God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (18 page)

In the autumn of 1582, Lord Vaux’s second son, George, who had just turned eighteen, was smuggled into France with the help of one Persall of Rye, ‘a common conveyer over of papists’. A spy in Thomas Copley’s household reported that George visited the exile in Rouen ‘now and then’. (Another visitor was ‘Mr Ffrogmorton’ from Paris, probably Francis Throckmorton’s brother and co-conspirator, Thomas.)
²⁹
Accompanied by Polidore Morgan, George then made his way to Paris, where Ambassador Cobham noted his arrival. ‘The English papists,’ he wrote to Walsingham on 17 October 1582,

say that one of the Lord Vaux’s sons will become a religious man and receive the orders of their priests. It is to be thought the coming over of Englishmen should be now as good a trade as in other times the passing over of geldings, or else it is not to be imagined they should resort hither so easily and in such great number.
³⁰

A few days later, George and Father Morgan left Paris for Rheims. George stayed at the seminary for four months, taking his leave on 3 March 1583 (New Style).
³¹
It is not known if he left upon his own initiative or was summoned home by his father, but by the spring of 1583 it had become apparent that his older brother, Henry, was the more likely candidate for holy orders. Lord Vaux had hoped that his eldest son would marry a rich heiress and thereby discharge his debts and revive ‘my poor estate’. He had ‘a very worshipful match’ lined up ‘and no small portion of money’, but Henry ‘flatly refused to
marry’. He was ‘no less resolutely determined (though such resolution till then kept secret to himself) to live a sole life’. According to Sir Thomas Tresham, ‘this came to be debated among priests concerning his retiring from the world and refusing to marry wherein he fully satisfied them’.

It took two years to draw up a formal settlement. Tresham, as always, was the facilitator. Henry took a small annuity and relinquished his inheritance. On 20 April 1585, George formally replaced him as Lord Vaux’s heir. It was ‘peremptorily provided’ that he would not be able to marry without the consent of his parents and elder brother.
³²
Henry, released from the burden of his birthright, was free to train for the priesthood, but he was in no hurry to cross the Channel. There was still much work to be done in England and he believed that he was the man who should carry it out.

^fn1
Osborne had lasted seven weeks with the Franciscans, to whom he had resorted after being dismissed from Rome as unsuitable for the English College there. William Allen later alleged that Osborne was threatened with torture in the Clink.

^fn2
Kirby seems to have tortured by a device known as the Scavenger’s (or Skeffington’s) Daughter – an iron clamp that compressed the body in contrast to the rack, which stretched it.

^fn3
Sir Thomas’s son, Anthony Copley, would be involved in the Bye plot to seize James I in 1603. Banished from the realm, he would undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with Ambrose Vaux.

^fn4
Francis Throckmorton’s grandmother, Catherine, was the daughter of Nicholas, first Baron Vaux of Harrowden. Sir Thomas Tresham had been a ward of Francis’s uncle, Sir Robert Throckmorton of Coughton, Warwickshire, and married Sir Robert’s daughter, Meriel, in 1566.

5

Refuse of the World

Above twenty seminary priests of reputation and best learning now in London … They walk audaciously disguised in the streets of London. Their wonted fears and timorousness is turned into mirth and solace among themselves … My instruments have learned out sundry places of countenance where sometimes these men meet and confer together in the daytime, and where they lodge a-nights.

Richard Topcliffe to the Lords of the Council,
c
.1584
¹

It is not known exactly when Henry Vaux became one of the leaders of the Catholic underground movement. By 1585 he was the mission’s chief lay contact and fund manager, but perhaps the spring of 1583 was the watershed, the moment when he committed body and soul to mission England.

