God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (24 page)

Robert Southwell was six years younger than Garnet and more striking, both physically and temperamentally. He had auburn hair, the bearing of a gentleman and the jagged intensity of a poet. One admirer called him ‘the rarest & most eloquent Ciceronian of our age’. He had left England at the age of fourteen and just before his seventeenth birthday had entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus, ‘that body,’ he wrote, ‘wherein lyeth all my life, my love, my whole heart and affection’.
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They had been travelling for two months, having left Rome at the beginning of May. The Society General, Claudio Aquaviva, had initially been reluctant to give his blessing to this new phase of the English mission. Garnet, in particular, he had thought ‘more suited to the quiet life rather than the unsure and worrisome one that must be lived in England’.
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But even as he lamented that he was sending ‘lambs to the slaughter’, Aquaviva was persuaded of the need for reinforcements in England. ‘Pray send men to help us and someone to take charge,’ Weston had begged in April, ‘then we shall gather in sheaves on sheaves with laden arms.’ Under pressure from Allen and Persons, Aquaviva had relented. Garnet was appointed the senior member on the journey and successor to Weston should the Jesuit superior ever lose his life or liberty. ‘The need for prudence is very great,’ Weston warned.
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Writing ‘from death’s ante-room’, just before his passage to England, the 24-year-old Southwell veered from bullish defiance to blanket fear:

I know very well that sea and land are gaping wide for me, and lions as well as wolves go prowling in search of whom they may devour. But I welcome more than fear their fangs. Rather than shrink from them as torturers, I call to them to bring my crown. It is true that the flesh is weak and can do nothing and even now revolts from that which is proposed … I do not dare to hope what I so violently desire, but if I reach, God willing, the lowest rank of happy martyrs, I will not be unmindful of those who have remembered me.
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The government knew that they were coming, but not where they would land. A special watch had been placed on the ports. ‘I must say,’ Garnet admitted, ‘we felt a thrill of fear’ under the shepherd’s gaze. ‘However, the die was cast, and we must try our luck.’ So they marched up to the man with as much outrage as they could feign and began to rail against their boatman for depositing them in this unlikely spot. The shepherd was ‘a very honest fellow’, Garnet wrote, and ‘most indignant at the wrong done to us’. He pointed out their location – not far from Folkestone – and ‘described to us at length the places round about, and the right way to get to them’.

After this ‘merry’ encounter, the priests received more good fortune. It was the feast day of St Thomas of Canterbury and amidst the crowds flocking to the fair, no one was suspicious of the two Jesuits with oddly cut clothes and slightly strange accents, who ‘made our confessions to each other as we walked along’. They decided to separate and reunite in London with Weston. Southwell found himself a horse and made good progress. Garnet began on foot and avoided the coastal towns ‘like the plague’. Both found the capital safely and hailed each other in the street. ‘For five or six hours,’ Garnet recalled, ‘we walked about the city, but we did not see a single friend. Then, by chance, we met the man we were looking for.’
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It had been agreed at Hoxton the previous year that any priests ‘determined to remain in England, or [who] hereafter shall come into England, shall be relieved at the hands of Mr Henry Vaux, son to the Lord Vaux, or by his assigns’.
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If Henry was not the Jesuits’ first contact, then in all likelihood it was one of his men. They were given breakfast, escorted to an inn and asked to wait for their superior. On 13 July 1586, Weston came and dined with his new recruits. He was delighted to see them, but fretful. As the evening drew in, they changed location. A few hours later, Anthony Babington (under suspicion, but not yet under arrest) arrived and spoke to Weston.
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The following day the three Jesuits, presumably with the help of Henry Vaux, rode out of the city gates and made for the Chilterns. ‘The news of our coming has already spread abroad,’ Southwell wrote in his first letter from England, ‘and from the lips of the Queen’s Council my name
had become known to certain persons. The report alarms our enemies, who fear heaven knows what at our hands, so nervous have they now become.’
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The priests and their lay assistants settled in a house, thought to be Hurleyford in Buckinghamshire, where they enjoyed a week of relative calm. On the banks of the Thames, to music by William Byrd,
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the company sung Mass, heard confessions, prayed, preached and worshipped together. But this was no summer retreat. The fear of arrest hovered in the air and the practicalities of the mission intruded upon spiritual exercises. Weston briefed his juniors on the strategy for survival in Protestant England. He provided them with the names of friends and the locations of safe houses. He told them about the fund that he had set up with Henry Vaux at Hoxton the previous year. And he directed their onward journeys, Garnet to the country, Southwell to the city. The Vauxes were to be their first hosts, entrusted with the crucial task of keeping them alive long enough for them to make a difference.
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The decision speaks volumes for the Society’s faith in the Vaux family and vice versa.

