God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (25 page)

But Campion had also recognised a match for Henry in the family. ‘Your sister is your rival in study and in work,’ the tutor had informed his charge in the summer of 1570: ‘She shares the same intellectual interests and I warn you that if you underrate her now, even a little bit, and take things easy, she will achieve renown before and triumph over you.’ Campion was almost certainly referring to Eleanor, the eldest of Henry’s three sisters. He predicted that they would make ‘a matchless pair’ and ‘shine with marvellous lustre’.
²⁶
Fortunately for all those who relied upon her brother, Eleanor would not disappoint. Nor would her younger sister, Anne, who readily stepped into the breach.

The next phase of the English mission was an altogether different enterprise to that inaugurated by the seminary priests in 1574 or to the first Jesuit mission of 1580. The law had changed several times and was less frequently winked at. An Act ‘for the more speedy and due execution’ of the penal legislation (29 Eliz. c. 6), which came into force in March 1587, made fines cumulative and allowed the Crown to seize two-thirds of a defaulting recusant’s estate. To be a practising Catholic in England was increasingly expensive, hazardous, stifling and demeaning. Homes were regularly raided. Rosaries, images, devotional books and treasured heirlooms were deemed unpatriotic, at best. Being a seminary priest was illegal; sheltering a seminary priest was illegal; both crimes courted the scaffold. With the Scottish Queen dead, the odds on a Catholic succession – and the restoration of the old faith by peaceful means – lengthened considerably. And England was at war with Spain, the Catholic Spain of Philip II, who still held his ‘messianic vision’ of world domination in sharp relief.

Focus shifted from attempting to debate the law (Campion’s oft-declared objective) to finding the most discreet ways of breaking it. Catholic carpenters busied themselves with false walls, swinging beams, trap doors, loft conversions, ‘chimney conveyances’ and other tiny spaces in which priests and their kit could be stowed at a moment’s notice. Resolutions were sought, and given, to allow priests and laymen to ‘equivocate’ (Protestants called it lying) to avoid incrimination. Casuist handbooks guided Catholics through what had become an ethical minefield. As Garnet put it, ‘we forged new weapons for new battles.’
²⁷
The Hoxton fund and the early ad hoc arrangements for incoming priests were regularised. The mission became bigger and slicker and, perhaps inevitably, plagued by infighting. Towards the end of 1586, Southwell warned future missioners to ‘gird themselves for heavier trials than their companions have hitherto suffered, for the sea is more boisterous than usual and swept by fiercer storms’.
²⁸

In 1586 Philip II turned down the plan of the Council of the Indies to strengthen the defences of the Caribbean. Two years later he refused a request for extra reinforcements made by the Viceroy of India for an attack on the Sultan of Acheh. It was the same story in East Africa – a fortress at Mombasa could not be built – and in South East Asia, where the Spanish colonists of the Philippines were frustrated in their plan to launch an invasion of China.
²⁹
The ruler who famously presided over an empire on which the sun never set had his eyes – and resources – fixed firmly on England. There were, assuredly, rough waters ahead.

^fn1
Richard Tottel was the publisher of the first anthology of English verse, popularly known as
Tottel’s Miscellany
. It included several poems by Thomas, second Lord Vaux, and was an extremely influential text. Shakespeare owned a copy. When Henry Garnet worked at the printer’s in 1574, the book was in its seventh edition.

^fn2
Despite indictments for recusancy (sometimes alongside Lord Vaux and his sons), Byrd retained his position in the Chapel Royal. Queen Elizabeth was known, on occasion, to put talent before faith. It is conceivable that Shakespeare’s ‘bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’ (Sonnet 73) is a play on the composer’s name. (Jeaffreson, I, pp. 163, 167; also pp. 127, 129, 143–4, 150, 158)

