God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  Tresham was, when it suited him, an eager subscriber to the ideal of ‘Christian charity’, insisting that Catholics, as ‘fellow members of self same body’ and labouring under the same cross, should suffer and heal together.2 ‘Look,’ he announced in one inscription on the Triangular Lodge, ‘I have not worked only for myself’ (Respicite non mihi soli laboravi). The purity of Tresham’s motives may be questioned, but not his industry, nor his value as one of the most articulate Catholic spokesmen of the time. It is, however, unsurprising that ‘sinful rancour’ sometimes got the better of ‘Christian charity’, for the same bond of suffering that brought Catholics together put strains on their relationships that could lead to some very unsympathetic behaviour.

  Recusants were fined heavily, often irregularly and, from 1587, cumulatively, while some, like Lord Vaux, forfeited two-thirds of their estate to the Crown. It was hard for them to get credit, harder to keep it, difficult to travel and therefore to repay loans and honour obligations. Those imprisoned or ‘fast-fettered’ to their five-mile cordons found it difficult to exert the personal authority needed to resolve disputes and command respect. Estates became so tangled in fines and ‘uses’ and trusts, drawing in third parties, and ‘pettifogging’ solicitors, that confusion abounded and, with it, litigation, which cost more money.3

  The indirect consequences of recusancy are impossible to quantify. Did Merill Vaux run off with Tresham’s servant because the lucrative match she had been promised for seven years did not materialise? Or did her claustrophobic, insular lifestyle (she was apparently a strict adherent to the five-mile rule4) encourage her to look below stairs for company? (If so, she was at least being true to the casuist texts that pronounced it better to marry beneath oneself than a heretic.5) Did a recusant culture emerge – secretive, nonconformist, necessarily duplicitous – and instil bad habits in Merill, making her more prone to clandestine, rebellious behaviour? Perhaps she simply fell in love. And perhaps Lord Vaux would have died in poverty, and Tresham and Eliza would have clashed, and Anne would have chased her marriage portion anyway, regardless of faith. They were their own agents and their temperaments determined their behaviour, but the state’s attempts to repress their beliefs and practices forced them down avenues that they might not otherwise have contemplated.

  At least the older generation could cling to a memory. They could recall a time when priests were revered and not reviled, when the Mass was celebrated and not suppressed. They might be patient (if not passive), knowing that orthodoxies changed with the passing of monarchs, for that had been their experience. It was different for their children, who had no living memory of easier, better times. It was perhaps hardest of all for the younger sons, boys like Ambrose Vaux, who would traditionally have been destined for the Church or the law or a military career. If they refused to take the oath of supremacy, they could not graduate from university or take up arms for the Queen or work for the state. Many grew up wandering and aimless, lacking skills and a sense of purpose. Ambrose received a seminary education in northern France.6 He left England as the fourth son of Lord Vaux and returned as his heir, a teenager propelled into a situation with which he was not remotely equipped to deal. He had no training in estate management and, having spent his formative years in an all-male environment, was easily bowled over by the enchanting Eliza.

  It is a picaresque and cautionary tale: the youngest son, adopted as heir, signs away his inheritance, spends the rest of his life getting into scrapes, in and out of prison, never out of debt. On the night of 10 February 1591, Ambrose and his cronies stole forty loads of barley from a barn (leaving the rest out to spoil in the rain). The Privy Council noted that he was of ‘such disorderly disposition as hardly can be brought to any good conformity’. The following year he and his brother George were cited for ordering a revenge attack on a local pursuivant who had prosecuted ‘some of their friends for recusancy’.7 March 1593 saw Ambrose on the run from creditors, of whom there were many. Tresham offered him temporary refuge in London along with some stern words about his ‘loose, riotous & sinful misgovernment’. Ambrose was in danger of becoming ‘a right younger brother, having neither wit, credit, land, nor money. Yea, I think I truly may say, scant clothes to put on your back.’8

