God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (26 page)

Garnet and his colleagues were heartened by the support they received from the recusant women of England. Wives, widows and spinsters, even young girls, took to the missionary field with considerable flair. ‘The work of God,’ Southwell reported six months into his apostolate, ‘is being pressed forward, often enough by delicate women who have taken on the courage of men.’
¹⁵
The Catholic clergy had a great deal of admiration for these women, but there was also an underlying discomfort at having to rely upon them for succour. Most men, and indeed women, shared the sentiments of Lord Vaux, who had chastised Lady Montagu in 1581 for her ‘somewhat too zealous (I will not otherwise term the same) urging me in matters tending to religion’. Citing St Paul, he had argued that ‘women should learn in silence and in subjection … for silence extolleth womanly shamefastness, and such comely shamefastness adorneth their age’.
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Women should be meek and decorative; that was the natural order of things. If they started to show signs of rationality or courage or other virtues traditionally associated with men,
^fn2
then they were circumventing the order, and that could be dangerous for anyone who liked order and hierarchy in their lives – notably Catholic clergymen.

On the other hand, there was an acceptance that these were not ordinary times. English recusants, like Christ’s followers in the early days of the primitive Church, believed they were answering a call to arms; peacetime rules need not apply. Nor could the usual structures of patriarchal and ecclesiastical authority be strictly maintained. Many fathers, husbands and brothers had been taken out of action – either by death or by imprisonment or because they had been so browbeaten by fines and forfeiture that they had surrendered (as recusants saw it) to conformity. The missionaries were fledglings operating ‘amidst bird lime and traps’, one priest wrote.
¹⁷
They needed protection wherever and however they could get it. The mission was fluid, fragmented and necessarily flexible. There was no coherent leadership. The Jesuits had their superior, though visitors were carefully vetted – ‘I know not where to come to you,’ one priest groused to Garnet.
¹⁸
Members of the secular clergy (those priests who did not belong to a religious order) might look to William Allen for guidance, but he was in Rheims and, from 1587, a cardinal in Rome, and would in any case die in 1594 with no obvious successor. The Pope’s attempt to establish ‘perfect love and union’ among the clergy by appointing an archpriest in 1598 backfired spectacularly and would have only the opposite effect.
¹⁹

Through the fissures and fractures, the recusant women slipped; not many – a minority of a minority of a minority – but their influence was disproportionate. They undertook whatever role was required of them and adapted to circumstance. On the ground, where resourcefulness and spontaneity were essential, common sense might prevail over canonical procedure. A quick-witted lady could be the difference between the capture and concealment of a priest. Or, indeed, the salvation and damnation of a soul, if, like Dorothy Lawson from Newcastle, she was instrumental in conversions and played the catechist to the extent that her chaplain had ‘no other share in the work but to take their confessions’. In emergencies, she even performed baptisms ‘with her own hand’.
²⁰

Catholic women were conduits and fixers. John Donne had a childhood memory of going to the Tower of London with his mother to visit her imprisoned brother, Jasper Heywood. He was the senior Jesuit in England in 1584 and another visitor was his successor, William Weston. Elizabeth Donne had provided the first contact between the two priests and arranged for their eventual meeting, perhaps even
helping to allay Weston’s ‘great trepidation as I saw the vast battlements, and was led by the warder past the gates’.
²¹

Women with autonomy at home were the custodians of household religion, and of the young, and of the priests they decided to take in. Then, as now, the ‘gatekeeper’ was in a privileged position and that made Anne Vaux and Eleanor Brooksby very influential indeed. The priest who had griped at the lack of access to Garnet also vented his spleen at ‘the elder gentlewoman’, who had ‘refused to take notice’ of him and treated him as ‘a person justly to be mistrusted’. He identified Eleanor so closely with the Jesuit superior that he considered her snub a reason to take offence at him.
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Other Catholics sought Anne’s advice. Garnet would convey instructions and even appoint his temporary successor through her.
²³
The sisters knew where the bodies were buried – figuratively and, in the case of ‘fresh green new relics’, quite literally.
²⁴