The missionaries were buoyed by their reception. ‘We have had the happiest possible arrival in England,’ Southwell enthused on 25 July. ‘Things would be terrible here,’ Garnet opined five days later,

if we had only our enemies to think of, and wonderful if there were only the Catholics and their fervour. They show no fear of sheltering us at any time; and so great is our friends’ opinion of the Society that we are forced to conceal that we are of it lest the whole of Jerusalem be disturbed.
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Within a few days, though, Babington was captured and the plot that bore his name was revealed to an outraged public. There were persistent rumours of a Spanish invasion. ‘All highways were watched,’ wrote Southwell, ‘infinite houses searched, hues and cries raised, frights bruited in the people’s ears, and all men’s eyes filled with such
a smoke as though the whole realm had been on fire.’
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The prisons overflowed with suspected conspirators and priests. Many Catholics were ‘broken’, Weston recalled:

All men fastened their hatred on them. They lay in ambush for them, betrayed them, attacked them with violence and without warning. They plundered them at night, confiscated their possessions, drove away their flocks, stole their cattle.
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On 3 August 1586, just outside Bishopsgate, Weston was captured. Garnet automatically took over as Jesuit superior. For the next twenty years, while Weston was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Garnet headed the Jesuit mission in England. He would receive considerable assistance from two formidable ladies.

Robert Southwell, meanwhile, had returned to the London area, where he described the pursuivants prowling, ‘lynx-eyed’. He quartered with the Vauxes at Hackney and worked closely with Henry for the relief of the missionary priests. ‘Hemmed in by daily perils, never safe for even a brief moment’, he also heard confessions, prepared sermons and carried out ‘other priestly duties’, including absolving three seminary priests of their sins as they hung from a Tyburn gibbet. ‘Such is the multitude of spies,’ he informed General Aquaviva, ‘that we cannot set foot out of doors, nor walk in the streets, without danger to our lives.’
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The greatest jeopardy, however, was closer to home. Sometime the previous July, a priest called Anthony Tyrrell was arrested, interrogated and turned. He had been involved in the Hackney exorcisms and, in the autumn, gave up ‘the names of divers priests where I understood they did haunt or lie’. On 5 November the Vaux house was raided. Richard Young, a notorious priest-hunter,
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led the search
in person. He swooped first thing in the morning in an attempt to catch the family at Mass. His prime target was ‘one Mr Sale, a priest that for certain,’ said Tyrrell, ‘did lie at the Lord Vaux his house’.
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This may have been Southwell, who gave an account of a raid around this time:

