God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (19 page)

On 9 October 1584, Ralph Miller, a twenty-year-old tailor from the Peak District, was hauled before the London magistrate Richard Young. A well-travelled Catholic before his arrest and imprisonment, Miller had spent time in the Low Countries, Rheims and Rouen, where
he had been sent by a priest ‘to work for all the papists there’. Now he gave a long statement detailing all the people and places he had seen in Europe and since his return. A recent encounter with Robert Browne, a theology student who had left Rheims in December 1583, had led to an introduction to Lord and Lady Vaux and their son George. Miller seems to have won their trust, for a fortnight afterwards he had been invited to Hackney to hear Sunday Mass, ‘whereat were present about 18 persons, being my Lord’s household’. The officiating priest was Robert Browne’s uncle, ‘a little man with a white head & a little brown hair on his face’, who went about in an ash-coloured doublet and a gown trimmed with rabbit fur. Miller knew where the priest lodged – in a room beyond the hall left of the stair leading to the chambers – and revealed the location of the secret chapel – ‘right over the port entering into the hall & the way into it is up the stair aforesaid on the left hand at the further end of the gallery, & there is a very fair crucifix of silver.’

Miller also gave away the names of other visitors: ‘a young man named William Harrington’, recently arrived from Rheims and lodging in Holborn with two other priests, had attended the Mass at Hackney. He was ‘very desirous to be a Jesuit’ and knew of priests ‘lying about Kentish Town’. Also, ‘Meredith the priest was at the Lord Vaux his house within this month.’ This was Jonas Meredith, a flaxen-haired, Bristol-born seminarian described by an informant five years earlier as ‘short of stature and well timbered, fat faced and smooth countenance’. He had accompanied Miller on the crossing from France and had, Miller thought, ‘a brother that doth serve Charles Arundell
^fn2
in
Paris’. This brother, John Meredith, had recently been accused of concealing crucial evidence regarding the Throckmorton Plot. He had subsequently fled, ‘for in truth,’ went the government line, ‘he was privy to the treasons and a fellow practiser in them’.
¹²

Ralph Miller further recalled that during one conversation at Hackney, Lord Vaux had asked him why he had come to England. ‘You see how the world goeth,’ Vaux had said, ‘we are poor prisoners.’ The priest had added that the family ‘looked any day for search to be made for them’.
¹³
One recalls the words of Robert Persons four years earlier:

There comes a hurried knock at the door, like that of a pursuivant; all start up and listen – like deer when they hear the huntsmen. We leave our food and commend ourselves to God in a brief ejaculation, nor is word or sound heard till the servants come to say what the matter is. If it is nothing, we laugh at our fright.
¹⁴

It is surprising that the Vauxes were not targeted with the Treshams and the other recusant families whose homes were raided on 27 August 1584 in a major crackdown on Catholic centres in and around London.
¹⁵
Perhaps Burghley’s friendly shadow was behind the omission, or perhaps a decision was made to observe the family from within. According to Thomas Dodwell, a renegade priest in the pay of the government, Henry Vaux was keeping ‘in manner of a serving man one Bridge
alias
Gratley, a seminary priest’. What Dodwell did not mention, and probably did not know, was that Gratley was himself a government spy. It was, perhaps, on the recommendation of the unsuspecting Henry Vaux that he soon became chaplain to the Earl of Arundel, a recent convert to Catholicism. In April 1585, the Earl wrote to Queen Elizabeth explaining his decision to forsake his family, friends and property for a life on the Continent ‘without danger of my conscience, without offence to your Majesty, without this servile abjection to mine enemies & without the daily peril to my life’. He did not make it beyond the Channel. He was captured in his boat and taken to the Tower of London, where, a decade later, he would die. Gratley had betrayed him and, unfortunately for the Vauxes, he was not the only spy in their midst.
¹⁶

*

On 10 July 1584, William of Orange, the Dutch resistance leader and Protestant figurehead, was assassinated. He was shot in the chest by a Catholic fanatic, who said ‘he had done an act acceptable to God … and that for so doing, he was confident that he should be sanctified and received into the heavens into the first place near to God’.
¹⁷
It transpired that Philip II of Spain had offered a bounty for Orange’s death. Two months later the city of Ghent succumbed to Philip’s general, the Duke of Parma. The grim spectre of Spanish victory in the Low Countries – and consequently of Habsburg control of the North Sea coastline – loomed large. The Duke of Guise’s Catholic League looked set to dominate affairs in France and by the end of the year it had concluded an alliance with Spain to prevent the succession of the Protestant heir. The forces of international Catholicism were arguably more militant and menacing than at any previous time in Elizabeth’s reign. Her government braced itself for war.

