God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (60 page)

By 1616 she was living at Boughton, a manor on the Vaux estate (not to be confused with Boughton House, the Montagu seat near Kettering). There were tragedies (William’s disgrace after a street killing in Madrid; Mary’s death). There were triumphs (Edward’s command of the English regiment serving under the Spanish banner in Flanders;
^fn3
Joyce’s appointment as mother superior of the ‘English Ladies’ in Perugia). And there were events that must have elicited mixed feelings. If Eliza allowed herself to feel the proud matriarch when Edward took his seat in the House of Lords on 19 February 1624, she was, presumably, the proud, bitter, recusant matriarch when, after just two more sittings, he had to withdraw for refusing the oath of allegiance. Edward did not attend James’s Parliament again.
²⁰

The Vauxes also experienced the odd clash such as sometimes happened in counties like Northamptonshire where prominent recusants and Puritans lived side by side. On 31 October 1625, Richard Knightley of Fawsley, an outspoken Puritan, turned up at Boughton
with a posse of men and a mind to ‘disarm’ the house.
²¹
This was all above board, indeed ‘according to his Majesty’s pleasure’. Although recusants had to contribute to the local musters (the Vauxes always provided a fully armed and mounted soldier), they were not allowed to store weapons at home, a humiliation that was exacerbated by a 1619 directive that made them bear the cost of repairing weapons that had gone rusty in the hold of petty officialdom.
²²

Feelings ran high in 1625. Local Puritans resented Edward’s martial swagger and he, having recently commanded thousands in Flanders field, baulked at the withdrawal of power and trust that came with the renewal of Anglo-Spanish hostilities. The real problems began when Knightley and his fellow deputy lieutenants, having found no ‘martial munitions, arms and weapons’ in the main house, moved on to the outhouses and farm. Edward’s volatile younger brother, William (he of the Madrid murder), went with them. ‘They could not be worse dealt withal,’ he snarled, ‘unless they should cut their throats’, and ‘with an oath’ he wished ‘it were come to that pass’. Knightley reproved William for his bad language and was repaid with further expletives.

Back at the house, Knightley effectively brought out the swearing box, citing the 1624 statute (21 Jac. I, c. 20), which prescribed a shilling an oath. The Vauxes refused to pay. Knightley ordered the constables to seize the equivalent value in goods. Edward warned him that ‘if he found him in another place he would call him to a reckoning for this’.

‘You know where I dwell,’ said Knightley.

The officials made to leave. ‘Now you have done your office you may be gone,’ said Edward, shoving Knightley out of the hall. Knightley insisted he would only go when he was ready. Edward exploded, ‘gave him a good blow on the face’ and, in the ensuing fracas, struck down one of Knightley’s servants with a cudgel. The sight of blood sent the officials packing, but they soon filed a report insisting that the Vauxes be held to account, lest ‘dangerous encouragement’ be given ‘to such as we find are too daring and insolent already’.

The case went before the King (Charles I) in Council and not even Edward’s ‘prepared friends’ could prevent an order to proceed to trial. As Edward left the room, he offloaded ‘very intemperate words’ on one of Knightley’s witnesses and was promptly sent, with William,
to the Fleet. The brothers endured the briefest, if frostiest, of prison spells and the following February, in order to gain the privilege of Parliament and have the case dropped, Edward swallowed the oath of allegiance. Knightley was made sheriff, which was not at all to his liking as it prevented him from promoting Puritan interests in the House of Commons. He returned to the county in a sulk and spent Boxing Day thinking up ways of flushing out every ‘little papist’ in the shire.