  Avuncular advice unheeded, Ambrose continued to borrow and, it seems, speculate, with reckless abandon. He raised £320 in London in the summer – half from a haberdasher, half from dyer – which he promised to start repaying within six months of the return of a gentleman from Venice.9 It does not appear that he honoured any of his obligations. In 1597, Peter Roos, from whom he had borrowed £200 in 1588, had him imprisoned. Despite ‘sundry complaints’ to the Privy Council, Ambrose remained a prisoner, though Eliza was able to enter a bond for his temporary release in the New Year. (This gave him just enough time to contest his late mother’s will, terrorise the good people of Irthlingborough and ‘return to the said prison’.)10 On 27 March 1599, Ambrose witnessed two Northamptonshire leases and seven months later, under escort from his keeper, he visited the Fleet, where he tried in vain to extract an annuity from Uncle Tresham.11

  In 1605 he cropped up in the Low Countries, in an English company fighting for Catholic Spain against the Protestant United Provinces. Military service abroad was a popular path for angry young recusants and, as far as the English were concerned, a more productive outlet for their aggression than the shires. It was presumed to be remunerative, in this world and the next, and fostered a spirit of camaraderie. Eliza’s son, Edward, who would enlist later in life, reportedly swaggered about town with his unit like the Jacobean version of a university drinking society.fn1 Ambrose’s comrades in 1605 included several other younger brothers, as well as a certain ‘Mr Faukes of Yorkshire’, a much-admired soldier who would be found later in the year in a vault under the House of Lords with a slow match and eighteen hundredweight of gunpowder.12

  By the close of 1609, Ambrose had transformed himself into a Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. In Jerusalem he vowed ‘to defend the honour of God’ and, since he was able to show ‘sufficient proofs of noble extraction’, he was dubbed a knight by the Guardian of the Franciscan convent. (He would have had to pay for the privilege; one wonders how.) His choice of companion on the pilgrimage from Rome to Jerusalem suggests that Ambrose had not undergone a radical metamorphosis.

  Anthony Copley, the son of an exiled friend of Lord Vaux and a cousin of the late Robert Southwell, S.J., was an erstwhile seminarian who had reputedly disgraced himself in Rome by appearing at the pulpit with a rose between his teeth. By the time he had linked up with Ambrose, he had fought for the Spanish in the Low Countries, turned coat, thrown a dagger at a parish clerk in Horsham church, abused the Jesuits in their dispute with the appellants, conspired against James I and then turned King’s evidence. In a poem vaunting his loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, Copley had depicted himself as an ‘Elizian outcast of Fortune’. Richard Topcliffe rather saw him as ‘the most desperate youth that liveth’. Robert Persons, S.J., thought him ‘idle-headed’ and ‘light-witted’. Copley’s trial recorder noted his ‘whining speech’.13

  He was banished from England in 1604 and, according to his charitable kinswomen at the convent of St Monica’s, gave himself up to ‘devotion’. In 1609, he voyaged to the Holy Land with Ambrose ‘and, coming to Jerusalem, they were both knighted at our Lord’s Sepulchre’. Devotions performed, sights seen and souls cleansed, the two blades returned home. Copley died on the journey – it is not recorded how, but the passage was dangerous – and Ambrose conveyed the news to his family. On 10 December 1610, Lionel Wake in Antwerp heard from a contact in Marseilles that ‘Mr Ambrose Vaux is returned from Jerusalem, but in very poor estate, and was there in prison, but now escaped and upon his journey hitherward.’14

  By 1612, Ambrose had made it back to England, but only as far as the debtors’ prison, where he borrowed money from at least one inmate.15 He was out before Easter and on ‘about the third or fourth of April’ –
he could not quite remember – he married Elizabeth Wyborne, the widow of William Wyborne, a recently deceased recusant from Kent. Ambrose, then in his early forties, was under the impression that his bride was fabulously wealthy. In fact she was ‘destitute of jointure or any other means to live’, having transferred all her property to her late husband’s executors. Ambrose contested the ‘fraudulent deed’ of conveyance, claiming that it had been sealed after his marriage and backdated by the executors to 2 April. They contended that it was authentic and made of Elizabeth’s own free will for the satisfaction of her late husband’s debts. Elizabeth subsequently separated from Ambrose and lodged at ‘one Billyes house in Fleet Street’. She was a regular guest at the family home of her kinsman Dudley Norton, who was one of the executors and a former secretary of the Earl of Salisbury. Ambrose was left wifeless, penniless and seething.