He moved north-east of London, to the village of Hackney, where in April 1583 his father was placed under house arrest. The peer’s release after twenty months of the ‘noisome and loathsome’ Fleet owed a great deal to Lord Burghley, who interviewed him on 6 February and drafted a ‘submissive declaration’ for him to transcribe and send to the Queen. It stressed Vaux’s loyalty and contrition. He was a ‘most obedient subject’, who now realised how ‘grievously’ he had offended in refusing to answer on oath about Campion. Never again, Vaux protested, would he ‘offend in any like case’. He beseeched the Queen for forgiveness and compassion, especially regarding ‘the great fine’ – still unpaid – ‘set upon me for the said offence’. Furthermore, he pleaded ‘most humbly to be forborne to be compelled to come to the church’. This was a matter of conscience, Vaux declared, not contempt, and he was open to instruction ‘whereby my conscience may be better informed and satisfied’.
²

It was a fairly remarkable request, especially as it was guided by Burghley, a determined anti-papist who was not known for putting sentiment before the interests of the state. Burghley respected noble rank and shared county connections with Lord Vaux. He may have been moved by his fellow peer’s plight – in future years, he would assist Vaux ‘in relieving my distressed, my else desperate estate’
³
– but it is still surprising that he should have engaged in special pleading of this kind, especially at a time when his fears for the security of the realm were growing. His sympathetic intervention serves as a reminder that no one was predictable in Elizabethan England and nothing was ever quite what it seemed.

Lord Vaux’s ‘submissive declaration’ was partially successful. He was relocated from the Fleet to a large house in Hackney. Sir Thomas Tresham was released at the same time and was eventually allowed to live in his house in Hoxton, but only after an intolerable few months confined to a chamber ‘over a noisome, smoky kitchen’ in the next-door house, where the air was blue with expletives and thick with ‘noise, smoke, heat [and] loathsome savours’.
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The laws on church attendance were not relaxed for Vaux and if he submitted to instruction and conference with ‘learned persons’ according to his pledge, it had no discernible effect on his conscience. Between October 1583 and January 1587, he was regularly indicted ‘for not going to church, chapel or any other usual place of Common Prayer’. Sometimes Henry Vaux was also named in the indictments and sometimes George, along with several household servants: William Hollis, William Worseley, John Parker, William Cheney, Valentine Kellison, William Vachell.
⁵
These names recur in the Vaux records: witnessing wills, leasing land, harbouring priests, delivering messages. They were loyal servants to their master and no less, it seems, to their faith.

Lord Vaux’s youngest daughter, Merill, seems to have been brought up in the Hoxton household of her uncle Tresham. She was certainly there at the time of a raid on 27 August 1584. The pursuivants failed to find any priests, but they confiscated a hoard of Catholic books and images. One ‘popish painted crucifix’ was found on a tablet hanging by Lady Tresham’s bedside. There was also ‘a new fashioned picture of Christ in a great table and a tabernacle of sundry painted images, with leaves to fold, serving as should seem for a tabernacle or screen to stand
upon an altar’. That the picture of Christ should be described as ‘new fashioned’ shows that Tresham was not just preserving the old, but commissioning new objects of worship. A large plaster relief of the crucifixion, dated 1577, can still be seen at Rushton Hall, his seat in Northamptonshire (now a very good hotel). For those who knew where to look, there was a thriving black market in ‘popish trash’. According to an informant in 1595, Mr Bentley of Little Oakley, near Rushton, ‘had an old man named Greene, a carpenter and mason’, who not only turned his hand to the construction of elaborate priest-holes, but also ‘maketh all the beads that lie in little boxes’ – for rosaries, presumably.
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Much of the information on Vaux activity in the mid-1580s derives from spy reports. In August 1584, the same month as the raid at Hoxton, one James Hill, an erstwhile Catholic who had spent time at the court of the King of Spain and the English College in Rome, wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham with information on ‘such persons, with the places of their resort, as was enjoined me by your honour’. In London, he wrote,

lodging at the sign of the White Hart in Holborn, I there grew acquainted with one Hugh Yates, sometimes servant to the Lord Vaux his son. This Yates had one Alfield repairing to him, with whom I was acquainted, who had his stuff for the purpose commonly carried with him in a box.
^fn1
He lodged ordinarily in inns, but would not be known of the place. His custom was to repair (as he found himself requested) to gentlemen’s lodgings.