Eliza died not long afterwards. Her passing went unrecorded, her grave is unmarked. The last extant reference to her is a bequest from Lady Fermor, whose will was drawn up in August 1625, signed in April 1627 and proved two years later. She left Eliza a pair of narrow silver boxes engraved with elephant heads. One was for her treacle, the other for ‘metridate’ – both valued for their medicinal properties.
^fn4
It conjures a rather touching last scene: Eliza, relaxed at home, comparing household remedies with her friend.
²³

Charles I might have wished that he had let the Catholics keep a few more weapons, for in the Civil War many would raise them under his standard. Edward, fourth Lord Vaux, was ‘beyond sea’ for much of the time and played no great part in those great events, though Charles would bowl on his green while a prisoner in Northamptonshire in 1647. The Parliamentarians registered Vaux a papist (though not a ‘delinquent’ Royalist) and sequestered his estate.
²⁴
It was restored with the Stuart monarchy and Edward died the following year, on 8 September 1661, five years before the Great Fire of London, an accident that was, like ‘every evil that occurs’, blamed on the Catholics.
²⁵

Edward had only been seventeen at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, but it affected him deeply. He had been on the cusp of marrying the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Howard, but her father, the Lord Chamberlain who investigated and tried the conspirators, took fright and married her off to a Puritan widower three times her age.
²⁶
William
Knollys, who later became Earl of Banbury, may have been more Malvolio than eminence those days (he was known as ‘parti-beard’ for his not entirely successful attempt to dye his beard
²⁷
), but he was good to his young bride and tolerated both her Catholicism and her open affair with Edward Vaux.
²⁸
He stood by ‘my Bessy’ when, on 10 April 1627, she gave birth to a boy, Edward, who was almost certainly named after his father.
²⁹
Four years later, he visited his wife at Harrowden Hall after she was delivered of another baby, Nicholas, who had a Catholic baptism and was nursed for fifteen months at the Vaux seat. On 25 May 1632, at the age of eighty-seven, William Knollys, Earl of Banbury, died. Within six weeks, Edward and Elizabeth had legitimised their relationship.
³⁰
It had taken them twenty-seven years.

The star-crossed lovers were admired for their recusancy, but the Catholic Church could hardly condone the fornication of the one and the adultery of the other. Even after their marriage, Edward was known in more hostile priestly circles as the man ‘who kept another man’s wife so publicly even to the scandal of our religion’.
³¹
Another painful consequence of the affair was the status of their surviving son, Nicholas. Elizabeth would argue just before her death in 1658 that ‘my son [is] as worthy, though a mother see it, as any of his age to honour that title that descent has bequeathed him’.
³²
But Nicholas’s doubtful paternity meant that he was never regarded wholly as a Knollys or a Vaux. After the murder of his brother ‘in a quarrel’ on the road between Calais and Gravelines in 1645 (no details survive
³³
), Nicholas was styled third Earl of Banbury and, in June 1660, sat in the House of Lords. His legitimacy was questioned, however, and he was not summoned back. Lord Vaux had not helped in this respect, having settled his estate in October 1646 on ‘the Right Honourable Nicholas, now Earl of Banbury, son of the said Countess of Banbury, heretofore called Nicholas Vaux’.
³⁴

Nicholas made various efforts to regain his seat. In 1665, he accosted the Duke of York in his carriage and pulled his leg ‘so hard that he had almost drawn off his shoe’, but he was never readmitted to the Lords.
³⁵
His son, Charles (1662–1740), who sold Harrowden Hall in 1694, was also disappointed and another attempt in the early nineteenth century led to a judgment that the heirs of Nicholas were ‘not entitled’ to the Earldom of Banbury. It was an important ruling and, for some, a ‘gross and palpable injustice’, since before Nicholas’s exclusion, the
law had presumed that the father of a child born in wedlock was the mother’s husband, irrespective of adultery. Unless there was proof of divorce, impotence or absence from the realm at the time of conception, the law had hitherto cleaved to the proverb ‘my cow, my calf’.
³⁶

Nicholas could not, of course, inherit the Vaux title either, though he received the bulk of the estate in 1646. In his will of 25 April 1661, Edward styled the son he could not claim ‘the Earl of Banbury’ and left him a token ten pounds to pay for mourning clothes.
³⁷
Upon Edward’s death on 8 September 1661, the title passed to his surviving brother, Henry, who lived a quiet single life in Suffolk and died with no heirs on 20 September 1663.
³⁸
The barony fell into abeyance for 175 years.

