the next, and the next. Prices rose, plague struck and, in 1596–7, there was famine. The 1590s were hard years of war, dearth and death, especially in the north and west, where there was little poor relief. For once English Catholics could agree with the future Archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot: ‘He is blind who now beholdeth not that God is angry with us.’19

  No priest was executed in London for four years after Southwell’s death in February 1595, though bodies continued to swing in the regions. Between 1590 and 1603, fifty-three priests and thirty-five laypeople were executed. Compared to the seventy-eight priests and twenty-five laypeople between 1581 and 1590, this was an improvement.20 Some captive priests were not executed. John Gerard was one. William Weston, Garnet’s predecessor, was another. An informal alliance with France between 1595 and 1598 strengthened England’s hand for a time, but there was always ‘noise from Spain’21 and concomitant chatter about Philip II’s (after September 1598, Philip III’s) sleeping allies in England.

  With hindsight Queen Elizabeth’s last decade (1593–1603) appears more settled in terms of religion than previous years, but Anne and Eleanor are unlikely to have seen it that way.22 They were still harbouring the Jesuit superior and his brethren, still on the run, still jumping at shadows. We glimpse them only occasionally – visiting their sick father at Harrowden Hall in the summer of 1594; bailing William Baldwin, S.J., out of prison in 1595; bumping into a surprisingly upbeat Countess of Arundel in London in 1598 a day or two after her teenage daughter had succumbed to tuberculosis: ‘Ah cousin,’ she said to Anne, ‘my Bess is gone to heaven and if it were God Almighty’s will, I wish the other were as well gone after her.’fn4 23

  In March 1598, Oswald Tesimond, a slender, rubicund Jesuit from York, found Garnet and his family at a house called Morecrofts, ‘about twelve or thirteen miles from London near a village called Uxbridge’. He had walked there from the capital and arrived just before sunset, receiving ‘the warmest welcome and the greatest imaginable charity’. A couple of evenings later, a messenger galloped in from London with news that the house, which belonged to Anne and Eleanor’s cousin Robert Catesby, was to be searched that night. Tesimond was astonished by Garnet’s equanimity, though he would soon witness it ‘on some ten other occasions’ of greater danger. ‘In truth,’ he wrote, the Jesuit superior ‘proved himself to be an old soldier and experienced captain, accustomed to such assaults’.24

  Garnet and his hosts were indeed veterans now, not only at running away, but also at covering their tracks and managing their next steps. Wherever they stayed, they had to keep in mind the planned itinerary as well as multiple alternatives for themselves and their guests. ‘We are constrained to shift often dwelling,’ Garnet explained a month after their flight from Morecrofts, ‘and to have diverse houses at once and also to keep diverse houses at those times when we run away.’25 Tesimond was directed towards a halfway house at Brentford, where Garnet caught up with him and took him, by boat, to a place that the sisters kept just outside the city in Spitalfields. The following year that house was discovered, but again the tip-off arrived just in time, courtesy of John Lillie, Garnet’s imprisoned lay assistant, who managed to smuggle out a message that the Lieutenant of the Tower knew all about the house ‘of Mrs Anne Vaux and her sister Mrs Brooksby’ and was planning a raid.26

  Every captured priest and layman was now ‘asked for Henry’.27 In 1600 they removed to White Webbs, a large house in Enfield Chase about ten miles north of London. John Grissold alias James Johnson from Rowington, Warwickshire, acted as caretaker. He arrived in February and had the house ready for ‘Mrs Perkins’ (Anne) by Whitsuntide. One of the first guests was her ‘kinsman’, Mr Measy, ‘an ancient well set gentleman, but plain in apparel’.28 This was Henry Garnet. Around the same time, Eleanor’s son, William Brooksby, and his bride, Dorothy Wiseman, moved in. Soon the patter of two little girls’ feet could be heard.

  There were other joys: Henricus Garnettus professed his final vows as a Jesuit on 8 May 1598, the anniversary of the day that he had set out from Rome with Robert Southwell twelve years earlier. To General Aquaviva he wrote a heartfelt letter of thanks.29 To the Vaux sisters, who had protected and defended him all those years, he would surely also have expressed his gratitude. And still there was music and holy days and those supremely risky Jesuit meetings – ‘I cannot keep them away, but they will flock to such feasts,’ Garnet wrote on 25 November 1600. And still there were the sacraments, with their life-breathing properties for the ailing faith. Notwithstanding the dawn raids and the midnight runs, notwithstanding the spies and fallen friends, ‘notwithstanding all our troubles,’ Garnet wrote on 30
June 1601, ‘we sing Mass.’30

  fn1 Watson and the appellants did not represent the views of all the secular priests in England, of whom, in the 1580s and 1590s, there were between 120 and 150 in any given year. The Jesuits, by contrast, only ever comprised a handful, but they made a lot of noise and put a great deal on record. This can lead to a magnification of their role in the wider mission. For the Vauxes, however, their influence was immense. (McGrath and Rowe, ‘Harbourers and Helpers’, p. 209)

  fn2 In October 1602 a papal brief ratified Blackwell’s appointment and removed the clause regarding consultation with the Jesuit superior. The appellants were exonerated from charges of schism.

