God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  A later, extremely hostile source also portrayed Eliza in the proselytising process. A young clergyman called John Gee wrote a book, New Shreds of the Old Snare, in 1624 in a bid to improve his Protestant credentials after his attendance at a Catholic evensong was revealed to his superiors. (The service in question was the ‘fatal vespers’ of 26 October 1623 when the floorboards of the gatehouse adjoining the French embassy in Blackfriars collapsed, killing almost a hundred worshippers. Gee saw God’s hand in his deliverance from death and the ‘snare’ of popery.) Written in the same intemperate vein as Samuel Harsnett’s exorcism-bashing Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, Gee’s tract sought to expose the ‘legerdemaine tricks’ of the Jesuits and unmask them as a pack of actors so skilled ‘that they should set up a company for themselves, which surely will put down The Fortune, Red-Bull, Cockpit, & Globe’.28

  Gee seemed to be particularly incensed by the Catholic Church’s belief in miracles and its cultivation of the supernatural as a proselytising tool. Exorcisms, relics, signs, ‘personated apparitions’ and the like were all, to Gee’s mind, terrible cons designed to bolster conversion rates and extort cash from impressionable youths. He cited the case of Mary Boucher, a London Protestant in the service of ‘Lady A., a Papist’.29 The girl’s mother had received assurances from Lady A – presumably the Countess of Arundel – that no attempt would be made to convert her. But three Jesuits, including ‘Mr Fisher’ (an alias of John Percy), could not help themselves. ‘We are God’s prophets,’ Fisher reputedly told Mary, ‘we can do miracles and we are inspired with divine illuminations. It is revealed unto me that you must go beyond the seas and become a nun.’ When Mary protested that her mother would never allow it, she was told that she should no longer see her. Sick with confusion, Mary took to her bed,

  where, after she had rested herself a while, there comes into the chamber one Mris Vaux, a great recusant, and asked her how she did and then came to her and did somewhat stroke or rub her forehead. After which time Mary Boucher felt herself very ill at ease and distempered in her head. And about an half-hour after Mris Vaux was departed from her, she heard her chamber door open and with that a great light flashed into the room two or three times, which she thought somebody did by way of jest or merriment to make her afraid.

  Mary’s dead godmother seemed to enter the room. She was dressed all in white, her hair was long and loose and her hand was ‘cold as earth or iron’. She claimed to have come from purgatory and she admonished Mary of the perils of damnation. After the vision had disappeared, Eliza returned to help the girl make sense of it.

  ‘Oh then,’ quoth Mris Vaux, ‘it is time for thee to become a good Catholic, for assure thyself it was a special favour and mercy of God that thou shouldest have such a warning.’ And so, giving her more instructions to this purpose, went away.

  The ghost reappeared and reiterated the message (Gee noting in the margin that ‘nimble actors know their Q’). Mary was visited over a dozen times and seemed keen to be ‘nunnified’, but in the end her mother’s protestations were so loud that ‘the voyage was stayed and her daughter restored’. Three years later, Mary was married and living near Baynards Castle in London and it was there that Gee claimed to have interviewed her ‘to inform myself the better of the truth of these particulars’.

  It is a classic tale of Jesuit duplicity. Gee was a plagiarist and a polemicist, determined to undermine the teaching of the Catholic Church. In an earlier work of the same year, he ridiculed Mary Boucher’s ‘ghastly ghost walking in a sheet knit upon the head’.30 His modern editor was unable to trace Mary or her mother, but the story, though partisan, is not necessarily apocryphal.31 It may have stemmed from a real event involving real people. Whatever the truth of the tale, Gee’s inclusion of the ‘great recusant’ Eliza Vaux lent it an air of authenticity, for she was well known by then as ‘one of the best friends the Jesuits have had in England’. So wrote her middle son, William, in a plea for special treatment from the Jesuits of Lisbon in 1612. This pallid redhead thought he deserved more respect from the brethren considering his mother ‘hath harboured them and hid them in stone walls and furnished them with money’.32

