God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (20 page)

It was ‘concluded and agreed’ at Hoxton to set up a fund. Lord Vaux, who later in the year would declare himself unable to pay a levy for the Queen’s army,
²⁴
pledged one hundred marks ‘to the relief of priests that would tarry’. Tresham, Catesby and their Hoxton host, Mr Wylford, matched Vaux’s donation and other unnamed gentlemen were ‘assessed at lower sums’. They also decided to launch an appeal in the shires. Henry Vaux was appointed treasurer. It was a formidable role, one that Henry, now in his mid-twenties and officially free from the burden of the Vaux inheritance, was seemingly keen to undertake.

The meeting at Hoxton broke up and the participants melted back into the streets and alleys of north-east London. One man, who identified himself as ‘A.B.’, returned to his lodging and took out his quill. ‘May it please your honour,’ he began his letter to Sir Francis Walsingham, ‘to be advertised that it is concluded & agreed among the papists that such priests as are determined to remain in England or hereafter shall come into England shall be relieved at the hands of Mr Henry Vaux, son to the Lord Vaux, or by his assigns.’

The spy proceeded to give a detailed account of the meeting and the proposed fund. ‘All this money,’ he continued,

is presently to be delivered to Mr Vaux before the 40 days to avoid the danger of the statute. And letters also directed into the countries abroad for the said collection & the money to be delivered to Mr Vaux. And he to take notice of all priests that shall remain or come into England & in secret by his servant Harris
^fn5
(as is thought) to relieve them where they shall be heard of.

In the margin, the spy added an ominous note: ‘The hope which the papists have to receive comfort by the Duke of Guise & his confederates is not little.’ By the end of May 1585, the relief operation was functioning well. The spy reported to Walsingham that Henry was ‘daily’ collecting money for the fund.
²⁵

For several years, it seems, probably since at least 1580, Henry Vaux had been privy to a certain amount of sensitive information on the English mission. After Hoxton, he was in receipt of the intelligence and income needed to bolster the whole enterprise. Not only was he in regular touch with lay benefactors, but he also took ‘notice of all priests that shall remain or come into England’. From the late spring of 1585, he liaised with priests and sustained their work. According to Robert Persons, he was a ‘blessed gentleman’, who presented ‘a rare mirror of religion and holiness unto all that knew him and conversed with him’.
²⁶
According to Elizabethan law, he was a felon, who ‘wittingly and willingly’ mixed with traitors and abetted their treason. He had become a person of very great interest in the ongoing investigations of Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham.

^fn1
That is, the equipment Alfield needed to celebrate the Mass. As the Jesuit John Gerard explained,

‘At first I used to take round with me my own Mass equipment. It was simple, but fitting, and specially made so that it could be carried easily with the other things I needed by the man who acted as my servant. In this way I was able to say Mass in the morning wherever I happened to lodge.’ (Gerard,
Autobiography
, p. 40)

^fn2
Charles Arundell, a prominent supporter of Mary Stuart, had fled to Paris a month after the arrest of Francis Throckmorton. He was suspected of having had a hand in a scurrilous ‘evil counsellor’ tract that portrayed the Earl of Leicester as a power- and sex-crazed murderer, who kept bottles of erection-enhancing ointment at his bedside. More ominously, the tract anticipated the assassination of Queen Elizabeth and advanced the claims of the Scottish Queen to the succession. Compiled in Paris and printed at Robert Persons’ press at Rouen, ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’, as it was popularly known, was circulating in London from September 1584. Writing to Leicester on the 29th of the month, Sir Francis Walsingham called it ‘the most malicious written thing that ever was penned sithence the beginning of the world’ (BL Cotton MS Titus B VII, f. 10r). Along with Allen’s
True, Sincere, and Modest Defence
, also published in 1584, it marked a shift in Catholic polemic towards a more combative stance.

^fn3
Weston’s alias was a tribute to his late friend and Oxford contemporary, Edmund Campion, S.J.

