God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  John Gerard could be ruthless and, like many charming people, ruthlessly effective. According to one hostile source, he was the type of person ‘in whose mouth a man would think butter could not melt’.18 It was just the kind of comment that Sir Thomas Tresham might have made about Eliza Vaux. Henry Garnet had found the perfect hosts in Anne and Eleanor. His flamboyant junior with the good looks and brazen ways would find an equally suitable match with their sister-in-law Eliza.

  fn1 Anne Line alias Mrs Martha ran a boarding house for priests. The widow would be arrested on 2 February 1601. Charged with harbouring, she ‘kissed the gallows tree’ at Tyburn on the 27th of the month. Garnet’s agent in London managed to procure some of her clothes as relics.

  18

  St Peter’s Net

  ‘And so I happened, by God’s good providence, to visit a noble household. I had often been invited there before and had been expected for a long time, but other business had always kept me elsewhere.’1

  Following his escape from the Tower, Gerard laid low with Garnet and the sisters for a few days. When he attempted to resume work in London, word soon spread and his old city haunts were raided. It became so hot for him that Garnet considered sending him back to Europe. Gerard was ‘much dismayed’ by the prospect and managed to convince his superior to keep him on. ‘I hope he will walk warily,’ Garnet wrote on 31 March 1598.2

  Meanwhile, Eliza and her six small children had moved into the Vaux house in Irthlingborough. It was ‘old and tumble-down’, but more suited to their needs than grand, derelict Harrowden. ‘When I came to the house,’ Gerard recalled,

  I found her completely overwrought by her husband’s untimely death. So much had it affected her that she hardly moved out of her room for a whole year; and for three years after that (when I was visiting her) she had been unable to bring herself to enter the wing of the house in which her husband had died.

  He added that she was ‘worried by anxiety for the future of her son’. The barony was impoverished and Eliza was finding it hard to make ends meet. ‘But,’ Gerard concluded, with a nod to Proverbs 14:1, and also to Eliza’s steel, ‘a wise woman builds up her house and proves herself in it.’3

  As the voluminous Tresham Papers reveal, Eliza had not just been sobbing into her pillow since George’s death in 1594. She had been busy shoring up the Vaux patrimony and defending herself against threats of indictment and forfeiture. ‘To her great costs and charges’, she had also secured the wardship of her son Edward, fourth Lord Vaux. This had been achieved through the mediation of Sir Thomas Cecil, who had purchased the guardianship of the underage peer from the Queen and then sold it on to Eliza, who continued to look after Edward and the estate.4

  A ‘marked Catholic’, Eliza was not afforded a completely free hand. As Gerard explained, ‘the Lords of the Council wanted to keep in touch with her son the baron and watch where and how he was being brought up.’ Although a bill for the seizure of the children of recusant parents had been dropped in the Parliament of 1593, the treatment of the Worthington boys – four brothers forcibly taken from a house near Warrington in 1584 – lived long in Catholic memory.fn1 Recusant schoolmasters were illegal, so Eliza employed Thomas Smith, an Oxford graduate who was prepared to take the oath of supremacy and go to church. This made him a ‘schismatic’ in Jesuit parlance. ‘He was the type of person,’ wrote Gerard, ‘who can say truthfully with the prophet “My belly cleaveth to the ground”, and they are much more difficult people to move than heretics.’

  The family chaplain did not fare much better. Although a Jesuit, ‘a learned man and a good preacher’, Richard Cowling of York was unpopular with the servants and had spent an ineffectual year in Eliza’s house with his nose in his books. She claimed to like and reverence him, but she really wanted someone who ‘mixed with men’, someone who could advise on practical matters, someone, perhaps, like Gerard himself, who had previously strengthened the faith of her sister, Lady Lovell. During Gerard’s visits Eliza’s ‘grief seemed to change to joy’. She let it be known that, if he came to live with her, she would ‘put aside her long mourning – she would be a different person and all would be well’.5

