25. The swinging-beam hide at Harvington Hall, Worcestershire, discovered by a boy exploring a derelict wing in 1894.
26. The ‘pedlar’s chest’ containing a portable church for the itinerant priest.
27. Recusant women at home, taken from The Painted Life of Mary Ward.
28. A chasuble embroidered by Helena Wintour, daughter of the gunpowder plotter Robert Wintour. Priests had to wear their vestments during Mass despite the high risk of detection.
29. ‘Fresh green new relics’: the thumb of Robert Sutton (ex.1588) was preserved by the Vaux sisters.
30. Engraving of the main gunpowder plotters.
31. Sir Everard Digby: one of John Gerard’s glamorous young converts and Eliza Vaux’s ‘great and tried friend’. He was one of the last recruits to the Gunpowder Plot: ‘Oh how full of joy should I die if I could do anything for the cause which I love more than my life.’
32. St Winifred’s Well, North Wales. It was on a pilgrimage to this holy shrine in September 1605 that Anne Vaux noticed fine horses in her friends’ stables and ‘feared these wild heads had something in hand’. She implored Garnet ‘for God’s sake’ to talk to Catesby ‘and to hinder anything that possibly he might’.
33. Coughton Court, Warwickshire: home to the recusant Throckmorton family and rented by Digby upon the advice of Catesby. It was here that Garnet and the Vaux sisters first heard the news of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot.
34. Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuit Mission in England. The Vaux sisters kept him safe for almost twenty years. (Inset: a representation of ‘Garnet’s Straw’.)
35. Anne Vaux’s orange-juice letter to Henry Garnet in the Tower. The writing was invisible until exposed by heat.
36. Henry Garnet’s last letter to Anne Vaux, written from his cell in the Tower of London on Easter Monday 1606.
Abbreviations
AAW Westminster Diocesan Archives
APC Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. J. R. Dasent et al., 46 vols (1890–1964)
ABSI Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu
ARSI Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu
BL British Library
Bod Bodleian Library
CP Cecil Papers
CRS Catholic Record Society
CSP Calendar of State Papers
DEP A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures by S. Harsnett (1603), in F. W. Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (1993)
ERL English Recusant Literature 1558–1640, 394 vols selected and edited by D. M. Rogers (1968–79)
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
LJ Journals of the House of Lords
LRO Leicestershire Record Office
NRO Northamptonshire Record Office
NRS Northamptonshire Record Society
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004)
PRO Public Record Office: the National Archives, Kew
RH Recusant History
TP ‘The Tresham Papers belonging to T. B. Clarke-Thornhill. Esq., of Rushton Hall, Northants’, HMC 55: Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, vol. III (1904)
Vaux Petitions A Collection of documents, printed and manuscript, relating to the petitions of G. Mostyn and E. B. Hartopp, claiming to be coheirs of the Barony of Vaux of Harrowden (1836–8)
Notes
Introduction
1 The following account is taken from the two examinations of Anne Vaux, reported on 11 March and 24 March, and her ‘declaration’ of 12 March 1606 (PRO SP 14/216, nos 200, 201, 212). The official ‘interrogatories’ are not extant, but one can glean them from Anne’s answers and from the letter of Luisa de Carvajal to Magdalena de San Jerónimo, 12 April 1606 (NS), in Rhodes, This Tight Embrace, pp. 237–9. I have also drawn on Garnet’s several examinations and statements, the Proclamation of 15 January 1606, the orange-juice letters exchanged between Garnet and Anne, and various examinations of conspirators, suspects and servants taken in the aftermath of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. Full details and context can be found in Part Four. Quotations given here can be found at: CP, 110, f. 33v; 115, f. 15v; 193, no. 57; Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations, p. 132.
2 BL Add. MS 39829, f. 10r. For Campion’s praise of Eleanor, see Anstruther, Vaux, p. 101.
3 A Tract on the Succession to the Crown (1602), cited by Kilroy, Edmund Campion, p. 114.
4 Geoffrey Nuttall (‘The English Martyrs’) counted 189 English Catholic ‘martyrs’, but acknowledged the difficulty in defining martyrdom. Patrick McGrath (Papists and Puritans, pp. 177n, 255–6), Penry Williams (Later Tudors, p. 475) and Diarmaid MacCulloch (Reformation, p. 392) give the figure of 191 executions: 131 priests and 60 laypersons.
5 Margaret Ward, cited by Crawford, Women and Religion, p. 63.
6 Bod MS Eng. Th. B. 1, p. 3.
7 Bossy (English Catholic Community, ch. 8) defines a Catholic as one who habitually, though not necessarily regularly, used the services of a priest. The diocesan returns of 1603 recorded 8,590 recusants, though local influence, poor enforcement, ‘riding up and down the country’, etc. meant that many escaped presentation for recusancy. Also see Miola, Early Modern Catholicism, pp. 26–9.