^fn4
The weather was a useful opener: ‘He should seize also any opportunity from the weather, which renders a man more apt to devotion – as, for instance, when the weather is fine to speak of elevation of spirit, in bad or rainy weather of graver things.’

^fn5
The following year, another spy reported: ‘There is one Thomas Harris, a trusty servant to Mr Henry Vaux; much matter might be found out in him if he were apprehended.’ Around the same time, one ‘Harris, servant to Henry Vaux’, headed a list of ‘knaves & papists & harbourers of priests’. (PRO SP 12/195, ff. 36r, 184r)

6

Flibbertigibbets

In Shakespeare’s original version of
King Lear
, Edgar, disguised as the madman Poor Tom, claims to have been tormented by the fiends Obidicut, Hobbididence, Mahu, Modo and Flibbertigibbet, ‘who since possesses chambermaids and waiting-women’.
¹
As fantastical as these names sound, they are not the product of Shakespeare’s imagination. He was inspired by real events. They occurred over a period of about eight months around twenty years before he wrote his great tragedy and the most extraordinary episode, ‘the prime grand miracle’, was performed at Lord Vaux’s house in Hackney towards the early autumn of 1585.

It involved the Jesuit superior Weston and Nicholas Marwood, a servant of Henry Vaux’s friend Anthony Babington. In attempting to expel the devil from the unfortunate Marwood, Weston utilised several ‘fresh green new relics’, including ‘certain pieces of Father Campion’s body’, which ‘did wonderfully burn the devil, all the organs of all his senses seeming to be broken and rent asunder’. Marwood’s screeching was witnessed by various members of the Vaux household alongside a carefully selected audience, which was reportedly put into ‘such astonishment as there was a confused shout made of weeping and joy for this foil of the devil’.
²

The exorcism was the talk of the town in smart Catholic circles. It must have been a welcome diversion for the Vauxes, who were reeling from the death at home of the baron’s third son, Edward,
^fn1
and the ‘unfortunatist mismatching’ of his second son, George, to Eliza Roper.
³
No one in the family seems to have had a good word for the girl. George’s uncle, Sir Thomas Tresham, questioned Eliza’s motives – George had
formally become his father’s heir in April 1585 – and her virginity. George ignored the warnings and on the very day of his younger brother’s death, 25 July 1585, he defied the conditions of his inheritance and married without permission. By November, though, when a young man called Richard Mainy dined at Hackney with a son and daughter of Lord Vaux, there was not much talk of death or undesirable brides, nor even, it seems, of the imminent war with Spain (effectively declared the following month when Elizabeth I sent the Earl of Leicester to command an expedition in the Low Countries). Instead there was much excited chatter about ‘the late possession and dispossession’ of Nicholas Marwood.

Seventeen years later Mainy would inform an ecclesiastical court that ‘the tales which were told of that matter seemed strange unto me, as what extraordinary strength he had in his fits, how he roared like a bull, and many other things were then mentioned, which now I have forgotten’. At the time, though, he was more receptive to his hosts’ tale and, soon after the dinner, he too became ‘possessed’. He later claimed to have feigned his ‘pretended visions’ to please Father Weston and ‘to gain to myself a little foolish commendation or admiration because I saw how the Catholics that heard of them, and were present at many of my fond speeches, did seem to wonder at me’.
⁴

Also exorcised around this time were four servant girls, including Lady Vaux’s maid, Sara Williams. She was around sixteen years old and had previously attended the Peckhams of Denham in Bucking-hamshire, where she had reportedly been possessed and ‘dispossessed’ of ‘divers devils’. For a while the transfer to Hackney, a place considered ‘more convenient for the health not only of her body, but also of her soul’, seemed the perfect tonic. Sara acquired a ‘sweet & comfortable manner’ and displayed all the attributes that befitted the female servant of a devout household. Everything changed on New Year’s Day, 1586. As the Vauxes celebrated the Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord, one priest perceived by Sara’s ‘behaviour & gesture that all was not well’. Upon further examination, he concluded that she had been repossessed. He sent for some of his colleagues, who ‘prepared themselves, through the help of Almighty God & authority of his Church, to cast out & expel this troublesome devil from this young maid & virgin’.

