God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (41 page)

One afternoon the following summer, the jilted husband learned that Elizabeth and Norton were going to a play at the Globe theatre in Southwark. (Norton was later at pains to point out that he was not a regular patron of Shakespeare’s playhouse, having only been ‘four or five times in his whole life’.) Ambrose raced over and tried to reclaim his wife. Voices were raised, then fists. ‘God’s wounds,’ Norton reportedly swore, ‘thether he brought her … and from thence he would carry her again away.’ Ambrose claimed that he was held down and assaulted by twelve of Norton’s men, armed with rapiers, daggers, pistols and other weapons. Norton denied ‘the pretended misdemeanour and riot’, insisting that he had only touched Ambrose’s wrist to prevent him from drawing his own dagger.
¹⁶

Elizabeth, apparently in ‘great fear and perplexity’, was spirited away and little more is heard of her until almost a decade later when she was at the centre of another affray and another Star Chamber suit. This one involved a broken-down door, some rearranged furniture and an injured landlord. Elizabeth’s ‘near kinsman’ Sir William
Windsor, an old comrade of Ambrose from Flanders, had found her rooms in the same building in St Mary-le-Strand that he and his wife occupied. A contract was signed with Robert Collins, the landlord, and Elizabeth – styling herself ‘Lady Elizabeth Vaux’ – moved in towards the end of January 1620.

She immediately found fault with the lodgings, bedding and furniture and asked the Windsors for help. Collins was duly summoned and he arrived at eleven at night, not happy about being dragged from his cups and, allegedly, somewhat the worse for wear. An argument ensued, with both parties claiming that they had been reasonable and the other ‘uncivil & provoking’. There was, to use Elizabeth’s phrase, ‘some buslinge betwixt them’. Sir William sent Collins away with a box on the ear. The landlord regrouped, allegedly broke down the door, ordered his servants up the stairs with ‘a great fire fork and a pair of tongs made of iron’ and threw a stool at Lady Windsor. Further violence was prevented by a passing constable. Throughout the whole ‘hurly burly and brabble’, Sir William Windsor had been dressed ‘in his pantables and ready to go to bed’.

There is no hint of farce in Collins’ testimony, just a disturbing account of a man set upon by a gang of aristocratic rowdies. Thus: Sir William, refusing to hear the landlord out, felled him with his first blow and punched and kicked him on the ground. Collins found his feet, but Sir William’s ‘confederates, servants and acquaintances’, including Lady Vaux
and
her husband, Ambrose:

did most furiously, fiercely, cruelly, riotously, routously and unlawfully assault [Collins], some of them holding [him] by the arms and body, while other some did in terrible and cruel manner beat, wound and most grievously hurt [him]. And other some of them (at such time as [he] did call and cry out for aid and help to release him and to save him from being murdered) did hold and keep shut the door of the said dining room, not suffering those people, being very many that came to aid … to come into the room.

Apparently Sir William then charged at Collins with ‘a stiletto or pocket dagger’. Collins fended him off with a stool. Sir William drew his sword. Collins parried the thrusts with more furniture until the constable finally came to the rescue.

Elizabeth Vaux pleaded not guilty to the charges and denied having seen Windsor box Collins’ ear, even though Windsor confessed it. She sounds like a different person to the widow cowering at the Globe a decade earlier.
¹⁷
The case also suggests that her estrangement from Ambrose – such as it was – had ended. Although Collins named Ambrose in his bill, he gave no particular details and there is no deposition from Ambrose on file. Sir William maintained that ‘there was no other person with him but his own lady and the said Lady Vaux’ and their servants. Someone was lying, but even if it was Collins, it is telling that he chose to cite Ambrose. London parishes were close communities. The main actors in the scene all belonged to St Mary-le-Strand and it was there, five years later, on 25 April 1626, that Ambrose was buried. It is not known how he died.

As early as 1593, Sir Thomas Tresham had esteemed his nephew ‘a world’s wonder for assy reprobateness’.
¹⁸
If a satirical verse penned by Henry Shirley in the early seventeenth century is anything to go by, the intervening years had not improved Ambrose’s reputation or, indeed, his physique.

The Battle

The combatants:

Sir Ambrose Vaux, knight, and Glascott the bailey of South-wark.

The place:

the Rule of the Kings Bench.

No amorous style affects my pen,

For why? I write of fighting men:

The bloody story of a fight

Betwixt a bailiff and a knight.

Let him that therefore writes the story

Of Warwick’s Guy or Bevis’ glory,

Sir Tristram’s hurts and Lancelot’s wounds,

Or otters hunted with great hounds,

Confess the story doth excel

With best of any I can tell,

Who was a witness of the fray

Which thus my muse ’gins to display.

Sir Ambrose strooke the first great blow,

Which did the bailiff overthrow,

That he lay tumbling in the dirt,

From which he took his greatest hurt,

Save that the knight away did tear

A handful of the varlet’s hair.

The knight for teen,
^fn2
the knave for fear

With roaring did their chopses tear,

Whilst all the women loud did cry:

‘Sir Ambrose let the villain die!’

The bailiff then cried out for help,

With that another marshal’s whelp

Did from his foe’s devouring paws

All in the dirt his fellow draws.