The special conditions of the English mission presented women like Anne and Eleanor with opportunities for influence and action that would have been unthinkable in the more disciplined countries of Tridentine Europe. The Yorkshire Catholic, Mary Ward (1585–1645), would realise quite how different those conditions were when her attempts on the Continent to establish a female religious institute outside the cloister were met with suspicion and derision.
^fn3

Contemporary portraits of recusant women were not always flattering. Alongside all those edifying reports of perfectly pious ladies – like Mary Gifford, who wore her dresses out at the knees from so much praying
²⁵
– are ones where they were depicted as either too much of a woman, or not quite a woman at all. A staple of anti-Catholic, especially anti-Jesuit, discourse was to lampoon the recusant woman as a silly slut,
who sated her lust by keeping a priest in her closet. Richard Sheldon, author of
A Survey of the Miracles of the Church of Rome, proving them to be Antichristian
(1616), suggested that cosy households were not good environments for chastity. ‘Is it not a miracle,’ he asked,

that so many of your priests, Ignatians
^fn4
and monks feeding here in England daintily, arrayed gallantly, lodging softly, should be very domestically and privily conversant with ladies, dames, matrons, maids of all sorts, and yet none of all these be scorched?
²⁶

At the other end of the scale was the image of the virile woman: the exceptionally heroic lady who could, in special circumstances, assume the qualities of a man (strength, aggression, fortitude, rigorism, rationality and so on) and thereby transcend the perceived limitations of her gender. ‘Though she has all a maiden’s modesty and even shyness,’ Garnet wrote of Anne, ‘yet in God’s cause, and in the protection of His servants,
virgo
becomes
virago
.’
²⁷
The image was neither new, nor confined to England. Like Martha, the New Testament hostess who was transformed in medieval legend into the dragon-taming hero of Provence, or Teresa of Ávila (1515–84), a patron saint of Spain, who ‘ceased to be a woman, restoring herself to the virile state to her greater glory’, it seemed that some women could only be privileged with a man’s praise if safely stripped of their femininity.
²⁸
Queen Elizabeth would work the same prejudices with her heart-and-stomach-of-a-king wartime rhetoric. It was made clear by the priests who wrote about them that these women were not typical. They were temporary aberrations in a patriarchal world and only impressive because, like Dorothy Lawson, their ‘masculine spirit’ had been inflamed by ‘divine fire’.
²⁹

If the thought of a divinely administered shot of testosterone was one way for a man to bestow acceptance upon a recusant woman, often it was better for the woman to go the other way: to make a great show of her femininity and play up to the Pauline stereotype. ‘Oh! put up your swords!’ cried Eleanor’s eleven-year-old adopted daughter Frances, when pursuivants crossed the family threshold, ‘or else my mother will die, for she cannot endure to see a naked sword.’
At the sight of the little girl and her swooning ‘mother’ (who could have been Eleanor or Anne impersonating Eleanor), the men were momentarily abashed and under the guise of fetching some wine, off trotted Frances to see the priests safely hidden.
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Distraction, delay and feminine outrage were deployed on another occasion when Anne accused a pursuivant of indecorum. ‘Do you think it right and proper that you should be admitted to a widow’s house before she or her servants or children are out of bed? Why this lack of good manners,’ she enquired, ‘why come so early?’ Breakfast and a bribe could not prevent a thorough search of the house, but in those vital seconds Garnet, Southwell, three other Jesuits, two secular priests ‘and all other signs of our religion’ were stowed away.
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Not all women succeeded in hiding behind feminine modesty. When the wife of Mr Bentley of Little Oakley, Northamptonshire, stayed in bed during a raid in 1595, the pursuivants searched her bedchamber and found ‘near the bed’ a small coffer containing a ‘chalice of silver, a crucifix of jet, a surplice, a Mass book, and divers other vain things belonging thereto’. Mr Bentley was promptly declared a ‘true prisoner’ and bound by a one thousand-pound recognisance to present himself at the sign of the Swan in Kettering the following morning.
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The husband was punished for the contents of his wife’s bedchamber because he was their legal owner. Upon marriage, he assumed her property and, so it was commonly believed, responsibility for her conduct. Such inequality in the law gave a recusant wife a degree of immunity from prosecution. Elizabeth Moninge of Kent, questioned in 1591 about her refusal to go to church, claimed that ‘as a wife under subjection, she had no ability to give an answer’.