Prelude: The Calm before Campion
1 Simpson, Campion, p. 248.
2 BL Harl MS 859, f. 44r.
3 Edmund Campion to Henry Vaux, 28 July 1570, trans. Anstruther, in Vaux, pp. 100–2.
4 PRO C 81/863, no. 4673.
5 Letters and Papers, Henry VIII, I, i, 257(32), 357(45).
6 PRO E 36/215, f. 65r.
7 Letters and Papers, Henry VIII, IV, ii, 4040.
8 Vaux Petitions, p. 4. Dugdale, Baronage (1676), pp. 304–5. It is unlikely that he was the Thomas Vaulx who wrote to the Duke of Norfolk from Ampthill in April 1533 about the resistance of Catherine of Aragon and her household to her new status as Princess Dowager (BL Cotton MS Otho CX, f. 177). Unfortunately, the letter is not signed, but other references to this man never refer to ‘Lord Vaux’, only ‘Thomas Vaux’. Anstruther (p. 41) suggests that this man was a member of the Vauxes of Odiham, Hampshire. See too: BL Cotton MS Otho CX, fols. 199r–205v; State Papers, Henry VIII, I, ii (1831), p. 394; Letters and Papers, Henry VIII, II, ii, p. 1548.
9 LJ, I, pp. 65–82 (esp. at pp. 75, 77, 81–2). S. E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament (Cambridge, 1970), p. 199.
10 Vaux Petitions, p. 4; BL Harl MS 158, f. 143v; LJ, I, p. 297.
11 PRO SP 1/100, f. 92.
12 Rollins, Tottel’s Miscellany, I, no. 212; II, pp. 283–6. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 60, 62, 239–40. Puttenham confuses Thomas with his father, Nicholas.
13 Rollins, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, no. 89, lines 1–4.
14 Bowler, Recusant Roll No. 2, note 160 on p. xliv.
15 PRO SP 1/98, ff. 74–82.
16 Loarte, The Exercise of a Christian Life, p. 55.
17 Bod MS Eng. Th. B. 2, p. 159; Vaux, Catechisme, pp. 108–9.
18 T. More, Treatise on the Passion, Yale, Complete Works, vol. 13, p. 143.
19 In 1535 the chaplain was ‘Mr Moote’ (PRO SP 1/98, f. 75r).
20 Garnet, The Societie of the Rosary, pp. 149–50; Loarte, The Exercise of a Christian Life, pp. 90–1.
21 Vaux, Catechisme, p. 76.
22 PRO PROB 11/21/178.
23 Williams, ‘Forbidden Sacred Spaces’, pp. 111–12.
24 The authority on the subject is Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, esp. ch. 13.
25 Fincham and Tyacke, ‘Religious Change and the Laity in England’, p. 43.
26 Anstruther, Vaux, pp. 60–1 and App. D.
27 Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, ch. 3, esp. pp. 116 (for quotation) and p. 123 for the ‘unspectacular orthodoxy’ of the majority. See too Marsh, Popular Religion, ch. 2.
28 Duffy, Fires of Faith, passim; MacCulloch, Reformation, pp. 282–4.
29 Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563 e
dn), bk 5, p. 1131.
30 Duffy, Fires of Faith, p. 87.
31 Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1570 edn), bk. 11, p. 1703.
32 Ibid. (1563 edn), bk 5, p. 1699. Subsequent editions depict a woodcut of the burning.
33 NRO WR 337; Anstruther, Vaux, p. 101.
34 NRO Parish Register, Irthlingborough, 1562.
35 BL Lans. MS 33, f. 64r. John Murray (English Dramatic Companies, vol. 2, 1910, pp. 97, 209, 291, 308) gives instances of the bears on tour in the reign of Elizabeth, and of Lord Vaux’s players at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey (1884, p. 67) shows that the players were also active in the 1570s.
36 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 270v.
37 BL Lans. MS 991, f. 164r.
38 Strype, Annals, I, pt II, pp. 390–1; D’Ewes, Journals, p. 8.
39 Jones, Faith by Statute, p. 100.
40 For the Elizabethan Settlement as a ‘frozen tableau of her brother’s Church’, see MacCulloch, ‘Latitude’, pp. 45–52.
41 Parker, ‘Messianic Vision’, pp. 181–2, 191.
42 Alford, Burghley, pp. 124–5.
43 Ibid., p. 155.
44 CSP Rome, 1558–1571, p. 266.
45 NRO WR 337; BL Lans. MS 15, ff. 181r, 186r.
46 Simpson, Campion, p. 226.
47 Kilroy, Edmund Campion, Transcription I (quotations at pp. 177, 193). Kilroy (p. 4 and Ch. 2) argues that ‘the epic reveals Campion’s secret intellectual journey to the Roman church’.
