God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (28 page)

The ‘Armada Portrait’ of Elizabeth I shows what happened next. In the picture behind her on the left, the two fleets prepare to engage. In the picture on the right, the storm-struck Armada struggles to return home. The Queen, looking remarkable for fifty-five, taps the Americas on a globe. Her eyebrows are just slightly raised; her dominance is assured. The Spanish were never allowed to touch England’s shore. They were repulsed and dispersed at sea and the relief among the English people was palpable. But someone had to pay for ‘that time of fright and rumour’, and, with few Spaniards to hand,
^fn1
the
Catholics at home inevitably bore the brunt. ‘Our rulers,’ Southwell reported on 31 August, ‘turned their arms from foreign foes against their own sons and with inhuman ferocity vented the hatred they had conceived against the Spaniards on their own fellow citizens.’ Seventeen priests, nine laymen and one woman were executed in the space of three months for alleged religious treasons. They were dragged in horse carts, flanked by a baying mob ‘uttering all manner of harsh and savage abuse’. At the scaffolds, ‘there was an extraordinary concourse of citizens and a crowd surging on all sides’. All the usual courtesies were withdrawn. One priest who tried to address the crowd had a cloth stuffed into his mouth ‘very nearly suffocating him before he was hanged’. Bystanders on the lookout for sympathisers caught a man making the sign of the cross and had him arrested. Another, falling to his knees in prayer, caused ‘a great outcry’ and ‘was hurried off to prison’.
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This, at least, is what Robert Southwell, S.J., reported.

Lord Vaux was spared ‘the enemy’s barbarity’. By 20 February 1589, he was free and sitting in the House of Lords.
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He was allowed to return home to Northamptonshire the following year, but he never really recovered his standing in society. His already fragmented estate had grown ‘lamentable’, two-thirds having been seized in the autumn of 1587 for recovery of arrears.
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By the time he attended the Queen’s next Parliament in 1593, he owed his creditors £2,800 and was forced to present a humiliating petition for a bill to allow him ‘to sell certain lands for the payment of his debts’.
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Having pawned his parliamentary robes, he appeared in the Lords ‘without decent clothes to his back for such an assembly’. He was, he wrote to Burghley (in a letter drafted by Tresham), the ‘infortunatest peer of Parliament for poverty that ever was’.
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Given the chance, would he ever have taken up arms against his countrymen? When he had drawn up an indenture in 1571, it had been a matter of course to include a provision for ransom money in the event of capture while serving ‘in any of the Queen’s warlike affairs’.
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In 1585, though, when he was the Queen’s prisoner, he pledged one hundred marks to the Hoxton missionary fund, but declared himself ‘unable to furnish’ a levy for the Queen’s light horse serving against the Spanish in the Low Countries. (He did, however, offer his lands for review ‘for payment of the money’ and by the following March he had ‘disbursed £50 for the setting forth of horses’).
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He was a
fierce supporter of the mission to change his country’s religion and this was undeniably damaging to the Elizabethan establishment. Yet in signing statements of loyalty and petitions for toleration, and in his attendance (albeit occasional) at Parliament, he also displayed a preference for peace and a desire to effect change from within the system of which he was a part.