  On the basis of Tresham’s testimony, John Gerard did not turn ‘covetous, conscionless’ Eliza into a saint.6 In Gerard’s prose, however, she is ‘the gentle widow’ and her life, hitherto ‘good and holy’, becomes exemplary. She learned ‘to set cares of the next world before those of this’. She began to meditate, ‘for she was capable of it – in fact she had intelligence and talents of a high order’. She embraced her widowhood, offering her chastity to God and promising to act as a ‘handmaid’ to His servants. Indeed:

  she was resolved to fulfil as nearly as she could the role of Martha and of other holy women who followed Christ and ministered to Him and His Apostles. She was ready to set up house wherever and in whatever way I judged best for our needs – whether, she protested time and again, it was in London or in the remotest part of England.7

  This was a vie édifiante, an idealised version of the truth, but clearly changes were made in Eliza’s household that were not to everyone’s liking. One thinks of Valentine Kellison, for example, ‘a well-willer, but no Catholic’,fn2 who was more used to raising hell with Ambrose Vaux than examining the state of his soul.8 ‘This lady had many servants in her house when I came to live with her,’ Gerard recalled:

  A number were non-Catholics; others were Catholics of a sort, but all enjoyed too much liberty. Gradually I got rid of the abuses. By talking privately with them and by my sermons in public, I brought them slowly, with the help of God’s grace, to better ways. Some I instructed and received into the Church, but there were a few I had to get dismissed, since there seemed no hope of their reform.9

  Kellison, whose brother Matthew would become president of the seminary in Douai, was retained by Eliza and remained staunchly loyal to the family. But another, unnamed servant had to be let go when, on a visit to London in the train of his mistress, he carped at Gerard’s reforms to ‘a treacherous friend’ and gave away their location. In the ensuing raid, Gerard hid in the gable, but his great stalwart John Lillie gave himself up and was reportedly tortured. Also seized were Gerard’s meditation notes, his breviary, some devotional books ‘and what I valued most: my manuscript sermons and notes for sermons, which I had collected together over the last ten years’.10 Any notion of moving to London was abandoned. It was too dangerous for Gerard and too public for Eliza, who faced scrutiny as the fourth Lord Vaux’s mother and estate manager: ‘Officials and bailiffs would be constantly coming to see her’, making it ‘impossible for her to live near London under an assumed name as she would have to do if she was going to continue her good work for any length of time’.11

  Having decided that Irthlingborough and Harrowden were shabby, inhospitable and ill-defended, Gerard and Eliza went house hunting. They combed Northamptonshire and finally came across Kirby Hall, a large remote Elizabethan manor with sprawling grounds. All it lacked were priest-holes. In the spring of 1599, they took the lease – or rather, the owner, Lady Elizabeth Hatton (whose late husband had inherited the property from his uncle, Sir Christopher Hatton), let it to John Wiseman, who let it to Henry Montagu, who let it to Francis Crisp and Thomas Mulsho, the last named being a trustee for Lord Vaux.12

  There were already rumours of Eliza’s plan in Puritan-run Northamptonshire when she and Gerard travelled to Kirby that summer with ‘Little John’ Owen and his carpentry kit. Pursuivants were posted at Kettering in a bid to intercept them on their return to Irthlingborough, but a servant fortuitously suggested an alternative route that was ‘easier for the lady’s carriage’. Back at Irthlingborough, Gerard and Eliza were not aware of the raid at Kirby the following morning, nor of the pursuivants galloping furiously towards them. They ‘burst in on us at the dinner hour’, but as the mistress and young master of the house were both ill and resting in their chambers, they stormed an empty room. Gerard was in his own chamber, about to din
e with the gentleman convert, Roger Lee, who had come to take the Spiritual Exercises, and John Percy, a second Jesuit priest newly posted at Irthlingborough. ‘Hastily I snatched up everything I wanted to conceal and made a dash for the hiding-place.’ It was beyond the room where the searchers were gathered:

  I heard them shouting out that they wanted to get on with their search without delay. One pursuivant actually pushed his head round the door to see who was passing and some of the Catholics in the room told me afterwards that he must have seen me as I went past. But God intervened, for how else can you explain it? There they were, straining and shouting to get through and search the house, yet they halted behind in an unlocked room just long enough to allow us time to reach the hiding-place and shut ourselves safely in. Then they broke out as though they had been let loose. They burst into the lady’s apartment while others raged round the remaining rooms.