  fn3 course: literally, to pursue with hounds. It is not clear whether Eleanor meant that her uncle should chase Tresham in the courts or give him a beating.

  fn4 Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel (the ‘Lady A.’ disparaged by William Watson in 1602) was a great patroness of the Society of Jesus in England. Southwell wrote his Short Rule of Good Life for her and she harboured him, and the Jesuit printing press, at one of her houses in London for several years. According to her biographer (and chaplain for the last fourteen years of her life), she had only meant for Southwell to be an occasional visitor, but he had assumed a more permanent arrangement and she had been too polite to put him straight. Her husband, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, who died a few months after Southwell in 1595, had prayed in prison for the success of the Spanish Armada. The Countess’s biographer wrote admiringly of her charitable works, relating one instance when she walked three miles from Acton to assist a poor woman giving birth ‘in the common open cage of Hammersmith’. (Fitzalan-Howard, Lives, pp. 308–9)

  PART THREE

  ELIZA

  Great Harrowden is a village in a million. Why? Because – so I am assured – there is no gossip, no scandal, no backbiting.

  Tony Ireson, Wellingborough News, Friday, 21 March 1958

  Thus this Harrodian hatred hath in Hydra-wise me in restless chase, ended with one, assailed by another, and multiplied in one stem of brothers and sisters: that as it seemeth neither determined with death, nor ought pacified in long process of years, yet all these religious and virtuous Catholics.

  Sir Thomas Tresham on the Vaux family, summer 1599

  15

  Brazen-faced Bravados

  Harrowden Hall is now Wellingborough Golf Club. Rolling fairways and smooth greens have replaced the pastures and meadows once trodden by forbidden priests. The drama of the final putt is the talk of the clubhouse, not the events of four hundred years earlier when Eliza Vaux’s house was stripped bare, her plants and trees were uprooted and ‘the charming shaded enclaves and summer houses’ that she had raised in the grounds were flattened in a frenzied dawn raid.1 The mansion was largely rebuilt in the early eighteenth century, but one Tudor wing might have survived and, with it, a priest-hole.

  When the twenty-year-old Elizafn1 Roper came to the house in the summer of 1585, it was in some disrepair. Lord Vaux, confined to Hackney and overwhelmed by debt, was in no position to keep it up. Just over a decade later, some wings were ‘quite dilapidated, almost in fact a ruin’.2 Eliza was the controversial bride of Lord Vaux’s newly instated heir, George. Thomas Tresham wrote of her ‘creditless carriage when she went for a maiden’, though he was hardly a disinterested observer.3 As George’s uncle and Lord Vaux’s adviser, he had gone to great lengths to ensure the transfer of the inheritance to George from his half-brother Henry. ‘Many, and many years, I much more busied my brains on your behoof than did I on my eldest son’s,’ he would later remind his nephew. Although George’s ‘adopting’ was supposed to redound to his benefit, the ‘original intention’, Tresham explained, was ‘to repair the ruins of Harrowden baned barony and to relieve your father’s pitiful distress plight’.4 It was agreed that Lord Vaux, who had a habit of making ‘thriftless bargains’ (as well as a wife who was ‘a much better hand at spending money than saving it’), would only – and only with his heir’s permission – be able to sell certain lands for the maintenance of his children. He would not be allowed to sell any for the payment of his, or George’s, debts. George was to marry a suitable girl with a suitable marriage portion; that is to say, he was to be ‘ruled in his marriage by the advice of his honourable parents and eldest brother’.5

  But George would only be ruled by his heart. Three months later, on 25 July 1585, without the necessary consents, indeed plain against Tresham’s ‘oft reiterated’ warnings, he ‘heedlessly and headlessly’ married his sweetheart and forfeited his inheritance. It was a double blow to the family, since on that very day Edward Vaux, the next son in line, died at Hackney.6 The new heir was Lord Vaux’s youngest son, Ambrose, who was under twenty-one and thus could not authorise any sale of land.

  Tresham seems to have taken it all much harder than Lord Vaux. ‘You well know,’ he huffed to George, ‘that I should have been one of them whose consents you must have had.’ (If true, this was only an informal arrangement.) He threw a spectacular tantrum and refused to see George for two years. The match was ‘brainless’, he steamed, ‘far-fetched’; George was ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘over distaffly awed’. The ‘track of time,’ he warned, would completely unveil ‘the guileful mask of blinded fleshly affection’.7 Except that it did not. George and Eliza had six children in quick succession and seemed perfectly happy with each other. This only enraged Tresham further.

