God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  The Vauxes also experienced the odd clash such as sometimes happened in counties like Northamptonshire where prominent recusants and Puritans lived side by side. On 31 October 1625, Richard Knightley of Fawsley, an outspoken Puritan, turned up at Boughton with a posse of men and a mind to ‘disarm’ the house.21 This was all above board, indeed ‘according to his Majesty’s pleasure’. Although recusants had to contribute to the local musters (the Vauxes always provided a fully armed and mounted soldier), they were not allowed to store weapons at home, a humiliation that was exacerbated by a 1619 directive that made them bear the cost of repairing weapons that had gone rusty in the hold of petty officialdom.22

  Feelings ran high in 1625. Local Puritans resented Edward’s martial swagger and he, having recently commanded thousands in Flanders field, baulked at the withdrawal of power and trust that came with the renewal of Anglo-Spanish hostilities. The real problems began when Knightley and his fellow deputy lieutenants, having found no ‘martial munitions, arms and weapons’ in the main house, moved on to the outhouses and farm. Edward’s volatile younger brother, William (he of the Madrid murder), went with them. ‘They could not be worse dealt withal,’ he snarled, ‘unless they should cut their throats’, and ‘with an oath’ he wished ‘it were come to that pass’. Knightley reproved William for his bad language and was repaid with further expletives.

  Back at the house, Knightley effectively brought out the swearing box, citing the 1624 statute (21 Jac. I, c. 20), which prescribed a shilling an oath. The Vauxes refused to pay. Knightley ordered the constables to seize the equivalent value in goods. Edward warned him that ‘if he found him in another place he would call him to a reckoning for this’.

  ‘You know where I dwell,’ said Knightley.

  The officials made to leave. ‘Now you have done your office you may be gone,’ said Edward, shoving Knightley out of the hall. Knightley insisted he would only go when he was ready. Edward exploded, ‘gave him a good blow on the face’ and, in the ensuing fracas, struck down one of Knightley’s servants with a cudgel. The sight of blood sent the officials packing, but they soon filed a report insisting that the Vauxes be held to account, lest ‘dangerous encouragement’ be given ‘to such as we find are too daring and insolent already’.

  The case went before the King (Charles I) in Council and not even Edward’s ‘prepared friends’ could prevent an order to proceed to trial. As Edward left the room, he offloaded ‘very intemperate words’ on one of Knightley’s witnesses and was promptly sent, with William, to the Fleet. The brothers endured the briefest, if frostiest, of prison spells and the following February, in order to gain the privilege of Parliament and have the case dropped, Edward swallowed the oath of allegiance. Knightley was made sheriff, which was not at all to his liking as it prevented him from promoting Puritan interests in the House of Commons. He returned to the county in a sulk and spent Boxing Day thinking up ways of flushing out every ‘little papist’ in the shire.

  Eliza died not long afterwards. Her passing went unrecorded, her grave is unmarked. The last extant reference to her is a bequest from Lady Fermor, whose will was drawn up in August 1625, signed in April 1627 and proved two years later. She left Eliza a pair of narrow silver boxes engraved with elephant heads. One was for her treacle, the other for ‘metridate’ – both valued for their medicinal properties.fn4 It conjures a rather touching last scene: Eliza, relaxed at home, comparing household remedies with her friend.23

  Charles I might have wished that he had let the Catholics keep a few more weapons, for in the Civil War many would raise them under his standard. Edward, fourth Lord Vaux, was ‘beyond sea’ for much of the time and played no great part in those great events, though Charles would bowl on his green while a prisoner in Northamptonshire in 1647. The Parliamentarians registered Vaux a papist (though not a ‘delinquent’ Royalist) and sequestered his estate.24 It was restored with the Stuart monarchy and Edward died the following year, on 8 September 1661, five years before the Great Fire of London, an accident that was, like ‘every evil that occurs’, blamed on the Catholics.25