  They searched the whole day, but found nothing and no one:

  Undoubtedly it was the finger of God who did not want to cut at the roots of the lady’s good works. Rather, by this manifestation of His providence, He wished to confirm her in her resolve and keep her for a future full of service and fine achievement.13

  So Gerard wrote a decade later and so he must have told Eliza at the time, for she remained determined to risk all for the mission. She took ‘very special precautions’ and gave out that the Jesuit was going to ‘quit the house altogether’. But he never left. Eliza shifted her household to Harrowden Hall and had an extension built for Gerard and Percy ‘close to the old chapel where the former barons used to hear Mass when the weather was too wet for them to go to the village church’. Nicholas Owen probably constructed the new wing from which priests could ‘pass out unnoticed into the private garden and through the broad walks into the fields’.fn3

  There were other advantages to Harrowden, including an impressive library that had been enlarged by Henry Vaux and two sets of ‘very fine’ vestments – ‘one for ordinary use, the other for greater feasts.’ Several were embroidered with pearls and gold thread and displayed ‘exquisite workmanship’. Gerard was also delighted by the chapel plate:

  Six massive silver candlesticks stood on the altar and two smaller ones at the side for the elevation. The cruets, the lavabo bowl, the bell and thurible were all of silverwork.fn4 The lamps hung from silver chains, and a silver crucifix stood on the altar. For the great feasts we had a golden crucifix a foot high. It had a pelican carved at the top and on the right arm an eagle with outstretched wings carrying on its back its little ones who were learning to fly; and on the left arm a phoenix expiring in flames so that it might leave behind an offspring; and at the foot was a hen gathering her chickens under her wings. The whole was worked in gold by a skilled artist.14

  It was as if the past half-century had never happened. It helped, of course, that Harrowden was a baronial seat and that the Vauxes were tied, as the Jesuit, Oswald Tesimond, observed, ‘by consanguinity or affinity … to practically every leading and noble family in the county’.15 The old Lord Vaux had been well liked and there was good will towards his grandson. The Cecil connection continued into the next generations.16 Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton, though a Protestant official, was not entrusted with a general search of Harrowden in February 1601 because it was suspected that he would not ‘use the matter so strictly and circumspectly as is fit and convenient’. (It was further noted that Eliza had ‘such places for the concealing’ of a priest that unless ‘a man pull down the house, he shall never find him’.)17

  Thus, although Eliza was observed by the powers on high, she was also to some extent protected by them. As long as the altar furniture and ancestral vestments were kept out of sight, and on site, they might remain out of mind. Approaching danger usually came with a warning. Some local Puritans were outraged. Richard Knightley of Fawsley would complain in 1625 about the family’s apparent immunity from prosecution and their ‘too daring and insolent’ behaviour. Contacts and favours only went so far, however.18 With the coming of Gerard and his colleagues, the noise and traffic from Harrowden began to increase. Eliza only had herself to blame for any withdrawal of privilege, the Earl of Salisbury (Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil) would inform Lord Vaux in 1612, if, ‘rather than content herself with one of the priests from Mary’s reign, she chose to have two of those blood-soaked Jesuits’.19

  *

  During their first Christmas together in 1598, Eliza gave Gerard a ‘precious ornament’ depicting ‘the Holy Name’ in gold pins. Gerard estimated – or did he count? – 240 pins in total, each attached to a large pearl. There was another, smaller monogram at the bottom enclosing ‘a heart with a cross of diamonds radiating from it’. Gerard was thrilled with his gift – technically a donation to the Society – if disappointed that the pearls weren’t quite perfect. ‘Had they been,’ he wrote wistfully, ‘the value of the ornament would have been fabulous, but as it was the whole thing was worth about a thousand florins.’20

  The following Christmas, the children’s ‘schismatic’ tutor, Thomas Smith, had an evangelical awakening courtesy of the edifying example of his young charges staying up for midnight Mass. Gerard observed that the pupils had taught the master ‘by conduct and not by words a lesson which he should have been teaching them’. Smith departed for the English College in Rome and was replaced at Harrowden by another Oxford scholar, one Tutfield, who was not at all trusted by the Council and was later ‘suspected to be a priest’.21 The schoolroom was filled with Vaux children, the offspring of neighbours and servants and at least one child from further afield: Henry Killinghall, born of a recusant mother in York gaol, was educated at Harrowden and later became a priest.22