He knew people on either side of the Armada divide. One of his trusted servants, Athony (
sic
) Carrington of Harrowden, took the oath of supremacy and marched for the Queen in the eastern division of the Northamptonshire militia only a few months after being convicted of recusancy. The Earl of Arundel, by contrast, prayed in his prison cell for the ‘happy success’ of the Spanish.
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If we are to believe Burghley’s propaganda, Viscount Montague of Cowdray, keen to display familial loyalty, presented his sons and almost two hundred horsemen to Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, announcing his ‘full resolution’ to ‘hazard his life, his children, his lands and his goods’ in her defence. He could not, however, hazard one of his brothers, who had died aboard the
San Mateo
a few days earlier.
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Some very senior Catholic clerics, including Cardinal William Allen, urged the people of England and Ireland to ‘join with the Catholic army’ in the ‘holy war’ against the ‘infamous, deprived, accursed, excommunicate heretic’.
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But Sir Thomas Tresham, who always claimed to speak for his brother-in-law Vaux, indignantly trumpeted his patriotism as if it should never have been in doubt. A government spy writing in 1591 confirmed that the two were ‘accounted very good subjects & great adversaries of the Spanish practises’.
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Against these statements should be weighed the views of Catholics abroad. Some clearly claimed Lord Vaux as a potential, if not yet actual, collaborator. In 1571, he had reportedly been ‘well disposed’ to the Ridolfi Plot ‘and ready to act’. In 1586, the year of the Babington Plot, he had appeared in ‘a catalogue of such men in England as the papistical fugitives make account to be assured if any foreign power should come to invade this realm’.
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And so again, on the eve of the Armada, ‘Lord Vaux of Harrowden, a good Catholic, now a prisoner in the Fleet’, was named a ‘friend’ of Philip II. Considering he had not been in the Fleet since 1583, the accuracy of the report is questionable, but there is no mistaking the sentiments of its Scottish author. In a reference to Queen Elizabeth’s imprisonment in her sister Mary’s reign, he comments: ‘I
wish to God they had burnt her then, as she deserved, with the rest of the heretics who were justly executed. If this had been done we should be living now in peace and quietness.’

The author, who also advised where the Armada should land (Kirkcudbright) and announced his willingness to die ‘in defence of the Catholic faith under the protection of his Majesty’, clearly had strong views.
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What the Privy Council did not know, and in the absence of quantitative data could not know, was how many Englishmen secretly shared them. We will never know Lord Vaux’s ultimate loyalty because it was never, ultimately, tried. He and his friends were immobilised before the Armada got anywhere near the English Channel. Tresham complained bitterly. There was, nevertheless, some justification in his accusers’ assertion that ‘while we lived her Majesty should not be in security, nor the realm freed from invasion’.
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The Spaniards sailing aboard the
Rosario
had been told to expect support from at least a third of England’s population.
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Elizabeth’s Privy Council had been ‘certain’ that an invasion would ‘never’ have been attempted, ‘but upon hope’ of internal assistance. It may very well have been a false hope, built on a house of cards by exiles desperate to see the old faith restored at home, but for as long as it was held and acted upon by backers powerful enough to do damage, Vaux, Tresham and the rest, whether ‘faithfullest true English subjects’ or not, were indeed a security risk.

There was no such thing as a random occurrence in the sixteenth century. Divine will determined all. God decided where to quake the earth and where to beam his sunshine. And so, in the minds of most contemporaries, England had repulsed the Spanish fleet, not because of strategy, supplies, seamen, ships or shot, not even because the Armada had failed to ‘join hands’ with Parma’s expeditionary force. England emerged victorious because God had willed it. In the words sung at the thanksgiving service held at St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘He made the winds and waters rise / to scatter all mine enemies.’
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Even messianic Philip, usually so sure of his status as the special one, was momentarily confounded by the mysteries of God’s will.