  One afternoon the following summer, the jilted husband learned that Elizabeth and Norton were going to a play at the Globe theatre in Southwark. (Norton was later at pains to point out that he was not a regular patron of Shakespeare’s playhouse, having only been ‘four or five times in his whole life’.) Ambrose raced over and tried to reclaim his wife. Voices were raised, then fists. ‘God’s wounds,’ Norton reportedly swore, ‘thether he brought her … and from thence he would carry her again away.’ Ambrose claimed that he was held down and assaulted by twelve of Norton’s men, armed with rapiers, daggers, pistols and other weapons. Norton denied ‘the pretended misdemeanour and riot’, insisting that he had only touched Ambrose’s wrist to prevent him from drawing his own dagger.16

  Elizabeth, apparently in ‘great fear and perplexity’, was spirited away and little more is heard of her until almost a decade later when she was at the centre of another affray and another Star Chamber suit. This one involved a broken-down door, some rearranged furniture and an injured landlord. Elizabeth’s ‘near kinsman’ Sir William Windsor, an old comrade of Ambrose from Flanders, had found her rooms in the same building in St Mary-le-Strand that he and his wife occupied. A contract was signed with Robert Collins, the landlord, and Elizabeth – styling herself ‘Lady Elizabeth Vaux’ – moved in towards the end of January 1620.

  She immediately found fault with the lodgings, bedding and furniture and asked the Windsors for help. Collins was duly summoned and he arrived at eleven at night, not happy about being dragged from his cups and, allegedly, somewhat the worse for wear. An argument ensued, with both parties claiming that they had been reasonable and the other ‘uncivil & provoking’. There was, to use Elizabeth’s phrase, ‘some buslinge betwixt them’. Sir William sent Collins away with a box on the ear. The landlord regrouped, allegedly broke down the door, ordered his servants up the stairs with ‘a great fire fork and a pair of tongs made of iron’ and threw a stool at Lady Windsor. Further violence was prevented by a passing constable. Throughout the whole ‘hurly burly and brabble’, Sir William Windsor had been dressed ‘in his pantables and ready to go to bed’.

  There is no hint of farce in Collins’ testimony, just a disturbing account of a man set upon by a gang of aristocratic rowdies. Thus: Sir William, refusing to hear the landlord out, felled him with his first blow and punched and kicked him on the ground. Collins found his feet, but Sir William’s ‘confederates, servants and acquaintances’, including Lady Vaux and her husband, Ambrose:

  did most furiously, fiercely, cruelly, riotously, routously and unlawfully assault [Collins], some of them holding [him] by the arms and body, while other some did in terrible and cruel manner beat, wound and most grievously hurt [him]. And other some of them (at such time as [he] did call and cry out for aid and help to release him and to save him from being murdered) did hold and keep shut the door of the said dining room, not suffering those people, being very many that came to aid … to come into the room.

  Apparently Sir William then charged at Collins with ‘a stiletto or pocket dagger’. Collins fended him off with a stool. Sir William drew his sword. Collins parried the thrusts with more furniture until the constable finally came to the rescue.

  Elizabeth Vaux pleaded not guilty to the charges and denied having seen Windsor box Collins’ ear, even though Windsor confessed it. She sounds like a different person to the widow cowering at the Globe a decade earlier.17 The case also suggests that her estrangement from Ambrose – such as it was – had ended. Although Collins named Ambrose in his bill, he gave no particular details and there is no deposition from Ambrose on file. Sir William maintained that ‘there was no other person with him but his own lady and the said Lady Vaux’ and their servants. Someone was lying, but even if it was Collins, it is telling that he chose to cite Ambrose. London parishes were close communities. The main actors in the scene all belonged to St Mary-le-Strand and it was there, five years later, on 25 April 1626, that Ambrose was buried. It is not known how he died.

  As early as 1593, Sir Thomas Tresham had esteemed his nephew ‘a world’s wonder for assy reprobateness’.18 If a satirical verse penned by Henry Shirley in the early seventeenth century is anything to go by, the intervening years had not improved Ambrose’s reputation or, indeed, his physique.