  By his own account Gerard sent ‘many young men to the seminaries’ as well as several ladies to the convents. His conversion rate was extremely – perhaps suspiciously – high. Leaving Percy at Harrowden to receive visitors and administer the sacraments, he would go foraging for souls in the south Midlands. With introductions from the Vauxes and subsequent influential converts like Roger Lee and Everard Digby, he was welcomed into smart circles and offered generous hospitality. His disguise was crucial for it was often during card gamesfn5 or out in the saddle that he would win the trust of his subjects. Only later, and with great delicacy, would he attempt to catch them in ‘St Peter’s net’, a conversion that entailed not only a change of institutional allegiance, but also a complete reorientation of the self. Gerard taught his penitents how to examine their consciences thoroughly before confession and how to purify their souls through frequent prayer, spiritual reading and meditation. He utilised the principles and methods of the Spiritual Exercises and led some of his converts through the month-long meditative retreat. His goal was to reveal, ‘by means of the Exercises, the straight road that leads to life with Him for guide, who is Himself the Way and the Life’.23

  Gayhurst in Buckinghamshire, where the Digbys lived, soon resembled Harrowden Hall with its well-appointed chapel and priest-holes. There was even a pair of wafer irons for making altar breads. According to Gerard:

  what this family did, others did too. Many Catholic gentlemen, when they visited this house and saw the arrangements there, took it as a model. They founded congregations centred round their own homes, furnished their chapels and, designing accommodation suited to a priest’s needs, maintained one there with reverence and respect.24

  By 1609 the chief Jesuit ‘churches’ were known by code names. A surviving cipher list reveals that Lord Vaux and his mother belonged to A.P., the ‘church’ of their resident chaplain, John Percy, who was also responsible for Lady Digby in Buckinghamshire, Lady Wenman of Thame Park near Oxford, members of the Simeon family of Baldwin Brightwell, Oxfordshire, and the Fermors of Easton Neston. All were related or affiliated to the Vauxes and it is evident that kin networks were as important as geography in determining the make-up of these ‘churches’.25 The Jesuits were often accused of elitism, but it was strategic elitism, designed for hierarchical Eng
land in order to open up as many mission fields and win as many souls as safely and as quickly as possible. The coverage could be wide, extending through tenants and other dependants to all levels of society.

  Eliza turned her home, to use Alexandra Walsham’s phrase, into one of the ‘humid hothouses in which Tridentine spirituality seems to have flourished exuberantly’.26 Indeed her contribution to the mission extended beyond her facilities. In his Autobiography Gerard told the story of the conversion of one of her kinswomen.27 Eliza apparently loved this relative ‘like a sister’ and wept tears of frustration when she could not ‘induce her to become a Catholic’. She refused to give up on the lady. Inviting her to stay, she introduced Gerard as a guest from London ‘as we had previously arranged’. They kept the conversation light for a few days until Gerard chose a propitious moment for Eliza ‘to open a serious conversation on religion’. He then took over and Eliza left the room. A few hours later, Eliza was accosted by her red-faced relative:

  ‘Cousin,’ she cried, ‘what have you done?’

  ‘What have I done?’ asked my lady.

  ‘Who’s this man you brought to me? Is he what you said he was?’

  And she asked questions about me and spoke much too favourably about my eloquence and learning, saying she could not hold her own or answer back.

  The next day God confirmed what He had begun in her. She surrendered at discretion and I gave her a book to help her prepare for confession.

  After her confession, the lady rushed to thank Eliza, ‘who was the means of bringing her this happiness’. She stayed at Harrowden for about two years ‘and during all that time she grew in devotion and read many ascetical books’. Although careful not to overstep the bounds of Pauline decency, Gerard gave his hostess due credit for her kinswoman’s conversion, depicting it as a joint plan, jointly realised. Gerard was the exegete, but the initiative was Eliza’s.