A manuscript account of Sara’s experience survives in the Bodleian
Library in Oxford, within a vast two-volume Catholic encyclopaedia that once belonged to the Brudenells of Deene.
^fn2
The account was purportedly written by a ‘true witness’ and probably also appeared in the now-lost
Miracle Book
, a compendium of supernatural occurrences compiled to showcase the power of the Catholic Church.
⁵
According to this witness, the devil, through Sara, repeatedly cursed and threatened the exorcists: ‘God’s wounds! God’s life! Six popish priests. Six popish priests. A pursuivant. A pursuivant. To prison with them & hang them. Hang them!’

The following morning, the Vauxes ushered more priests into their home to do combat with Sara’s demon. He scoffed at their appearance and apparel, calling one ‘red face’ and ‘other priests that were in vestments going to Mass, white coat & red coat, whooping and shouting, and all to disturb the company that were at devout prayers’. During Mass, at the elevation of the host, he ‘would roar & screech in most terrible manner, saying: I will none of your God, turn away my face, turn away my face, turn me away!’

Prayers and priestly commands having failed, the proceedings entered a terrifying phase:

Well, quoth the Exorcist, I will punish and torment thee for thy obstinacy, & with that called for fire and brimstone. First he hallowed the fire, and after scraping the brimstone upon the coals, the devil roared & cried in most terrible manner, cursing & swearing, saying: A pox on you, God’s wounds, you will burn me.

‘It was a wonderful sight,’ our narrator assures us,

to behold the pain & torment that the devil was put unto at the burning of the brimstone & holding the same before him at his nose, how he roared, tormented & screeched in most terrible manner, swelling in the face of the party, swearing & cursing so grievously that a man would have been afraid to have heard it.

Another priest, ‘holding the party possessed by the head’, placed a relic under her nose: ‘The devil raged & tormented, sniffing and blowing & winding away the face of the party from it, spitting & crying most strangely.’ The Eucharist caused a similar reaction, as did a picture of the Virgin Mary, which led Sara’s devil to threaten to ‘hollow
^fn3
out so loud that I will be heard a great way’. The exorcist then gave her a ‘hallowed drink’, which made her ‘spew & spit … in most wonderful manner, sometimes crying out that the drink burned her’.

Sara’s ordeal lasted from four o’clock in the morning till two or three in the afternoon. According to the Catholic narrative, her devil gradually began to succumb to priestly power. He gave his name as ‘St Maho’ and confessed to having lost Sara’s heart. He even said that Alexander Briant, who had been executed for treason alongside Edmund Campion and whose bone was utilised as a relic towards the end of the ritual, was a saint who had never suffered purgatory. ‘If this be not a sufficient testimony of the glorious martyrdom of our priests,’ the narrator writes, ‘I know not what we may believe.’

Still the devil refused to depart. With ‘the whole company praying devoutly for the delivery of the maiden from the tyranny and power of Satan’, he made her ‘gape in most pitiful manner, and withal deformed so her face as any man’s heart would have bled to have seen the same’. He then retreated into Sara’s body. ‘Oh, he will break my belly,’ she cried, ‘he will break my belly; he lieth in the bottom of my belly.’ Indeed, so low did he descend, that:

therewithal she called for the help of a woman. Then the priest, perceiving that the devil was gotten into the bottom of her belly, gave a relic unto one of the women, willing her to apply it unto the belly of the party, the which being done by the woman, it was wonderful to see how the devil was tormented.

Finally, with Sara ‘calling upon the help of Almighty God and of our Blessed Lady’, the devil departed:

And the maid, coming to herself, gave thanks to God for her safe delivery, for I thank God and our Blessed Lady, quoth she, I am now delivered; and being asked whether she saw him depart or no, she said, I did see him depart in the likeness of water. Whereat the exorcist and all the rest of the priests gave thanks to God.

Thus ended the exorcism of Sara Williams.