  Actually, it is easy to see why no one thought much of Eliza’s foul-mouthed, volatile son. She did her sharp-elbowed best with him, sending him to the Jesuit colleges at St Omer and Valladolid, and imposing on friends for favours, but he consistently let her down. In October 1612 Eliza would petition Pedro de Zúñiga, Marquis of Flores Dávila, who was in England on diplomatic business, to return to Madrid with William in his train. When Zúñiga refused, Eliza begged the intercession of Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish noblewoman in London. Knowing that a refusal ‘would have hurt her too much’ and ‘she would certainly have complained a great deal about it to me’, Luisa reluctantly agreed. Zúñiga relented, but insisted that Eliza ‘consider hard first’ whether her son had ‘the character and virtue for Madrid, because if he was not prepared to heed the advice of others and was not virtuous, he would be completely ruined there’. Eliza assured him that William was a good boy who ‘neither gambled nor blasphemed’. Zúñiga took her at her word and William to Madrid, a decision that he would soon regret.

  On the night of St James’s Day, 1613, during the hot, Hispanic summer, William killed an English merchant called Copland ‘in the street’. The English ambassador was so appalled by the ‘odiousness’ of the crime that he only gave William sanctuary for a day.33 Writing from London a month later, Luisa, who was not a mother, blamed Eliza:

  Here everyone praises her for being a very wise woman, yet if she is indeed wise, I am astonished that she so deceived herself and brought dishonour on herself by sending that particular son to Spain; for the older one is a young man of considerable sense and good character.34

  ‘The older one’ would fare better. Indeed, it would seem for a short while in 1605 as though Edward, fourth Lord Vaux of Harrowden, might escape the recusancy rut, save the barony and marry the girl of his dreams. He was only sixteen then. Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the first Earl of Suffolk and Lord Chamberlain of the Household, was eighteen. Certainly later, and perhaps already, their love was deep and mutual. Eliza promoted the match with characteristic vigour, securing the services of her ‘great and tried friend’, Sir Everard Digby, as well as the ‘good will and gladness’ of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, whose son was betrothed to another of Suffolk’s daughters and whose intimacy with the pro-Catholic Countess of Suffolk was an open secret.35

  Around Easter, 1605, Eliza sent her pregnant friend and kinswoman, Agnes, Lady Wenman, an update on her progress. Although ‘chiefly concerning her son’s marriage to my Lord of Suffolk’s daughter’, Eliza’s letter also complained of Agnes’s husband, Sir Richard Wenman, who had recently snubbed her in London. According to Gerard’s searing pen, Sir Richard was ‘a knight with a large estate, who hoped one day to become a baron, and is still hoping’.36 He did not approve of Eliza, whom he accused, with some justification, of having ‘corrupted his wife in religion’. In her letter Eliza acknowledged the ‘disgrace’ associated with Catholicism in her country. ‘Notwithstanding, pray,’ she urged Agnes, ‘for Tottenham may turn French.’ Or words to that effect. Agnes could not quite remember. Her husband, who also read the letter before his wife conveniently lost it, recalled that it ‘concluded in this manner, or to the same effect: that she should pray, for that she did hope or look that shortly Tottenham would turn French.’37

  The phrase, which may have had its roots in the heavy migration of French workers to Tottenham in the reign of Henry VIII, referred to a dramatic, but incredibly unlikely, change of circumstance and was usually used in the context of something unexpected or absurd. Witness the third Duke of Norfolk’s reaction to a nasty rumour in 1536 that he should be in the Tower of London: ‘When I shall deserve to be there, Tottenham shall turn French.’38 Or the poet John Heywood’s description of the end of the honeymoon period:

  The flowers so faded that, in
fifteen weeks

  A man might espy the change in the cheeks,

  Both of this poor wretch, and his wife, this poor wench.

  Their faces told toys,fn6 that Tott’n’am was turned French.

  And all their light laughing turn’d and translated

  Into sad sighing, all mirth was amated.39

  On 14 July 1605, Edward, ‘having lost the hope of my greater suit in another place’, was granted a licence to travel abroad for three years.40 It is not clear what had happened, but Eliza’s father blamed her ‘for refusing the match & offer of my La: of Suffolk’. A royal progress through Northamptonshire the following month, with the King bedding down at Harrowden Hall on 12 August, presented Eliza with the perfect opportunity to revive the suit. After bending the ear of the crypto-Catholic Earl of Northampton (Suffolk’s influential uncle),fn7 she was confident ‘of the certainty of that match’.41 Then months passed without word. In early November she decided to send Edward to London ‘to make an end thereof one way or other’.