For many Protestants, ‘the enemy within’ was just as threatening. Catholic polemic had become noticeably more offensive and there was a steady stream of intelligence leading to further intrigues on behalf of Mary Stuart. Some plots were obscure: we may never fathom the true intentions of puffed-up William Parry, a government agent, turned Parliamentarian, turned freelance adventurer, who became ensnared in his own trap to expose disloyalty within the Catholic community. Other designs on Elizabeth’s life were frighteningly simple: John Somerville seems only to have had a ‘frantic humour’ and a pistol in his pocket when he set off from Warwickshire to kill the Queen.
¹⁸
But as the fate of William of Orange highlighted, it only took one extremist, bent on martyrdom and blind to worldly consequence, to effect an assassination. The thread upon which hung the safety of the Queen, and that of her subjects, was frail indeed. In the autumn of 1584, Burghley and Walsingham discussed ways of making it a little stronger.

They came up with the ‘Bond of Association’, a national covenant to protect the Queen and defend the Protestant establishment. The signatories, who numbered in the thousands, pledged as members of ‘one firm and loyal society’ to pursue, ‘as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge’, anyone who tried to harm the Queen or anyone ‘for whom any such detestable act shall be attempted or committed’. In effect, the Bond turned subscribers into vigilantes,
obliging them, if circumstance arose, to form a lynch mob against Mary Stuart or any other ‘pretended successor’, regardless of whether they had connived in a plot or not.

Elizabeth I disliked the Bond. She would never have survived her sister’s reign had such a provision existed and, quite apart from the dubious ethics of slaying a potential innocent, she baulked (as she had in 1563) at Burghley’s additional efforts to force through radical constitutional measures that would have interfered with her right to determine the succession. The Act for the Queen’s Surety, which was passed in March 1585, enshrined a moderated version of the Bond in statute. In the event of a plot or assassination, intended beneficiaries could be killed according to the Bond, but only if found guilty of involvement or ‘privity’ by an official commission. There was no question of unsuspecting heirs being at risk (the nineteen-year-old James VI of Scotland was thus kept onside) and no revenge could be wreaked without a nod from on high. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm with which Englishmen from all backgrounds had subscribed to the Bond in its early form told of the strength of their devotion to their Queen and the national religion. The other side of the coin revealed a virulent strain of anti-Catholicism throughout the land.
¹⁹

It was in this climate of fear and retribution that another major piece of legislation was introduced in Parliament. The bill ‘against Jesuits, Seminary Priests and such other like disobedient Persons’ was designed to annihilate the English mission. Any priest ordained abroad since the accession of the Queen and found in England after forty days of promulgation would automatically be deemed a traitor and face the death penalty. Anyone who wittingly harboured him would be ‘adjudged a felon’ and ‘suffer death, loss and forfeit as in case of one attainted of felony’. The bill presented an impossible scenario for England’s Catholics. Their one hope lay with Queen Elizabeth, ‘our headspring and fountain of mercy’. In a long petition, probably drafted by Tresham, and endorsed by several prominent recusants, including Lord Vaux, they begged for a measure of toleration. ‘O most lamentable condition,’ they cried:

If we receive them (by whom we know no evil at all) it shall be deemed treason in us. If we shut our doors and deny our temporal relief to our Catholic pastors in respect of their function, then are we already judged most damnable traitors to Almighty God …

Albeit that many ways we have been afflicted, yet this affliction following (if it be not by the accustomed natural benignity of your Majesty suspended or taken away) will light upon us to our extreme ruin and certain calamity: that either we (being Catholics) must live as bodies without souls, or else lose the temporal use both of body and soul.