48 Vossen, Two Bokes, pp. 1–13 (quotations at pp. 3, 6, 13). See too McCoog, The Reckoned Expense, pp. xiv–xxii.
49 Vossen, Two Bokes, p. 8n.
50 Haynes, State Papers, pp. 579–88 (quotation at p. 579).
51 Longley, Margaret Clitherow, p. 35.
52 Rex, Elizabeth, pp. 9–10.
53 PRO SP 12/59, no. 22; Trimble, Catholic Laity, pp. 52–5; NRO Parish Register, Irthlingborough, 26 January 1569/70.
54 Miola, Early Modern Catholicism, pp. 486–8.
55 Alford, Burghley, p. 161.
56 Bod MS Eng. Th. B. 1, p. 477; CSP Spanish II, p. 254.
57 Taylor, Tracts, 15, pp. 18–19.
58 13 Eliz. c. 1–3.
59 Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, pp. 213–14.
60 Ibid., p. 215.
61 Ibid., p. 216; La Mothe Fénélon, Correspondance Diplomatique, 1571–2 (1840), p. 106.
62 LJ, I, pp. 681–8.
63 Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, p. 216.
64 Plowden, Danger to Elizabeth, p. 95.
65 NRO WR 337.
66 CSP Rome, 1558–1571, pp. 393–400. See too Letters of Mary Stuart, ed. W. Turnbull (1845), p. 206n; Williams, Fourth Duke of Norfolk, pp. 199–201.
67 Parker, ‘Messianic Vision’, p. 197n.
68 Cecil, Salutem in Christo, sig. A6v.
69 Parker, ‘Messianic Vision’, quotations at pp. 195, 197.
70 Ibid., pp. 215–16; Alford, Burghley, p. 168.
71 Guy, My Heart is My Own, pp. 467–8.
72 Frieda, Catherine de Medici, p. 271.
73 Plowden, Danger to Elizabeth, p. 106.
74 Parker, ‘Messianic Vision’, passim, but especially pp. 177, 185, 206–9. For the commemorative medal, also see Parker, Grand Strategy, p. 4 and Plates 2 and 3 on p. 5.
75 CSP Rome, 1558–1571, pp. 393, 394, 396, 400.
76 BL Lans. MS 15, ff. 181r, 186r.
77 LJ, I, p. 728. For Vaux’s involvement in the county, see J. J. LaRocca, ‘Vaux, William, third Baron Vaux’, ODNB; CSP Dom 1547–80, pp. 343, 375; PRO SP 12/86, f. 135r; PRO KB 9/653, pt. II, ff. 106–7.
78 Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, p. 347.
79 Wiburn, A checke or reproofe of M. Howlets untimely shreeching in her Maiesties eares (1581), f. 15v; Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 27. For the Puritan movement in Northamptonshire, see Sheils.
80 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 59r; APC, XI, pp. 179–80, 207; PRO SP 12/86, f. 135r; HMC Buccleuch, 3, p. 18.
81 Folger MS Bd.w. STC 22957. f. 86.
82 PRO STAC 7/4/26; Anstruther, Vaux, pp. 87–90.
83 APC, XXII, p. 546.
84 S. Lipscomb, 1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (Oxford, 2009), pp. 62–3; K. Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 62 (1976), pp. 207–8.
85 Marsh, Popular Religion, p. 35.
86 Loarte, The Exercise of a Christian Life, p. 34.
87 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 169r.
PART ONE: WILLIAM AND HENRY
1 The Enterprise is Begun
1 Simpson, Campion, p. 228.
2 Cross, ‘Letters of Sir Francis Hastings’, Introduction and pp. 3, 19, 23.
3 Caraman, Garnet, p. 200.
4 Cross, ‘Letters of Sir Francis Hastings’, pp. 6–7, 19.
5 Caraman, Garnet, p. 201; PRO SP 14/19, f. 136.
6 Anstruther, Vaux, p. 101.
7 Ibid., p. 100; Folger MS Bd.w. STC 22957, ff. 78v–79v, 83v–86r.
8 Gerard, Autobiography, p. 195.
9 Alexandra Walsham’s Church Papists (1993) is the authority on this subject and any material not referenced below can be found there, especially at pp. 73–96. For Throckmorton’s complaint, see Wake, Brudenells, p. 117n. For Sheldon’s chapel: Williams, ‘Forbidden Sacred Spaces’, p. 98. For Mallory: PRO SP 12/190, f. 130v. For the articles against the parishioners of Preston: Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, I, p. 295. For links between the Flamsteads and the Vauxes and Treshams: TP, p. 47; NRO V 385: Harpole deeds; PRO C2/Eliz./U2/12; PRO WARD 3/17part1. For William Flamstead and John Shakespeare: Hodgetts, ‘Certificate’, II, pp. 13–14. For John Finche’s attempted suicide: CSP Dom 1581–90, p. 131.