  The Battle

  The combatants:

  Sir Ambrose Vaux, knight, and Glascott the bailey of South-wark.

  The place:

  the Rule of the Kings Bench.

  No amorous style affects my pen,

  For why? I write of fighting men:

  The bloody story of a fight

  Betwixt a bailiff and a knight.

  Let him that therefore writes the story

  Of Warwick’s Guy or Bevis’ glory,

  Sir Tristram’s hurts and Lancelot’s wounds,

  Or otters hunted with great hounds,

  Confess the story doth excel

  With best of any I can tell,

  Who was a witness of the fray

  Which thus my muse ’gins to display.

  Sir Ambrose strooke the first great blow,

  Which did the bailiff overthrow,

  That he lay tumbling in the dirt,

  From which he took his greatest hurt,

  Save that the knight away did tear

  A handful of the varlet’s hair.

  The knight for teen,fn2 the knave for fear

  With roaring did their chopses tear,

  Whilst all the women loud did cry:

  ‘Sir Ambrose let the villain die!’

  The bailiff then cried out for help,

  With that another marshal’s whelp

  Did from his foe’s devouring paws

  All in the dirt his fellow draws.

  The knight not with all this content,

  A scornful kick at Glascott sent,

  But then the dirt in which he rolled

  (I grieve at what must now be told)

  So slippery was, in all our sight

  Upon his back fell down the knight,

  And being much enraged thereat,

  Upon his feet in rage he gatt

  And forth his sturdy corpes he launches

  With quivering thighs and quagingfn3 paunches.

  About the dump the bailiff ran

  And now the worst of all began.

  The knight no longer could pursue,

  Too well his bounds the bailiff knew,

  But had he in his clutches come,

  Methinks I see what martyrdom

  The women and the knight had made

  On him that now no longer stayed,

  But home returned, not shamed to be

  Sore kicked by true nobility.19

  So is the life of our anti-hero just an amusing sideshow, a futile and somewhat grotesque diversion from the main story? Or does it highlight the tragic consequences of recusancy for ‘right younger brothers’ and ‘noddy nephews’ and, indeed, for any ‘untoward and giddy-headed young man’ of the time? The phrases are Tresham’s. He early spotted the ‘unskill and weakness in worldly drifts of Ambrose Vaux’.20 It is not something that can be blamed on t
he environment. Ambrose’s only real achievement was his knighthood, an honorific reward for venturing to the Holy Land. As the gift of a Roman Catholic order, it underwhelmed in Protestant England. His wife’s lawyers refused to recognise it, insisting that Ambrose was ‘but an esquire & no knight’.21

  If Ambrose’s undoubted energy and courage (proven in war, travel, even in his appetite for a brawl) could have been channelled more productively, if he had met with opportunities rather than obstacles and received proper parental guidance, he might have thrived, might – just – have redeemed himself. Or not. Ambrose Vaux was a brigand and a debtor, a prisoner and a pilgrim, a soldier and a knight. He was also a recusant and if every trait in his character pointed to failure, his recusancy sealed his doom.

  fn1 When the men came home, their association caused great concern, but investigation revealed little more than the donning of coloured ribbons, the adoption of silly nicknames and a copious amount of drinking. ‘What mischief may lurk under this mask God knows,’ John Chamberlain wrote from London on 6 December 1623, ‘but sure they were very confident and presumed much of themselves to carry it so openly.’ According to Chamberlain, one fraternity called themselves ‘Titere-tu’. Brewer’s Handbook reveals that Tityre Tus (a pluralised version of the opening two words of Virgil’s first Eclogue) was ‘the name assumed in the seventeenth century by a clique of young blades of the better class, whose delight was to break windows, upset sedan-chairs, molest quiet citizens, and rudely caress pretty women in the streets at night-time’. (PRO SP 14/155, ff. 31v–32r; Brewer, The Reader’s Handbook, 1880, p. 1011)

  fn2 teen: annoyance.

  fn3 quaging: soft, flabby, wobbling.