In England, commemorative medals were struck and pithy mottoes captured England’s gloating spirit of triumph: ‘God blew and they were scattered’; ‘It came, it saw, it fled.’ The post-Reformation calendar gained a red-letter day – Armada Day – some recompense for all those lost saints’ days. In pulpits all over the country ministers rhapsodised
over ‘special providences’ (they could hardly call them miracles) and God’s covenant with the children of England. Not only had Englishmen defeated Spaniards, but the true Church had triumphed over the false, Christ over Antichrist and freedom over tyranny. Elizabeth I was hailed as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen who ‘brought up, even under her wing, a nation that was almost begotten and born under her, that never shouted any other
Ave
than for her name’.
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So the myth was forged, the Protestant identity of the nation was reinforced and Vaux, Tresham and their friends were left to ponder quite how they and their ‘true English hearts’ were to fit into this predestined, Protestant version of English history.
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The year 1588 might indeed have been the ‘climacterical year’ presaged by the astronomers, but England’s victory was neither inevitable nor conclusive.
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The fleet of 1588 has come down to us as
the
Spanish Armada, but Philip II would send two further (failed) fleets against Elizabeth I and there were rumours of more. The war would continue for fifteen expensive years and at every whisper of invasion, every ‘time of fright and rumour’, the screw would be turned on the ‘obstinate and noted’ Catholics of England. Ely would become a ‘familiar prison’ for Thomas Tresham. Ordered there again in March 1590 amid renewed fears of invasion, he penned a heartfelt lament to Archbishop Whitgift: ‘We are disgraced, defaced, confined from our native countries, imprisoned, impoverished, forsaken of friends, triumphed upon by foes; scorned of all men.’
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Spanish aggression in France the following year prompted an inflammatory proclamation ordering householders to be specially vigilant against the priests and papists, who were spreading ‘treasons in the bowels of our Realm’.
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Another scare in 1593 called for another measure: the ‘statute of confinement’, which forbade all recusants over the age of sixteen from travelling beyond five miles of their homes without a licence. It was adhered to by some more than others: Lady Tresham would address a letter to her niece Merill Vaux on 8 May 1593, ‘assuring myself that you stir not above five miles from Irthlingborough, whatsoever your mother dareth or doeth’.
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There was a gulf between the law and its enforcement. The abstract language of anti-popery nearly always exceeded the lived experience of anti-Catholicism and there were lulls when international pressures would relax and life might seem tolerable. Nevertheless, it must have
been profoundly alienating and psychologically draining to be told, at every critical juncture, that one was an ‘unnatural subject’ and ‘bad member’ of the commonwealth. Tresham likened it to being ‘drenched in a sea of shameless slanders’ and foretold that for as long as the hostilities between England and Spain continued, there would be no end to the recusants’ ‘quotidian kind of imprisonment’.
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It would prove, for many, a more accurate prophecy than that of ‘Regiomontanus’, the fifteenth-century astronomer of Königsberg.

Henry Garnet was circumspect over the summer of 1588. He wrote to Rome from London on 9 June and again on 11 July, but knowing that Southwell was reporting ‘the still unfinished story of what wickedness is being planned against us’, he resolved to ‘write of pleasant things instead’. In late July, he spent ten days at Elizabeth Beaumont’s bedside and thereafter seems to have toured the Midlands. By the end of October, he was back in London, anxiously awaiting the arrival of two young Jesuits from Rome. ‘Unless we have urgent business,’ he wrote, ‘we dare not go about the city save at night.’
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If Anne and Eleanor were with Garnet in London, it is not recorded. All that is known is that they were no longer at Great Ashby. On 12 February 1588, the Sheriff of Leicestershire, William Cave, wrote to the Privy Council admitting that he had failed to detain all the ‘undutiful’ recusants of the shire. ‘Mrs Helline Brookesbye, widow’ and six of her servants had ‘fled from Ashby and escaped apprehension’. Cave was at pains to point out that his officers had operated ‘with great secrecy & speed’. If he suspected his fellow commissioner Henry Beaumont of tipping off his nieces, he did not inform the Council. But he certainly regretted their flight. It was not common to make presentments to the Privy Council of children under the age of sixteen, but Sheriff Cave did just that, citing Eleanor’s son William (‘about the age of x years’) and daughter Mary (‘about the age of viii years’), as well as a fourteen-year-old boy called William Hutchinson. ‘These are of Mrs Brooksby’s household also,’ he informed the Council, ‘where these youths receive evil instruction as we fear.’ They had also fled, ‘whereby,’ the Sheriff concluded, ‘we are confirmed in opinion that it is most dangerous to the state where there is a recusant mistress’.
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