The pursuivants were raging all around and seeking me in the very house where I was lodged. I heard them threatening and breaking woodwork and sounding the walls to find hiding places; yet, by God’s goodness, after four hours’ search they found me not, though separated from them only by a thin partition rather than a wall. Of truth, the house was in such sort watched for many nights together that I perforce slept in my clothes in a very strait, uncomfortable place.
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Young was frustrated. He was certain there were priests in the house, ‘conveyed away so that they could not be found’. Henry Davies and his wife, who were operatives in the underground movement and had ridden ‘to my Lord Vaux and to Sir Thomas Tresham about secret causes’, pretended that she was the sister of Mr Marbury of the Pantry. (One of the pursuivants, ‘being greatly beholden’ to this Marbury, ‘passed them over with friendly speeches’.) According to a spy known as ‘II’ (real name: Maliverey Catilyn), Lord Vaux managed to distract another pursuivant long enough for his wife to squirrel away ‘her little casket, which she would not for five hundred pounds had been searched’.
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Indeed, the entire fruits of Young’s fossicking boiled down to some letters, found in a bag belonging to Henry Vaux. They were written in Latin and signed ‘Robert’. Initially thought to signal the return of Robert Persons from Rouen, the letters were subsequently recognised as Southwell’s.
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Henry was taken in for questioning. He refused to give anything away and was committed to the Marshalsea.
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That evening Lady Vaux sent for her brother, Sir Thomas Tresham, and his lawyer ‘to give advice what course was best to be taken in the cause and behalf of her [step]son Henry’. The two men hurried over from Hoxton and ‘after long talk’ agreed to leave him ‘to his own
answers’, hoping that he would frame them ‘so wisely … as he shall not need any other means of deliverance’.
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Half a year later, Henry was still languishing in prison. On 22 May 1587, Walsingham granted him three months’ leave, probably on compassionate grounds.
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He rode up to his sisters Eleanor and Anne in Leicestershire, the county where they had spent much of their childhood. He did not return to the Marshalsea in August ‘according to the tenor of his bond’. His burial was recorded in the parish register of Great Ashby on 19 November 1587.
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According to Garnet, who almost certainly attended him at the end, Henry suffered from a wasting disease brought on by his imprisonment. Robert Persons wrote that he died ‘most sweetly and comfortably’. Another Jesuit, John Gerard, claimed that Henry’s only deathbed regret was that he could not, ‘there and then’, be admitted into the Society of Jesus. He had been ‘most anxious’ to enter the Society and had, Garnet recalled, made a vow to that effect, telling Eleanor and Anne that he recognised God’s favour and providence in men of the Order. ‘I have no doubt,’ he said to his sisters, ‘that He will be propitious to them, that they in time will reap in this kingdom the same fruit from their labours as they have done elsewhere, for they are not excepted here from the injuries that they suffer in other countries.’
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The English mission lost a valuable asset when that ‘boy of such great promise’, as Campion had called Henry, died. Sir Thomas Tresham thought his young cousin a ‘gentleman of rare worth’. For Garnet, he was ‘a shining example of learning, innocence and piety’. Robert Persons even took it upon himself to play pope, declaring Henry Vaux a ‘blessed gentleman and saint … whose life was a rare mirror of religion and holiness unto all that knew him and conversed with him’. The Queen’s ministers would have vehemently disputed any notion of Henry’s ‘innocence’, but even hostile sources acknowledged his significance. Walsingham’s agent, Maliverey Catilyn, witnessed ‘great lamentation’ amongst the Catholics of Clerkenwell when Henry was arrested, for they had esteemed him ‘a most singular young man’.
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Apart from a well-stocked library and eighteen extant poems (he considered himself an ‘unripe yet rotten poet’), Henry left behind little of substance, having liquidated most of his assets and resigned
his interest in the Vaux patrimony ‘in order to devote himself entirely to God and to his studies’.
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His chief legacy lay in the relief operation for Catholic priests that he had helped found and run. With his team of fixers, he had ‘daily’ handled money, intelligence and communications on behalf of the English mission. It helped that he had a ‘pleasant demeanour’, was ‘accurate and quick at figures’ and ‘diligent in application’. Edmund Campion first spotted those traits in his nine-year-old pupil and they had served Henry well until his death nearly twenty years later. His pivotal role in the Catholic underground also required courage, self-sacrifice and a steely, single-minded belief in the cause. Small wonder that admirers thought Henry ‘rare’ and ‘singular’.