God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (32 page)

There could have been few better places in England for Frances to prepare for her vocation. Under the influence of Garnet, the son of a grammar schoolmaster, and Eleanor, who raised her ‘as her own daughter’, Frances was

taught to say her prayers, then instructed in the Catholic religion and admitted to be present at the exercises thereof, for this was a very Catholic house. As she grew in years, so did she in the constant profession of her religion.
⁴⁵

Eleanor’s grandson, Edward Thimelby
alias
Ashby (possibly after Great Ashby), who went on to the Jesuit colleges at St Omer and Rome, similarly recalled that Eleanor ‘took care that I should be instructed in the Catholic faith’.
⁴⁶
This was recognisably the same faith that the old Lord Vaux had learned as a boy. It involved the familiar rote prayers and the commandments of God and the Church. But it was also something different: a faith regenerated by initiatives that were imaginative, combative and exciting. The rosary, for example, that traditional, seemingly benign devotion, became, after Henry Garnet’s ‘repackaging’ in
The Societie of the Rosary
,
^fn15
a pedagogical instrument for Counter-Reformation spirituality, a worldwide confraternity of mutual charity and, in its special veneration of a
militant Virgin mother (in implicit competition with the temporal Virgin Queen, whose children never uttered ‘any other
Ave
than for her name’), a potent symbol of Catholic defiance.
⁴⁷

Another Catholic house in another part of the country might have had a very different concept of the faith and how it should be preserved and taught. But the Vaux house radiated apostolic activity. Whether as a centre for the Mass, a theatre for exorcism, a shrine for green relics or a haven for a meditative and prayerful lifestyle, it evolved with its guests, reflecting their priorities, preoccupations and proselytising zeal.

One guest, in particular, took over their lives. If the ‘Garnetian Academy’ could have been sited anywhere in England, it was at Anne and Eleanor’s house. The Jesuit superior’s physical presence made it a magnet for lay folk and clergymen. People knew that confessions would be heard there and the sacraments given. Thomas Bates, for example, a future gunpowder plotter, was cited for taking ‘a man child’ to the Warwickshire house in 1592, presumably for baptism.
⁴⁸
Messengers rode in with instructions from Rome and bulletins from the scaffold. Nicholas Owen set off for the shires with his toolkit; Richard Fulwood returned from Gravesend with a nod or grim headshake. Coaches rolled in on holy days for masses and music. Pedlars and gentlemen pitched up and swapped their disguises for vestments – young priests, old Marians, Jesuits flocking to their superior for succour and advice. ‘The place of my residence is like a little college, never without four or five,’ Garnet informed Aquaviva. ‘We were yesterday five of our own family, two being driven unto me for fear; and continual resort is of others unto me.’
⁴⁹

Anne and Eleanor welcomed and fed them all, seeing to their health, their horses, their provisions, massing equipment and laundry. And ‘since both lay people and priests come in such numbers to see us,’ wrote Garnet, ‘they are compelled to stay some period of time: it is not safe for them to leave immediately, since constant arrivals and departures would be observed by the heretics.’
⁵⁰

Security was an unending concern. Parish constables and village gossips could be a fatal nuisance. Eleanor became ‘Mrs Edwards’ and Anne was ‘Mistress Perkins’, sometimes the sister, sometimes just a kinswoman of Mr Walley, or Roberts, or Farmer, or whichever name
Garnet was using at the time. His true identity and location were known to ‘very few persons who could be thoroughly trusted’, Oswald Tesimond, S.J., recalled. The hidden informer haunted their dreams, for they knew that the devil could infiltrate even pious homes. ‘A pox on you all!’ poor possessed Sara Williams had shouted at Hackney, ‘I will cause you all to be taken & hanged.’ Robert Southwell warned mistresses with servants to ‘see that they lie not out in the nights, but … know what becometh of them’. Sensible advice, since the devil had vowed to revisit Sara ‘in the form of a tall man’ and ‘now & then tempt her, sometime with money’.
⁵¹