There seemed little point in going to the trouble of securing indictments and convictions for recusant wives if there could be no pecuniary pain or, indeed, no financial reward for the state. Some women, especially the poor, were imprisoned. Of the twenty-five recusant prisoners in Ousebridge gaol in York in 1598, eleven were women. But this was not considered viable in the long term as few female prisoners could afford the upkeep.

In 1593, Parliament tried to solve the problem of the recusant wife by making her husband pay for her nonconformity, but it was not a popular measure – not least because some members feared for their own purses – and despite an initial flurry of prosecutions, there
remained a general awkwardness at state intrusion of family life. Even in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, there would be ‘much dispute’ and dilatoriness in Parliament over the question of a husband’s exact liability.
³³

Of course, not all wives were safe and not all women were wives. Spinsters and widows could own property and were theoretically liable for prosecution. In practice, however, a great many of them also seemed to slip through the net. Eleanor had her widow’s jointure, a portion of the Brooksby estate in Leicestershire, while Anne was, for a time, cash rich, her brother Henry having ‘dealt very bountifully with her’ just before his death. She could also draw on an allowance from her father (twenty pounds a year) and, soon, the ‘great plenty of wealth’ bequeathed by her grandmother.
³⁴
We know this because Sir Thomas Tresham wrote about it in a letter to his wife, detailing a financial dispute he was having with Anne. It is unlikely that the authorities charged with collecting recusancy fines knew much about it. Indeed, only in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot and only after torture would one of Anne’s servants admit that he had heard that ‘she had a stock of money of some five hundred pounds and an annuity out of Leicestershire by the death of her grandmother.’
³⁵

The crisis of the Gunpowder Plot would also lead to the revelation that Anne had donated what seems to have been a substantial part of her fortune to the Jesuit mission. Indeed, because the Society’s rules forbade the mission from having a regular source of income, Anne seems to have handled the money herself, parcelling it out in loans and investments and giving the incoming annuities as alms. There is a vague reference to these investments in an intercepted letter from Garnet to Anne that under normal circumstances he would never have risked writing.
³⁶
The point here is that with no obvious fixed assets and no neat paper trail linking Anne to her money, it was very difficult for the authorities to assess her wealth, let alone get their hands on it.

Tracing the sisters was almost as challenging. Both used aliases: Anne was sometimes Mistress Perkins and Eleanor, in homage to her late husband, was Mrs Edwards. Independent women, if they had the means and the stamina, could live peripatetically, moving their households and crossing counties whenever they sensed danger. When, in 1592, Eleanor (‘Mrs Elizabeth Brookesbye
alias
Edwards’ of the parish
of Tanworth) was presented in Warwickshire as ‘a most wilful and seditious recusant’, she ought to have appeared at the county assizes for judgement. Instead, a note was added that she had ‘removed from thence: it is thought she is gone into Leicestershire’.
³⁷

Even with very little notice, recusants with good contacts and deep pockets could often make good their escape. In 1588 the Sheriff of Leicestershire admitted that some of those he had been ordered to detain had ‘removed & gone from their habitations before the coming of the sheriff his men & officers (though with great secrecy & speed they were sent)’. He reported that most of the women ‘rest unapprehended until your honours’ pleasures be further known’. The Sheriff of Cambridge and Huntingdon, responding to the same command, admitted that he ‘durst not presume to apprehend’ the women without further direction.
³⁸
It was no ordinary year, 1588, and yet even at that time of heightened security, the thought of dragging women away from their families made some officials squeamish.