The knight not with all this content,

A scornful kick at Glascott sent,

But then the dirt in which he rolled

(I grieve at what must now be told)

So slippery was, in all our sight

Upon his back fell down the knight,

And being much enraged thereat,

Upon his feet in rage he gatt

And forth his sturdy corpes he launches

With quivering thighs and quaging
^fn3
paunches.

About the dump the bailiff ran

And now the worst of all began.

The knight no longer could pursue,

Too well his bounds the bailiff knew,

But had he in his clutches come,

Methinks I see what martyrdom

The women and the knight had made

On him that now no longer stayed,

But home returned, not shamed to be

Sore kicked by true nobility.
¹⁹

So is the life of our anti-hero just an amusing sideshow, a futile and somewhat grotesque diversion from the main story? Or does it highlight the tragic consequences of recusancy for ‘right younger brothers’ and ‘noddy nephews’ and, indeed, for any ‘untoward and giddy-headed young man’ of the time? The phrases are Tresham’s. He early spotted the ‘unskill and weakness in worldly drifts of Ambrose Vaux’.
²⁰
It is not something that can be blamed on the environment. Ambrose’s only real achievement was his knighthood, an honorific reward for venturing to the Holy Land. As the gift of a Roman Catholic order, it underwhelmed in Protestant England. His wife’s lawyers refused to recognise it, insisting that Ambrose was ‘but an esquire & no knight’.
²¹

If Ambrose’s undoubted energy and courage (proven in war, travel, even in his appetite for a brawl) could have been channelled more productively, if he had met with opportunities rather than obstacles and received proper parental guidance, he might have thrived, might – just – have redeemed himself. Or not. Ambrose Vaux was a brigand and a debtor, a prisoner and a pilgrim, a soldier and a knight. He was also a recusant and if every trait in his character pointed to failure, his recusancy sealed his doom.

^fn1
When the men came home, their association caused great concern, but investigation revealed little more than the donning of coloured ribbons, the adoption of silly nicknames and a copious amount of drinking. ‘What mischief may lurk under this mask God knows,’ John Chamberlain wrote from London on 6 December 1623, ‘but sure they were very confident and presumed much of themselves to carry it so openly.’ According to Chamberlain, one fraternity called themselves ‘Titere-tu’.
Brewer’s Handbook
reveals that Tityre Tus (a pluralised version of the opening two words of Virgil’s first
Eclogue
) was ‘the name assumed in the seventeenth century by a clique of young blades of the better class, whose delight was to break windows, upset sedan-chairs, molest quiet citizens, and rudely caress pretty women in the streets at night-time’. (PRO SP 14/155, ff. 31v–32r; Brewer,
The Reader’s Handbook
, 1880, p. 1011)

^fn2
teen
: annoyance.

^fn3
quaging
: soft, flabby, wobbling.

17

Long John with the Little Beard

We last saw John Gerard in the Clink. It was the summer of 1594 and he had not yet been tortured. Indeed, ‘for a while’, he had ‘a quiet and pleasant time’ in prison. Compared to the noisy, foetid Counter, the Clink was ‘paradise’ – even if it shared space on the South Bank with brothels, bear pits, gambling dens and the only marginally more respectable playhouses. Security was extraordinarily lax and at the right price Gerard was able to receive visitors, hear confessions, celebrate the Mass, give the Spiritual Exercises and conduct missionary business. By his own account, he reconciled many people to Rome, including one of his gaolers. ‘The work John does in prison is so profitable that it is hardly possible to believe it,’ Garnet enthused on 17 January 1596.
¹
But John was being watched. A priest in the Clink informed on him in October and when, the following April, the authorities received details about his handling of a packet of letters from overseas, they took him over the river to the Tower of London.

Gerard was shown the warrant for his torture on 14 April 1597.
²
He had denied that the intelligence he had received from abroad was political and he had refused to disclose Garnet’s whereabouts. In his own words, he was led to the torture chamber,

in a kind of solemn procession, the attendants walking ahead with lighted candles. The chamber was underground and dark, particularly near the entrance. It was a vast place and every device and instrument of human torture was there. They pointed out some of them to me and said that I would try them all. Then they asked me again whether I would confess.

‘I cannot,’ I said.

I fell on my knees for a moment’s prayer. Then they took me to a big upright pillar, one of the wooden posts which held the roof of this huge underground chamber. Driven in to the top of it were iron staples for supporting heavy weights. Then they put my wrists into iron gauntlets and ordered me to climb two or three wicker steps. My arms were then lifted up and an iron bar was passed through the rings of one gauntlet, then through the staple and rings of the second gauntlet. This done, they fastened the bar with a pin to prevent it slipping, and then removing the wicker steps one by one from under my feet, they left me hanging by my hands and arms fastened above my head.
³

‘Long John’ Gerard was aptly named, however.
⁴
He was too tall and the earth under him had to be scraped away until his toes hung clear. He turned down a last chance to talk.

But I could hardly utter the words such a gripping pain came over me. It was worst in my chest and belly, my hands and arms. All the blood in my body seemed to rush up into my arms and hands and I thought that blood was oozing out from the ends of my fingers and the pores of my skin. But it was only a sensation caused by my flesh swelling above the irons holding them.