  Edward had only been seventeen at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, but it affected him deeply. He had been on the cusp of marrying the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Howard, but her father, the Lord Chamberlain who investigated and tried the conspirators, took fright and married her off to a Puritan widower three times her age.26 William Knollys, who later became Earl of Banbury, may have been more Malvolio than eminence those days (he was known as ‘parti-beard’ for his not entirely successful attempt to dye his beard27), but he was good to his young bride and tolerated both her Catholicism and her open affair with Edward Vaux.28 He stood by ‘my Bessy’ when, on 10 April 1627, she gave birth to a boy, Edward, who was almost certainly named after his father.29 Four years later, he visited his wife at Harrowden Hall after she was delivered of another baby, Nicholas, who had a Catholic baptism and was nursed for fifteen months at the Vaux seat. On 25 May 1632, at the age of eighty-seven, William Knollys, Earl of Banbury, died. Within six weeks, Edward and Elizabeth had legitimised their relationship.30 It had taken them twenty-seven years.

  The star-crossed lovers were admired for their recusancy, but the Catholic Church could hardly condone the fornication of the one and the adultery of the other. Even after their marriage, Edward was known in more hostile priestly circles as the man ‘who kept another man’s wife so publicly even to the scandal of our religion’.31 Another painful consequence of the affair was the status of their surviving son, Nicholas. Elizabeth would argue just before her death in 1658 that ‘my son [is] as worthy, though a mother see it, as any of his age to honour that title that descent has bequeathed him’.32 But Nicholas’s doubtful paternity meant that he was never regarded wholly as a Knollys or a Vaux. After the murder of his brother ‘in a quarrel’ on the road between Calais and Gravelines in 1645 (no details survive33), Nicholas was styled third Earl of Banbury and, in June 1660, sat in the House of Lords. His legitimacy was questioned, however, and he was not summoned back. Lord Vaux had not helped in this respect, having settled his estate in October 1646 on ‘the Right Honourable Nicholas, now Earl of Banbury, son of the said Countess of Banbury, heretofore called Nicholas Vaux’.34

  Nicholas made various efforts to regain his seat. In 1665, he accosted the Duke of York in his carriage and pulled his leg ‘so hard that he had almost drawn off his shoe’, but he was never readmitted to the Lords.35 His son, Charles (1662–1740), who sold Harrowden Hall in 1694, was also disappointed and another attempt in the early nineteenth century led to a judgment that the heirs of Nicholas were ‘not entitled’ to the Earldom of Banbury. It was an important ruling and, for some, a ‘gross and palpable injustice’, since before Nicholas’s exclusion, the law had presumed that the father of a child born in wedlock was the mother’s husband, irrespective of adultery. Unless there was proof of divorce, impotence or absence from the realm at the time of conception, the law had hitherto cleaved to the proverb ‘my cow, my calf’.36

  Nicholas could not, of course, inherit the Vaux title either, though he received the bulk of the estate in 1646. In his will of 25 April 1661, Edward styled the son he could not claim ‘the Earl of Banbury’ and left him a token ten pounds to pay for mourning clothes.37 Upon Edward’s death on 8 September 1661, the title passed to his surviving brother, Henry, who lived a quiet single life in Suffolk and died with no heirs on 20 September 1663.38 The barony fell into abeyance for 175 years.

  During that period, ‘test acts’ were passed making the reception of Anglican communion and the abjuration of key Catholic tenets (including transubstantiation) a precondition of public employment. Catholics endured the Popish Plot of Titus Oates, the Exclusion Crisis and the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688–9 when the Catholic King, James II, was overthrown by his Dutch Protestant son-in-law. They were made to pay double land tax and were barred from buying or inheriting property. They witnessed the raising of those august pillars of the British constitution: the
Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), both steeped in anti-popery. But they also sailed into the calmer waters of the ‘long eighteenth century’, where sensibilities shifted, priorities changed and, gradually, restrictions were lifted until, in 1829, they found a haven of sorts in the Catholic Relief Act. The issue of emancipation may have been forced upon a reluctant Parliament by the vigorous campaign of the Irish lawyer, Daniel O’Connell, but its acceptance was a sign of the times. When, in 1834, the Palace of Westminster was destroyed by accidental fire, Catholics were not automatically blamed as they had been in 1666.