During that period, ‘test acts’ were passed making the reception of Anglican communion and the abjuration of key Catholic tenets (including transubstantiation) a precondition of public employment. Catholics endured the Popish Plot of Titus Oates, the Exclusion Crisis and the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688–9 when the Catholic King, James II, was overthrown by his Dutch Protestant son-in-law. They were made to pay double land tax and were barred from buying or inheriting property. They witnessed the raising of those august pillars of the British constitution: the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), both steeped in anti-popery. But they also sailed into the calmer waters of the ‘long eighteenth century’, where sensibilities shifted, priorities changed and, gradually, restrictions were lifted until, in 1829, they found a haven of sorts in the Catholic Relief Act. The issue of emancipation may have been forced upon a reluctant Parliament by the vigorous campaign of the Irish lawyer, Daniel O’Connell, but its acceptance was a sign of the times. When, in 1834, the Palace of Westminster was destroyed by accidental fire, Catholics were not automatically blamed as they had been in 1666.

By 12 March 1838, when the Vaux barony was revived in favour of the descendants of Eliza’s eldest daughter, Mary, Catholics could lawfully hear Mass and receive priests. They were entitled to join the army, work for the government, serve the court, practise law, teach, acquire land, sit in Parliament and vote. They were no longer fined for not going to church. They were no longer recusants, even if they were still frequently denounced as papists, or worse, and even if a Catholic could not (and still cannot) inherit the throne.

When, in 1962, Peter Hubert Gordon (Fr Gabriel) Gilbey, ninth Baron Vaux of Harrowden, became the first Benedictine monk since 1559 to address the House of Lords, references to the past were light and congratulations hearty. ‘I think historically,’ the Bishop of London said in response to Vaux’s maiden speech,

it may be of some comfort to him to know that my predecessors in office were never able to exercise any authority over his predecessors in the Community of which he is now a member … We welcome in this House a voice, which, in a sense, has been silent for 400 years, and we hope that we shall hear more of that voice.
³⁹

There was, however, one discordant note: a letter, marked ‘confidential’, handed to Lord Vaux by an attendant. Scribbled in black ink on lined paper, the words have no greeting or signature:

I am surprised you are thinking

becoming a monk

The RCs are practically heathen

company

The pope is only a figurehead in

fact a very old man and a nonentity

The previous pope died an agonizing

death knowing the scheming that went

on to start the last war

Fancy a Gilbey becoming a monk

My advice is please reconsider.
⁴⁰

Almost fifty years later, the first state visit of a Pope to the United Kingdom – that of Benedict XVI in September 2010 – was a happy and fruitful occasion. On 13 March 2013, his successor, Pope Francis, became the first Jesuit Bishop of Rome, something unthinkable in the early modern period when the controversial new order was tarred by ‘black legend’ propaganda. In 1679, Thomas Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, described the Gunpowder Plot as

a villainy so black and horrid (I do not say unchristian only, but) so inhumane and barbarous, as has no parallel in any age or nation (Jewish, Pagan or Turkish), nor indeed could have before the invention of gunpowder and the unhappy institution of the Jesuitical Society by (a fanatical lame soldier) Ignatius Loyola. For before that time, the world had no instrument or means so pernicious as gunpowder and congruous for effecting such a mischief, nor any order of men so impious as to approve, design, and endeavour to execute a villainy so manifestly repugnant to the law of nature and scripture.
⁴¹

One might wish for gunpowder to be the threat it once was. Torture, persecution, fundamentalism, fanaticism, martyrdom, the tangle of religion and politics: many issues are as live today as they were then. Combatants and weapons may change, but in its ambition for mass destruction, the powder conspiracy was a precursor for the callous and calculated plots of our own time. In the aftermath of its discovery, Robert Wintour told Guy Fawkes about a strange dream that haunted him: of a scarred city with steeples blown ‘awry’ and charred, disfigured faces.
⁴²
Such images are now all too real.