10 Recusancy and Conformity, ed. Crosignani et al., p. 23. Also, pp. 262–84 for the views of Henry Garnet, S.J., who would later advise the Vauxes. This is an invaluable collection of documents with an excellent introduction.
11 Haigh, Plain Man’s Pathways, p. 197.
12 Miola, Early Modern Catholicism, p. 488.
13 Cross, ‘Letters of Sir Francis Hastings’, p. 23.
14 NRO WR 337.
15 Devlin, Southwell, pp. 18–21; A discoverie of the treasons, sig. Aiiir.
16 Loarte, trans. Sancer [Brinkley], The Exercise of a Christian Life, sigs **iir–v.
17 Southwell, Short Rule, sig. a7v.
18 Brown, ‘Robert Southwell’, p. 193.
19 Persons, ‘Memoirs’, pp. 200–1; Persons, ‘Life and Martyrdom’, 12, pp. 28–9; Foley, Records, III, pp. 626–8; Simpson, Campion, pp. 141–2, 222–3, 292–3, 296–9.
20 Gerard, Autobiography, p. xxiv.
21 Ditchfield, ‘The Jesuits’, pp. 54–6.
22 McCoog, The Society of Jesus, p. 141.
23 Simpson, Campion, pp. 141–2; McCoog, ‘French Match’, p. 200n.
24 See McCoog, ‘French Match’, and Lake and Questier, ‘Campion in Context’.
25 McCoog, ‘Playing the Champion’, p. 125; Simpson, Campion, pp. 139–40.
26 Reynolds, Campion and Parsons, p. 177.
27 Ibid., p. 127; Simpson, Campion, p. 175.
28 Simpson, Campion, pp. 174–5.
29 Ibid., p. 247.
30 Reynolds, Campion and Parsons, pp. 73–4.
31 For the way in which Persons and Campion used recusancy as ‘a wedge issue’ to prise apart the government’s rendition of the religion/politics divide, see Lake and Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context’, pp. 608–12. I am indebted to the insights in this article.
32 Ibid., p. 602.
33 Simpson, Campion, p. 226.
34 McCoog, ‘Playing the Champion’, p. 128n.
35 Simpson, Campion, p. 228.
36 Lake and Questier, ‘Campion in Context’, p. 604; McCoog, ‘Playing the Champion’, p. 129.
37 Simpson, Campion, p. 245.
38 Ibid., pp. 242–3.
3
9 BL Lans. MS 30, f. 201r; Anstruther, Vaux, p. 100.
40 Simpson, Campion, pp. 247–8.
41 BL Harl MS 859, f. 44r.
42 BL Harl. MS 360, f. 3v. Persons seems to have been mistaken when he later named Lord Vaux as one of those arrested. Vaux was not on Burghley’s list and the following month he signed a musters certificate in Northamptonshire.
43 Reynolds, Campion and Parsons, p. 155.
44 Simpson, Campion, p. 249.
45 Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 191; Larocca, ‘Popery and Pounds’, pp. 249–63.
46 Simpson, Campion, pp. 226–8.
47 PRO SP 12/142, f. 78r.
2 To be a Perfect Catholic
1 LJ, II, pp. 23–53.
2 Hartley, Proceedings, pp. 502–5.
3 23 Eliz. c. 1. For commentary, see Bowler, Recusant Roll No. 2, pp. xii–xxi; Larocca, ‘Popery and Pounds’, pp. 260–3.
4 Bowler, Recusant Roll No. 2, pp. xliv–v, citing Thomas Wilson’s 1601 survey.
5 Simpson, Campion, p. 244.
6 Anstruther, Vaux, p. 113, citing f. 20 of the Visitation Book of 1581–3 in the NRO. Unfortunately the mansuscript is so fragile that it cannot currently be viewed.
7 Persons, ‘Memoirs’, 2, p. 200; McCoog, ‘Slightest Suspicion of Avarice’, pp. 103–4; Simpson, Campion, pp. 222, 292–3, 296–9.
8 Devlin, Southwell, p. 53. The paintings commissioned by Gilbert and undertaken by Niccolò Circignani no longer survive, but engravings were made and bound in a book, published as Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophae (Rome, 1584).
9 Hicks, Letters and Memorials, pp. 331–40. See too Questier, ‘Like Locusts’, pp. 272–3.
10 Persons, ‘Life and Martyrdom’, 12, p. 30; McCoog, The Society of Jesus, p. 152.
11 Lake and Questier, ‘Campion in Context’, pp. 604–5.
12 Persons, ‘Memoirs’, 2, pp. 29, 182; Simpson, Campion, pp. 260–2, 287, 296, 526 (n. 190). See too Brown, ‘Robert Southwell’, pp. 193–6; Waugh, Edmund Campion, pp. 146–7.
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