Some of Anne and Eleanor’s guests were a pleasure. Everyone seemed to love Robert Southwell, who was ‘so wise and good, gentle and loveable’. Also Edward Oldcorne
alias
Hall, the Jesuit who came to the Midlands soon after landing with John Gerard in Armada year. This straight-talking, no-nonsense Yorkshireman was as comfortable in a party of demobbed sailors, ‘roughs that they were’, as he was with Dorothy Habington, the spiky mistress of Hindlip, near Worcester. Indeed, he succeeded where Garnet and others had failed: the lady was converted, Hindlip was peppered with priest-holes and soon resembled, in Gerard’s words, ‘one of our houses in some foreign country – so many Catholics flocked there to receive the sacraments, or to hear him preach or to get his advice’. For the next sixteen years, Oldcorne used Hindlip to spearhead the mission in Worcestershire and the west of England. ‘It was his work,’ wrote Gerard, ‘to bring many to the faith in this and neighbouring counties, to support the wavering and lift up the fallen, and to station priests in many places.’
⁵²
It was a pattern that Garnet hoped to replicate throughout the country.

Oldcorne, like Southwell, was born in 1561, and was younger than Eleanor, and older than Anne, by about a year. Many of the priests coming off the boats were younger. During the 1586 Hackney exorcism, the devil in Sara Williams had scoffed at the ‘little boy in the surplice’. Harsnett called them ‘our puny exorcists’. Edward Coke would label them ‘boy priests’.
⁵³
Garnet was only thirty-three when he became the Jesuit superior. ‘Hoary senses,’ wrote Southwell, ‘are often couched under green locks and some are riper in the spring than others in the autumn of their age.’
⁵⁴
There were still Marian veterans around – ‘one Hales, a very old massing priest’, performed
marriages and baptisms in Warwickshire and ‘resorted commonly to Mrs Brooksby’ in 1592
^fn16
55
– but the mission was a young man’s game:

Those who purpose to come to this country and to work profitably therein must bring along with them vigorous souls and mortified bodies. They must forego all pleasure and renounce every game but that of football, which is made up of pushes and kicks and requires constant effort unless one would be trampled under foot; and in this game they have to risk their lives in order to save souls. On my return to England I found that it was one huge prison for all who, like us, profess the true faith.

So wrote John Pibush, a Rheims-educated Yorkshireman, who had come to Garnet after landing in 1589. He was a secular priest, not a Jesuit, but Garnet ‘supplied his wants and recommended him to certain friends’. In July 1593, Pibush was captured at Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire. He endured more than seven years in prison before writing this letter to Garnet, thanking him for his continued support and asking him to convey his gratitude to ‘good Mrs Anne’ for her ‘golden token’. Despite Garnet’s efforts to improve the reception and transfer of seminarians in England, Pibush’s experience was not uncommon. ‘The only keepsakes I can send you,’ he wrote, are ‘a phial full of bitter smoke, a bundle of filth, lice and fleas.’ He was executed on 18 February 1601, his constitution ‘shattered’ and his appearance ‘so changed’ that none of his friends could recognise him. Before his death, he sent Anne ‘a picture which a priest sent me’. Her reaction upon its receipt, and to the news of his death, is nowhere recorded.
⁵⁶

The previous year, another secular priest, the 26-year-old Thomas Hunt
alias
Benstead, to whom Garnet had also given succour, both before and after his escape from Wisbech prison, was rearrested and executed. ‘He hath found a better place,’ Garnet wrote, ‘he was our very friend.’
⁵⁷
Anne and Eleanor must surely have felt protective towards their young lodgers, especially the ‘prentices’, like tennis-loving Thomas Strange, who stayed with them before crossing over
for training.
⁵⁸
It must have been nerve-shattering to wave them off, knowing that they might not fare well.