  Between eight and nine o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, 6 November 1605, Agnes Wenman’s father, Sir George Fermor of Easton Neston, received a request to visit his kinsman, Lord Vaux. He covered the twenty-odd miles to Harrowden Hall at an easy pace, arriving between four and five in the afternoon. Eliza greeted him and explained that she had sent for him in order to ask him to accompany Edward to London. While he had been in the saddle, however, news had arrived of ‘some garboyl’ in the city. Eliza had changed her mind, therefore, and would delay her son’s trip ‘until things were quieted’.42

  It was some time – more than a quarter of a century – before Edward could conclude his suit, for the garboyl in London turned out to be the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot and no member of the Vaux family was untouched. Tottenham had not turned French. Along with the rest of the country it had remained English and Protestant and determined to find out what, in God’s name, had been going on.

  fn1 The fate of the four Worthington brothers became a cause célèbre in Catholic circles. The boys, aged between twelve and sixteen, were subjected to various attempts to make them apostatise. They refused and were flogged, separated and pronounced guilty of treason. All four eventually managed to escape overseas and become priests. Two of them returned on the English mission. (Beales, Education under Penalty, pp. 57–64)

  fn2 This was the opinion of Gerard’s predecessor, Richard Cowling, in a letter of 23 June [1599?] to Guilio Piccioli in Venice. The chief purpose of his letter was to entreat Piccioli for ‘favour & friendship for my cousin germane Mr Guydo Fawkes’, who was living on the Continent ‘in great want’. (PRO SP 12/271, f. 56r)

  fn3 This may be the present north wing, where a hiding hole remains. In 1694 Harrowden Hall was sold by Charles Knollys, the son of the fourth Lord Vaux’s illegitimate son, to Thomas Watson, son of Lord Rockingham. It was substantially rebuilt in the Queen Anne style. The Gothic private chapel was erected by the seventh Lord Vaux, who returned the Hall to the family in 1895. It now houses Wellingborough Golf Club.

  fn4 The elevation occurred at the sacring, the consecration of the Eucharistic elements. The priest held the host up for worshippers to see and adore. Extra candles were lit and the bell was rung to highlight the elements and call the attention of the faithful. The cruets held wine and the water that was used, along with the lavabo bowl, for washing the celebrant’s hands. Incense was burned and distributed by means of the thurible.

  fn5 ‘I should explain that whenever I was with Catholics and we had to stage a game in circumstances like these, we had an understanding that everybody got his money back at the end and that the loser said an Ave Maria for every counter returned. In this way I often played with brother Digby and others when there was occasion to act a part and make bystanders think that we were playing for money in good earnest.’ (Gerard, Autobiography, p. 170)

  fn6 toys: whims, fancies, jests.

  fn7 Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, was the second son of the poet Earl of Surrey (ex. 1547) and the brother of the fourth Duke of Norfolk (Suffolk’s father), who was beheaded in 1572. Writing in the reign of Elizabeth, the Spanish ambassador noted that he ‘completely rules his nephews and constantly keeps before them the need for resenting the death of their father, and following the party of the Queen of Scots, by whose means alone can they hope for vengeance’ (Peck, Northampton, p. 11). Queen Elizabeth never trusted Howard, but James I made him a privy councillor, Earl of Northampton and, in 1608, Lord Privy Seal.

  PART FOUR

  POWDER TREASON

  These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction: there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature: there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves …

  King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2

  The play was performed at court on 26 December 1606

  Fair is foul, and foul is fair,

  Hover through the fog and filthy air.

  Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1

  First performed in the months

  following the Gunpowder Plot

  19

  This Stinking King

  I perceive there is no hope at all of amendment in this stinking king of ours. An ill quarter to look for righteousness: at the hands of a miserable Scot.