^fn3
Tyrrell described him as ‘a most cruel bloodsucker’, Southwell as a ‘butcher of Catholics’. He was apparently so closely associated with the rack that it was known as ‘Young’s Fiddle’. According to the Jesuit John Gerard, Justice Young was ‘the devil’s confessor’, who met a fitting end: ‘Day and night he toiled to bring more and more pressure on Catholics, drawing up lists of names, giving instructions, listening to reports. Then one rainy night, at two or three o’clock, he got up to make a search of some Catholic houses. The effort left him exhausted; he became ill, contracted consumption and died.’ Of course, none of these statements is without bias. Confessional writers (from both camps) seldom missed an opportunity to attribute divine wrath to the death or mishap of their enemies. (Gerard,
Autobiography
, p. 92; Kilroy,
Edmund Campion
, p. 93)

^fn4
The Marshalsea prison in Southwark kept a substantial number of Catholic inmates. Depending on confessional bias, it was either ‘a school of Christ’ (Father Gerard) or ‘a college of caitiffs’ (Bishop Aylmer). (Gerard,
Autobiography
, pp. 4, 215)

PART TWO

ELEANOR AND ANNE

Spell ‘Eva’ back and ‘Ave’ shall you find,

The first began, the last reversed our harms;

An angel’s witching words did Eva blind,

An angel’s ‘Ave’ disenchants the charms.

Death first by woman’s weakness entered in;

In woman’s virtue life doth now begin.

Robert Southwell, ‘The Virgin’s Salutation’,

first stanza
¹

9

The Widow and the Virgin

Eleanor was the elder sister, the ‘very learned and in every way accomplished lady’, who had so impressed Edmund Campion in his tutoring days. Her husband, Edward Brooksby, had been a ‘great admirer and follower’ of Henry Vaux and a keen supporter of the Jesuits, but he had died sometime between the summers of 1580 and 1581, leaving her with two small children.
¹
Soon afterwards, she adopted her late aunt’s five-year-old daughter. Early widowhood and the responsibilities of raising William, Mary and Frances in the forbidden faith had taken their toll. In the parish register recording her brother’s burial in 1587, Eleanor is described as ‘old Mris Bruxby’, though she was probably not yet thirty.
²
Her widow’s weeds doubtless enhanced the ageing process, but it is unlikely that she cared. Her life was dedicated to God, ‘her second spouse’. Forty years after her husband’s death, she was presented with a little book called
The Widow’s Glass
in which the translator praised her ‘long, constant & most exemplar profession of that noble and worthy state of chaste widowhood’. No doubt Eleanor heeded the book’s advice to live modestly, dress plainly and avoid bejewelled or frizzled hair, ‘for these be the true signs of hell-fire’.
³

Eleanor was fiercely intelligent, forceful and resourceful, but not always brilliant in a crisis. Garnet thought her ‘rather timid’ and noted that she struggled to cope with ‘the threats and evil looks of the searchers’ who frequently raided her home.
⁴
Not so Anne, who was emboldened by their presence. She was the youngest child from Lord Vaux’s first marriage, the one whose birth might have caused her mother’s death.
^fn1
With no children of her own, and no husband either, Anne could afford to take risks. She was happy to impersonate her sister
and become the lady of the house when the pursuivants came knocking. She was equally comfortable as ‘Mistress Perkins’, riding up and down the country with strange young men. There were the inevitable rumours, but Anne was a virgin and determined to stay that way. And the men were not that strange; they just happened to be priests.

Henry Garnet called them ‘the widow and the virgin’ and for two decades they would be his mainstay, providing practical, financial and emotional support as he attempted to steer the mission out of troubled waters. His arrival did not mark the beginning of their service – Eleanor had already been flagged as a probable priest-harbourer and one of the sisters (unnamed) had been happily endorsing the exorcisms over dinner at Hackney in 1585.
⁵
But once Garnet took over as Jesuit superior, the preservation of his life and work became their vocation.