‘Suffer us not,’ they begged the Queen, ‘to be the only outcasts and refuse of the world’:

Let not us, your Catholic native English and obedient subjects, stand in more peril for frequenting the Blessed Sacraments and exercising the Catholic religion (and that most secretly) than do the Catholic subjects to the Turk publicly, than do the perverse and blasphemous Jews haunting their synagogue under sundry Christian kings openly, and than do the Protestants enjoying their public assemblies under diverse Catholic kings and princes quietly. Let it not be treason for the sick man in body (even at the last gasp) to seek ghostly counsel for the salvation of his soul of a Catholic priest.

The petition stressed the apostolic nature of the mission and the loyalty of the priests to ‘their undoubted and lawful Queen’. In the unlikely event that any hint of treason could be discerned in any priest, the petitioners pledged to turn him into the authorities. ‘For our own parts,’ they concluded, whatever the outcome of the petition, ‘your Majesty shall find us such subjects as God requireth and your Majesty desireth, that is most obedient first to God and next to your Highness most loving, most loyal and most dutiful.’
²⁰

One of the petitioners, Richard Shelley, put the document in the Queen’s hands as she took the air in Greenwich Park. His presumption was rewarded with a cell in Marshalsea prison. The petition evokes a great deal of sympathy for England’s Catholics, stretched to breaking point by the uncompromising injunctions of rival authorities. At one level, they simply wanted to be allowed to receive the sacraments and purify their ‘unclean souls’. Yet they were also aware of the politics of religion and the latest casuist teaching that allowed a certain amount
of equivocation and ‘mental reservation’ in dealing with a persecuting body. One must wonder how sincere they really were when they offered to betray all treasonous priests. Reconciliation to Rome was categorised as treason, so official and Catholic interpretations of the crime clearly differed. While the petitioners’ first allegiance was to God – a Catholic God who, through the Pope, had excommunicated Elizabeth I – their love, loyalty and duty to the heretic Queen would always be qualified. Burghley’s confidant, Robert Beale, had expressed his concern years earlier: ‘It is unpossible that they should love her, whose religion founded in the Pope’s authority maketh her birth and title unlawful.’
²¹

And yet so many of them did love her – despite the bull of excommunication and despite the repressive laws. When the 24-year-old Robert Markham resolved to flee abroad and convert to Catholicism, he wrote a desperately sad letter to his parents, craving their forgiveness and explaining ‘the horror of my conscience’. He abhorred the ‘odious name of traitor’ and pledged never to fight against the Queen or have any truck with conspiracy. ‘I am,’ he declared, ‘and will be as good a subject to her Majesty as any in England.’ But there had to be a caveat: ‘my conscience only reserve I to myself, whereupon dependeth my salvation.’
²²
Fellows like Markham would have loved nothing more than to have been a good Englishman and a good Catholic. Parliament and the papacy conspired to make it impossible.

At the end of March 1585, royal assent was granted to the ‘Act against Jesuits, Seminary Priests, and such other like disobedient Persons’ (27 Eliz. c. 2). For all those priests ordained after 1559 it was now a capital offence just to be in England. They had forty days to leave the country.

Not long afterwards, a group of men gathered at a house in Hoxton. Lord Vaux, Sir Thomas Tresham and Sir William Catesby (our triumvirate of Fleet veterans, cousins and countrymen) were present, as were Henry Vaux, ‘certain other gentlemen’ and six priests, including the superior of the Society of Jesus, William Weston
alias
Edmunds.
^fn3
The new law had rattled the recusant community and a fresh wave of raids was anticipated. Some householders felt that the risk of
harbouring was too great. It was decided that priests should approach their homes by invitation only. Otherwise, they would ‘shift for themselves abroad, as in inns or such like places’.

There was no question, though, of leaving them exposed and destitute. The mission was a collaborative effort. Sometimes, as George Gilbert’s handbook written just before his death in 1583 makes clear, it was the layman who took the initiative with conversions, assessing and priming potential candidates, briefing the priest on ‘natural dispositions’ and exploitable weaknesses, creating ‘an opportunity for conversation suited to the occasion’.
^fn4
23
If the lay brethren did not live with the quotidian fear of the rack and the gibbet in the same way as their confessors, they nevertheless pledged lasting devotion to the cause and refused to abandon it in its hour of need.