  Hugh Owen in exile, 16031

  Anne and Eleanor had a kinsman called Robert Catesby, or Robin to his friends.2 He was about a decade younger than the sisters and ‘seldom long from us’, Garnet recalled, ‘for the great affection he bore the gentlewoman with whom I lived & unto me’.3 The Catesby family home, Ashby St Ledgers in Northamptonshire, was just over twenty miles from Harrowden Hall and even closer to Great Ashby, Eleanor’s jointure house in Leicestershire. Catesby, whose confessor, Oswald Tesimond, S.J., was stationed with Garnet and the sisters, supported the mission and loaned them houses. Morecrofts, near Uxbridge, where John Gerard had landed after his flight from the Tower in 1597, was one. A house in Erith, ‘in a private back lane near the water’, procured by Catesby late in 1603, was another.fn1 The arrangement seems to have been reciprocal: Catesby and his friends ‘often resorted’ to White Webbs, the sisters’ house in Enfield Chase.4

  According to Tesimond, Catesby was ‘more than ordinarily well-proportioned, some six feet tall, of good carriage and handsome countenance’. Like Gerard, whom he knew, he was eloquent, charming and possessed of a mesmeric quality that inspired adoration and loyalty. Like Gerard too, he seems to have had the gift of making people feel good and important. To his kinsman Lord Monteagle (who was married to his cousin), he was ‘the dear Robin whose conversation gave us such warmth’ and ‘the only sun that must ripen our harvest’. While Ambrose Rookwood ‘loved’ Catesby ‘more than his own soul’, Thomas Wintour vowed to follow him to the death.5

  Of course, magnets also repel and the other side of Catesby was ugly, devoid of empathy and full of hatred. He had been ‘very wild’ in his youth according to Gerard, until he had properly committed to his faith, forsaken ‘his swearing and excess of play and apparel’ and taken up daily devotions. Thereafter a powerful zeal infused that extraordinary charisma and fired the restless spirit. ‘He was beside himself with mindless fanaticism,’ Tesimond later wrote, and he thought ‘he was wasting time when he was not doing something to bring about the conversion of the country’.6

  He realised too late that the botched political rising of the Earl of Essex was not the way. Along with his friends John and Christopher Wright, his kinsman Lord Monteagle and other Catholic malcontents who attached themselves to the reckless earl in February 1601, Catesby was imprisoned and hea
vily fined. His uncle (by marriage) Sir Thomas Tresham helped bail him out, which was generous considering Tresham also expended a year’s income on the extrication of his own son, Francis, from ‘the unfortunate action of the late Earl of Essex’.7 Sir Thomas’s earlier concerns that he had ‘much more busied my brains’ on the affairs of George Vaux to the detriment of his son – ‘though otherwise Francis no less feared in those rather madding than gadding days’ – now appeared justified.8 (There had, however, been uses for Francis back then: in 1591, Sir Thomas had sent him out with men and crowbars to retrieve four hundred pounds from one George Ball. They had violently seized the septuagenarian debtor and thrown his pregnant daughter down the stairs ‘to the very great danger of her life, being within one month of her time’. Ball’s claim to have ‘divers informations of very lewd matter against her Majesty and the State’ regarding Tresham’s servant, George Fulshurst – he who later ran off with Merill Vaux – may also have contributed to his rough treatment.9)

  Francis Tresham and Robin Catesby were ‘near and dear’. Their mothers were sisters and the boys ‘had been brought up from their childhoods together’.10 They may have also bonded at the end of the century over the deaths of their first-born infant sons, though this is to speculate.11 Although Catesby’s great-grandmother had been a Vaux, it was marriages to Treshams – Catesby’s aunt to Sir Thomas Tresham; Anne and Eleanor’s father to Mary Tresham – that brought Robert so close to the Vaux sisters. There was also their shared heritage in suffering: Lord Vaux and Sir William Catesby had, along with their ‘brother’ Sir Thomas Tresham, been tried together in 1581 for supporting Edmund Campion. They had petitioned the Queen for leniency four years later and, when ignored, they had met at Hoxton to set up the missionary fund. During the Armada crisis all three had been detained. Recusants to the last, each man had shouldered a pecuniary and psychological burden that their children had been quite unable to lighten.