Their dedication was phenomenal. They would rent property for Garnet and his brethren, sometimes ‘diverse houses at once’, and provide cover for the sacraments that were administered within. They would handle the ‘continual resort’ of priests and penitents – and the pursuivants that so often came in their wake. Twice a year they would host the Jesuit conferences, where vows were renewed and resolves hardened. They would visit, supply and occasionally bail out imprisoned priests. They would make significant contributions to the Jesuit fund and provide a fence for their fiendishly complex finances. They actively promoted the Counter-Reformation in England, not only by maintaining the liturgical rhythms of the Catholic calendar, but also by catechising the young, patronising devotional literature, preserving relics, championing home-grown ‘martyrs’, and myriad other ways that were not always popular in Rome. They would be outspoken defenders of the Society of Jesus, attracting a considerable amount of misogynistic vitriol in the process, and they, particularly Anne, were there for Garnet when the pressures of leadership threatened to overwhelm.

It was a brave man who tried to cross these sisters. ‘In God’s cause and in the protection of His servants’, Anne could be quite magnificent. Despite an unidentified but ‘chronic weakness’ that she ‘nearly always’ suffered and which could render her speechless, she would spend many hours arguing with her adversaries. In 1594 the Master of the Rolls would describe her as ‘stomachful’, by which he meant that she was stubborn. ‘She is really quite funny and very lively,’ another contemporary observed, and she had a good line in sarcasm, often mocking her interrogators as
if they were ignorant schoolboys.
⁶
Eleanor was no pushover either, especially when it came to defending the interests of her family. Indeed, Sir Thomas Tresham (her stepmother’s brother), against whom she would ‘ungorge herself’ of some imaginative insults in 1594, considered Eleanor the dominant sister. Even their beloved brother Henry had been ‘powerfully terrified’ of the two when he had bypassed Eleanor’s children in his plans to resign his birthright.
⁷
They were sisters in blood and sisters in faith – ‘seeing virginity and widowhood have ever been accounted sisters and betrothed to the same eternal spouse Christ Jesus’
⁸
– and they made a formidable pair.

Garnet did not refer to them in every missive to Rome. Indeed he hardly mentioned them. The need for circumspection had been drummed into him and Southwell at the onset of their mission. ‘Be more on your guard,’ Southwell was admonished in February 1587:

Do not say so much in plain and open terms, lest (if what you write fall into others’ hands) danger should thence arise either to others and to yourself … Things, especially when of importance, should be somewhat veiled in allegory (for the receiver will grasp the sense) and when persons are in question, they should be merely alluded to indirectly.
⁹

Thus, when Garnet wrote of ‘creditors’ and ‘debtors’, he was referring to persecutors and persecuted. ‘Merchandise’ stood for souls, ‘merchants’ for priests; ‘prentices’ were novices and ‘engagements’ were religious vows. By ‘places of much trading’, he meant sites of execution, and instead of prisons he wrote ‘credit-houses’. He was vague on location – ‘the great house’, ‘my former dwelling’, ‘our places of abode’ – and careful not to incriminate his hosts – ‘my 2 ostesses’, ‘the two sisters’, ‘the widow and the virgin’. From 1594, he used a numerical code for particularly sensitive information.
¹⁰

The sisters were not always at his side. Advising Anne on her future in 1606, Garnet expressed his wish that she and Eleanor live ‘as before in a house of common repair of the Society, or where the superior of the mission shall ordinarily remain’.
¹¹
Eleanor, it seems, often kept to the headquarters, but Anne frequently escorted Garnet on his travels. At the time of the Gunpowder Plot, almost twenty years after Garnet’s return to England, a servant testified that ‘Mrs Anne Vaux
doth usually go with him whithersoever he goeth.’
¹²
In 1598, an angry husband whose wife had attached herself to the Jesuits challenged a priest to ask Garnet ‘with what face he can carry a gentlewoman up and down the country with him and thereby give such bad example to his subjects to take my wife from me’.
¹³

There was mutual respect, reliance and affection between Garnet and Anne. He was her senior by seven years and her ‘ghostly father’. She was his penitent and protector. She had vowed to obey him, but if necessary would order him down a priest-hole.
In extremis
, she feared she could not live without him and he would call her ‘my ever dearest in Christ’. It was an intensely familiar relationship. Some contemporaries, even some Jesuits, suspected it might be too familiar.
¹⁴
But those looking for scandal tend to overlook Garnet’s last two words:
in Christ
.