  By 12 March 1838, when the Vaux barony was revived in favour of the descendants of Eliza’s eldest daughter, Mary, Catholics could lawfully hear Mass and receive priests. They were entitled to join the army, work for the government, serve the court, practise law, teach, acquire land, sit in Parliament and vote. They were no longer fined for not going to church. They were no longer recusants, even if they were still frequently denounced as papists, or worse, and even if a Catholic could not (and still cannot) inherit the throne.

  When, in 1962, Peter Hubert Gordon (Fr Gabriel) Gilbey, ninth Baron Vaux of Harrowden, became the first Benedictine monk since 1559 to address the House of Lords, references to the past were light and congratulations hearty. ‘I think historically,’ the Bishop of London said in response to Vaux’s maiden speech,

  it may be of some comfort to him to know that my predecessors in office were never able to exercise any authority over his predecessors in the Community of which he is now a member … We welcome in this House a voice, which, in a sense, has been silent for 400 years, and we hope that we shall hear more of that voice.39

  There was, however, one discordant note: a letter, marked ‘confidential’, handed to Lord Vaux by an attendant. Scribbled in black ink on lined paper, the words have no greeting or signature:

  I am surprised you are thinking

  becoming a monk

  The RCs are practically heathen

  company

  The pope is only a figurehead in

  fact a very old man and a nonentity

  The previous pope died an agonizing

  death knowing the scheming that went

  on to start the last war

  Fancy a Gilbey becoming a monk

  My advice is please reconsider.40

  Almost fifty years later, the first state visit of a Pope to the United Kingdom – that of Benedict XVI in September 2010 – was a happy and fruitful occasion. On 13 March 2013, his successor, Pope Francis, became the first Jesuit Bishop of Rome, something unthinkable in the early modern period when the controversial new order was tarred by ‘black legend’ propaganda. In 1679, Thomas Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, described the Gunpowder Plot as

  a villainy so black and horrid (I do not say unchristian only, but) so inhumane and barbarous, as has no parallel in any age or nation (Jewish, Pagan or Turkish), nor indeed could have before the invention of gunpowder and the unhappy institution of the Jesuitical Society by (a fanatical lame soldier) Ignatius Loyola. For before that time, the world had no instrument or means so pernicious as gunpowder and congruous for effecting such a mischief, nor any order of men so impious as to approve, design, and endeavour to execute a villainy so manifestly repugnant to the law of nature and scripture.41

  One might wish for gunpowder to be the threat it once was. Torture, persecution, fundamentalism, fanaticism, martyrdom, the tangle of religion and politics: many issues are as live today as they were then. Combatants and weapons may change, but in its ambition for mass destruction, the powder conspiracy was a precursor for the callous and calculated plots of our own time. In the aftermath of its discovery, Robert Wintour told Guy Fawkes about a strange dream that haunted him: of a scarred city with steeples blown ‘awry’ and charred, disfigured faces.42 Such images are now all too real.

  fn1 Eliza argued that ‘forasmuch as there was contained matter of learning, not yet discussed among the learned, about the Pope’s power to depose princes, she being unlearned durst not with safe conscience take it. Yet if they pleased to take her oath of allegiance whereby she might free her integrity from disloyalty & secure, as she thought, the King from fear of her, she offered to swear fidelity to him notwithstanding any excommunication of the Pope granted against him. But when this would not suffice, she said if she had had money wherewith to have purchased her freedom, she should not have needed further to have been urged.’ (AAW A XI, no. 34)

  fn2 ‘The Lord Vaux made answer to the court that if any part of this oath did touch the conscience of his subjects, if it be the pleasure of the King to make a safe exposition of the oath, he would then take it accordingly.’ Otherwise, ‘he thought it better to swear from his heart his true allegiance to the King than to swear to a matter of the which he in his conscience hath some doubt, and that such an oath by him taken shall be for the greater safety of the King.’ (Bulstrode, Reports, pp. 198–9)

  fn3 During the negotiations for a Spanish match for his son, James I permitted volunteer regiments to fight on both sides in the war between Catholic Spain and the Protestant United Provinces. On 8 April 1622, the Privy Council authorised Lord Vaux ‘to pass the seas as Colonel to the voluntary soldiers licensed by His Majesty to go over to serve the King of Spain’ (APC, 1621–3, p. 213). It did not end well. Vaux resigned his commission in July 1624 after his grant for reinforcements was revoked. By then, England and Spain were at war again.