Likewise here in this inn by means of this Yates, I know one Ballard, sometimes called Fortescue. He had his abode chiefly in Hampshire, and at the house of an old lady called the Lady West: there repaired hether to this Yates another named Stamp, but I never knew his common abode.
⁷

Thomas Alfield, the brother of the servant of Robert Persons who had helped Elizabeth Vaux escape to the convent in Rouen in 1582, was a priest. He would be hanged at Tyburn on 6 July 1585 for importing and distributing copies of William Allen’s
A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholiques
, a tract that defended the power of the Pope to depose heretic rulers. Ballard and Stamp, who had said Mass for Lady Vaux at Francis Browne’s house in 1581, were also priests. Their acquaintance with the Vauxes would continue.

Hugh Yates was described in a 1583 conveyance of Vaux property as a yeoman ‘late of Harrowden Magna’. The Tresham Papers reveal that he received occasional payments from Sir Thomas Tresham. The report now in Walsingham’s hand showed that he also served the Catholic underground movement in London. ‘By means of this Yates’ and others like him, safe houses were maintained, priests were introduced to laymen and the sacraments were administered to secret congregations.
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The question troubling the authorities was whether or not the priests went any further. Did they engage in clandestine activity of the more political kind and conspire in plots against the Queen and her realm? Burghley, Walsingham and the majority of the Privy Council were convinced that they did. Some well-placed Catholics seemed to concur. The Spanish ambassador in London had written in December 1581, regarding the Lennox Plot, that priests in England ‘have the matter in hand’. The following year the papal nuncio in Paris reported that once an invasion was launched, ‘the principal Catholics in England will be advised in time through their priests’. Whether they knew it or not, whether they approved of it or not, William Allen’s graduates were expected to fulfil a role in England that would ultimately go beyond conventional devotions.

In 1585 Allen would inform the Pope that the English Catholics were ‘much more numerous’ and ‘much more ready (
intenti
)’ for invasion due to ‘the daily exhortations, teaching, writing and administration of the sacraments of our men and priests’. Only fear made them obey the Queen, ‘which fear will be removed when they see the force from without’. There were ‘almost three hundred priests in the households of noblemen and men of substance,’ he added, ‘and we are daily sending others, who will direct the consciences and actions of the Catholics in this affair when the time comes.’
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In light of these comments, the
popular Protestant fear of a Catholic fifth column, primed for rebellion when ‘the time’ was ripe, does not seem entirely paranoid.

Whatever their intentions when they first arrived in England, some priests did become involved in subversive activity against the Elizabethan regime. It does not, of course, follow that all priests were rabble-rousers or potential assassins. Only a handful were directly involved in what would obviously be labelled treason, but there was a vast grey area that encompassed all kinds of suspicious activity – the circulation of tracts that defended the validity of the papal bull of deposition, for example, or the misprision of treason: the knowledge, but non-disclosure, of a treasonous act. ‘I came into the realm, my native country,’ Father Roger Dickenson protested, ‘to give myself to study, to prayer and devotion and to use my function, and that, I hope, is no treason.’
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But even if most priests shared Dickenson’s outlook, even if they were scrupulously pastoral in their concerns and eschewed anything that smacked of politics, they were nevertheless feared for what they might do if there was ever a direct confrontation between the Queen and the Pope. The so-called ‘bloody question’ that was put to many Catholic prisoners was an attempt to discover their ultimate allegiance: in the event of a foreign invasion to enforce the bull of deposition, would they take the Pope’s side or the Queen’s?

Many tried to sidestep the issue – they did not bear arms; it was too high a matter; it would depend on prevailing circumstances; they would pray ‘that God’s will might be done in heaven and on earth’.
¹¹
Such responses infuriated those individuals tasked with the assessment and management of potential threats. How could Burghley and his colleagues sift out the individuals who were ignorant of conspiracy from those who were complicit? How could they prevent potential treasons, but also uphold the rule of law? And what was the appropriate response to the laymen who publicly denounced political intrigue, but nevertheless housed, fed and funded priests, some of whom subsequently turned out to be subversive? These are, in many ways, timeless issues and they kept Burghley up at night.