Impulsive adventurers like John Gerard, who visited ‘several times in the course of the year’, probably caused as many sleepless nights as Thomas Lister, a brilliant theologian, but rotten missionary, whose claustrophobia, headaches, mood swings and multiple neuroses made him unsuited to a life in hiding.
⁵⁹
Garnet stipulated that incoming priests have ‘good health’, but there was not much he could do about Lister’s fear of priest-holes beyond taking him in himself and absorbing the risk (along with the priest’s incessant complaints). Nor could he prevent Oldcorne’s throat cancer (although a trip to St Winifred’s Well in Wales reputedly cured it), or Pibush’s jaundice, or the fevered delusions that would transform Thomas Stanney, a benign guest in 1591, into a dagger-wielding lunatic fourteen years later.
⁶⁰

The sisters extended their hospitality to so many others. Two fugitive Portuguese Jesuits, who had survived ‘in woods off roots and such things as they could get’, would stay for ‘several months’ in 1602.
⁶¹
Robert Persons’ octogenarian mother spent much of the 1590s in their care. ‘We are constrained to shift often dwelling,’ Garnet would report in the spring of 1598, ‘and to have diverse houses at once and also to keep diverse houses at those times when we run away, for we cannot remove the old woman so often.’ Garnet also assumed responsibility for Persons’ nephew, ‘a little wry-necked boy’, even though his distinctive appearance could have brought unwelcome attention to the house.
⁶²

The Jesuit superior was no easy guest himself. Upon his modest shoulders rested the fate of the Jesuit priests in England, as well, unofficially, as many non-Jesuits. He was overburdened, overworked and taxed by ‘various troublesome affairs’. His writings reveal countless pastoral and moral concerns – about admissions to the Society, the propriety of bribes, the seizure of shipwrecked property, equivocation, occasional conformity, the illicit printing press, the welfare of Catholic prisoners, missionary circuits, frictions within the Catholic community and – always – issues over funding: ‘Whatever I have to give, I give; when I don’t give, it is because I have not got it to give, not because I do not want to give it,’ he wrote in exasperation in April 1596. He was ‘tortured in mind’ by problem priests like Lister and, at times of extraordinary stress, bleak about the future: ‘We are men. We can fail. And I do not know whether we stand or fall.’
⁶³

For the greater part of Elizabeth’s reign, Garnet’s health stood up well to the rigours of the mission, but when it faltered, as in 1600 for instance, it was noted that ‘the two sisters that he is with have such care of him that he is able to endure such pains as his office requireth’.
⁶⁴
This despite Anne’s ‘chronic’ infirmity and, as shall soon become evident, trials of her own. But there was always music to lift the spirits, especially on the big feast days, when recusant noblemen and ‘many ladies’ would arrive ‘by coach or otherwise’ to hear Garnet, and sometimes also his friend William Byrd, play spiritual motets. Garnet was said to be an ‘exquisite’ musician, especially on the lute, and his singing was ‘so rare & delightful’ that his listeners hailed the voice of an angel.
⁶⁵
This, presumably, was some recompense for the vocal shortcomings of little Frances Burroughs.

Twice a year, nearly every year, the sisters also made their house available for Jesuit meetings. As many of Garnet’s subordinates as could make it would converge, usually in the spring and autumn, to pray, confess and confer. Over a three-day period, they would make a general account of their conscience to their superior and renew their vows. ‘We have sung the canticles of the Lord in a strange land,’ Southwell enthused in 1590, ‘and in the desert we have sucked honey from the rock and oil from the hard stones.’ Gerard was similarly, if more prosaically, uplifted:

I never found anything that did me more good. It braced my soul to meet all the obligations of my life as a Jesuit and meet all the demands made of a priest on the mission. Apart from the consolation I got from renewing my vows, I experienced – after renewing them – a new strength and an ardent and freshened zeal.
⁶⁶

Practical matters were also discussed at these meetings. Garnet briefed his colleagues on the houses that were still safe, those that had been compromised and those that might be won. He imparted new instructions and resolutions from Rome. ‘In mutual exhortation’, the Jesuits planned ways of creating, as well as consolidating, support for the Catholic Church in England. It was then, Garnet wrote, that ‘we forged new weapons for new battles’.
⁶⁷

As edifying as these biannual meetings were for the Jesuits, they were also extremely risky. When Walsingham died in 1590, his espionage
network also expired, but Burghley and his son Robert Cecil ran and funded their own agents and there were always local officials eager to expunge the popish menace from their shires. What better way to achieve this than to catch the Jesuit superior in the act of giving ‘evil instruction’ to a cabal of traitorous priests?