  fn4 ‘Auicen sayeth: There be certain medicines … which will not suffer poison to approach near the heart, as treacle and metridate’ (Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, 1541). ‘Take a great onion, make a hole in the middle of him, then fill the place with mitridat or treacle, and some leaves of rue.’ (Defensative against Plague, 1593 – OED Online)

  1. Thomas Vaux, second Baron Vaux of Harrowden (1509–1556)

  2. Thomas Vaux’s wife Elizabeth, Lady Vaux (d.1556).

  3. Harrowden Hall, now Wellingborough Golf Club. It was sold by the family in 1694 and almost entirely rebuilt.

  4. William Vaux, third Baron Vaux of Harrowden. Vaux’s adherence to his faith cost him his freedom, his fortune and perhaps also his sanity.

  5. William Vaux’s second wife Mary née Tresham.

  6. Catholic atrocities like the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in France, 1572 shaped the popular Protestant impression of Catholic bloodlust.

  7. In this woodcut the Pope is depicted as Antichrist riding the seven-headed beast of the apocalypse. Demons are fired from his mouth as he orders a monk, a priest and a layman to ‘go kill your prince’.

  8. ‘Certaine of the Popes Merchandize latly sent over into Englande’, issued in 1579 to help officials identify devotional objects banned by Elizabeth I. They include rosaries, crucifixes, Agnus Deis and (object 1) a superaltar. ‘These stones are portable,’ explains the accompanying text, ‘and serve to say Mass on in any secret place where there is no altar, and to that purpose are they sent over into England.’

  9. Young missionaries pray with Pope Gregory XIII before being sent to England ‘to the defence of the faith against the treachery of the enemy’. Seminary priests started arriving in England in 1574 and the Jesuits six years later. After March 1585 they were deemed traitors for being on English soil and their harbourers also risked the death penalty.

  10. Edmund Campion, Jesuit missionary priest, hanged, drawn and quartered on 1 December 1581.

  11. When asked how his hands and feet felt after a session on the rack, Campion is said to have replied ‘not ill because not at all’.

  12. Part of the rope purportedly used to bind Campion to the hurdle upon which he was dragged to Tyburn.

  13. The pressing to death of Margaret Clitherow, York, 25 March 1586. The butcher’s wife was the first of three women put to death in Elizabeth’s reign for helping outlawed priests.

  14. Mary Queen of Scots’ cipher ‘acknowledged & subscribed’ by Anthony Babington, 1 September 1586.

  15. Tresham’s Triangular Lo
dge at Rushton, built in honour of the Trinity.

  16. Lyveden New Bield, devised in a cross formation as Tresham’s tribute to the Passion.

  17. Engraving of the Catholic plots against Queen Elizabeth.

  19. Philip II of Spain. He may have lost the battle in 1588 (celebrated by 18: the ‘Armada Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth, previous image), but the war was far from over.

  20.William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Catholics complained of a ‘Cecilian Inquisition’, but the relationship between the Vauxes and the Cecils suggests a more subtle picture.

  21. William Cecil’s son Robert, Earl of Salisbury.

  22. Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire, where Eliza Vaux planned to harbour the Jesuit missionary John Gerard before a pre-emptive raid forced her to change location.

  23. The manacles: ‘Such a gripping pain came over me,’ wrote John Gerard after a session hanging from the iron shackles. ‘It was worst in my chest and belly, my hands and arms.’

  24. Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire, probable home of the Vaux sisters between 1588 and 1591. The sewer hide ran along this side wall.