  On paper, Eliza did not seem such a bad match. Granted, she was no great heiress, but her father, John Roper of Lynsted, Kent, paid £1,500 and an additional £400 in jewels and apparel, which does not seem ungenerous considering the state of the Vaux barony.8 Moreover, the Ropers had an excellent Catholic pedigree: Eliza’s great-uncle had married Sir Thomas More’s favourite daughter, Margaret, in 1521. The memorial of Eliza’s mother at Lynsted parish church bears the words: ‘She led her life most virtuously and ended the same most catholicly.’ Those of Eliza’s brother and sister likewise celebrated their constantissimo Catholicism. John Roper’s ‘my hope is in God’ was more circumspect, as befitted an ambitious patriarch, but his epitaph proudly celebrated his family’s union with the baronial Vauxes. Indeed Roper, who was knighted in 1588, would eventually realise his dream of a peerage. Courtesy of £10,000 in King James’s coffers, he would end his days as Lord Teynham, first Baron of Teynham.9

  Eliza’s younger sister Jane, Lady Lovell, was another strong character. She would found an English Carmelite convent in Antwerp and provoke the lines: ‘she is as forward in her monastery as she was four or five years since, being a person humorous and inconstant, not only as she is a woman but as she is that woman the Lady Lovell.’ Witness too her affronted letters to the Earl of Salisbury after being ‘disquieted’ by pursuivants: ‘If your Lordship did rightly understand their abuses, you would not permit that gentlewomen of my sort should be subject to the authority of so base persons.’10

  Eliza shared Jane’s forcefulness, but seems to have had more charm. She may have been beautiful – her daughter Katherine inherited looks which, it was suggested, would have found favour with Henry VIII.11 Eliza was probably the dedicatee of the composer John Dowland’s Mrs Vaux’s Jig and Mrs Vaux Galliard.12 She was certainly beguiling. Tresham made constant swipes at her ‘irresistible feminish passions’. George was utterly enchanted and soon so was Ambrose – ‘scandalously’, thought Tresham. Even Lord Vaux seems to have been charmed. Uncharacteristically, he warned Tresham that if he continued in his ‘self-willed and obdured refusing’ to see George, ‘no mean part’ of the blame for his predicament would be placed at Tresham’s door. For a while, Rushton Hall was deprived of the baron’s visits. ‘Commend me to the captive Lord,’ Tresham despaired to Vaux’s solicitor on 6 January 1593, ‘that dare not while the sign is in the predominating Virago to look upon poor Rushton.’13

  Tresham had good reason to suspect Eliza of trying to dominate Lord Vaux. Around Shrovetide 1592 she allegedly read him a letter, ‘as written from her f
ather’, that promised an end to all his debts and an easy life with his musicians, hounds and hawks on the condition that he ‘renounce amity’ with Tresham ‘and be ruled by her father’. Clearly knowing the way to Vaux’s heart, Eliza sweetened the offer with ‘a cast of choice sore falcons, which purposedly was kept for him’. Vaux ‘greedily swallowed’ the ‘baits and hooks’, but when he signalled his willingness to discuss terms, Roper ‘utterly disavowed’ the letter, ‘protesting that he never wrote any such and that it was lewdly devised’ by George and Eliza.14 Be that as it may, Roper clearly shared his daughter’s view that Tresham was a pernicious influence on Vaux and should be ‘severed’ from future negotiations. As he explained to Lord Burghley on 4 July 1590, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham hath intruded himself as the disposer of all my Lord Vaux his estate & the commander of him & all his, who dare no more offend him than a child his master having a rod in his hand.’15

  Eliza claimed that ‘the world thinketh what my Lord doeth is by his Lady’s setting on, and what she doeth is by [Tresham’s] setting on’. Tresham said this was a ‘feminine feeble induction’, but it is clear from his papers that his influence was powerful and pervasive. Vaux did sometimes act independently of his brother-in-law, making the ‘thriftless bargains’ that so jeopardised the patrimony, and letting land ‘at Robin Hood’s pennyworths’, but more often than not Tresham’s shadow can be glimpsed.16 Whether it was friendly or not is debatable. Eliza accused him of ‘cozening’ Vaux. Lord Burghley, who was briefed by Roper, publicly denounced him as ‘covetous, covinous and godlessly treacherous’. Lord Keeper Egerton, who had grown to dislike Tresham’s religion as much as his character, declared in Chancery that he was ‘a bad man every way’.17 Tresham’s response to the critics was glorious in its pomposity: ‘My innocency and justifiable dealings is to me a brass wall of defence against these brazen-faced bravados.’18