Papists might be honest folks and good friends to him, for his mother was a Catholic and yet he behoved to say she was an honest woman.
KING JAMES
in Scotland
IT IS TIME TO PEER into the strange, hidden world of Elizabethan Catholic England, in order to understand the Papists’ expectations from King James. ‘Catholics now saw their own country, the country of their birth, turned into a ruthless and unloving land,’ wrote Father Weston of the persecutions they had endured. It was on the Catholics that all men fastened their hatred: ‘they lay in ambush for them, betrayed them, attacked them with violence and without warning. They plundered them at night, confiscated their possessions, drove away their flocks, stole their cattle.’ Lay Catholics, as well as priests, filled every prison, ‘no matter how foul or dark’. Father Weston recalled a prophecy of utter desolation made in the Bible: ‘Whosoever killeth you, will think that he doth a service to God.’1 His lament is that of the outcast minority throughout history who find a special cruelty in being persecuted in their native land.
It is easy to understand Father Weston’s despair if we consider what it was like – in purely legal terms – to be a Catholic in England at the time of the death of Queen Elizabeth. In her long reign penalties had increased, at a pace which was sometimes slow, sometimes violently accelerated, always destined to make Catholic lives ever more painful, powerless and poverty-stricken.
Let us begin with the central tenet of a devout Catholic’s life. The popular Cathechisme of Christian Doctrine Necessary for Children and Ignorant People by Laurence Vaux, a Lancashire schoolmaster turned monk, defined the commandments of the Church.2 The first and greatest of these was to hear Mass every Sunday, and additionally on holy days, the official festivals of the Church. But not in England in March 1603. Nowhere in England could the Mass be legally celebrated, neither in public nor in private; not in the great cathedrals which had once been part of the Catholic fabric, not in secluded chapels in remote country houses, not in upper rooms in taverns nor in secret chambers hidden behind the breast of a chimney. To hear the Mass was for a layman (or woman) a felony punishable by heavy fines and jail.
For priests, the penalties were starker. If a Catholic priest was discovered, either in the act of saying Mass or otherwise compromised – in the possession of ‘massing clothes’ (vestments) or vessels – he would be flung into prison. If the charge was treason, the ultimate sentence was death: but not necessarily a straightforward death. He might be sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered, which involved cutting down the living body, emasculating it, cutting out the heart and finally dividing up – ‘quartering’ – the limbs. Even before that he might be tortured in order to secure his confession that he was indeed a Catholic priest. As a result, priests often lived under perpetual aliases, not only to cover their tracks but to protect their families.
Lady Arundell was a Catholic widow who secretly housed Father John Cornelius, a priest renowned for his ‘sweet and plausible tongue’, in her manor at Chideock in Dorset. On Easter Sunday 1594 he was seized as a result of information laid by a treacherous servant. Father Cornelius was tortured before the Council until at last he admitted to being a Jesuit. He died with words invoking the Holy Cross on his lips. After the ritual dismemberment, Father Cornelius’ limbs were posted on the four gates of Dorchester town, until Lady Arundell boldly recovered them and gave them burial.3
Catholics could not have their children baptised legally in the Catholic rite by a priest, or even by a Catholic midwife, as sometimes illegally happened. These same children, grown to adulthood, could not be married according to the Catholic rite. At the moment of death, they would be denied the sacrament of dying, known as Extreme Unction. As the vice tightened, Catholics were explicitly forbidden to keep not only Catholic servants but a Catholic schoolmaster: since every master had to have a licence to teach. Moreover it was forbidden to send children abroad to the Low Countries to be educated in convents such as those patronised by the Archduchess Isabella, or in the new schools such as Douai, which were founded there in response to the general need.
It was a small mercy, but a mercy nevertheless, that a proposition put forward by Cecil’s father, Lord Burghley, in a pamphlet of 1583 was rejected: this was to take children of known Catholic parents away from them at the age of seven. Even so, Catholic parents often voluntarily despatched their children at sixteen to a distant neighbourhood; this was the age at which these children would incur fines of their own for not attending church, thus increasing the family burden. Local churchwardens would be on the look-out for the sixteenth birthday of parishioners, but strange officials might be fooled for a year or two. In order to keep the Catholics under further control, an Act against Popish Recusants was passed in 1593 forbidding the convicted gentry from travelling more than five miles from their estates. The Catholic, serving and labouring classes were already policed by the strong contemporary laws against vagrancy and unlicensed travel in general.4
These were all negatives, things that the law forbade Catholics to do. But there were also the positives: the things that the law obliged Catholics to do, if they were to keep clear of prison, or preserve themselves from fines. Babies had to be baptised in the Protestant church before they were a month old, just as adults had to be married in their local Protestant church. By the Act of Uniformity, passed at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, every person over the age of sixteen was compelled to attend his or her local (Protestant) church on Sundays or holy days. Protestant Communion had also to be taken at least twice a year. Failure to do so involved fines of a shilling a week in 1559, which was not an inconsiderable sum when the legal definition of a yeoman was someone who had forty shillings yearly at his disposal from his land. Continuous absence of a month or more led to heavier fines and finally to the seizure of goods in order to satisfy the courts. Such absentees were classed as ‘recusants’ - literally, those who refused (to attend Protestant services) and today might be termed refuseniks.
Under these circumstances, it may seem surprising that the Catholic community survived at all. The decision of Francis Swetnam, baker to Eliza Vaux and a good family man, is certainly understandable. For two years, he confessed, he had been a recusant, but then turned again to the Protestant Church, despite his personal convictions: ‘for that he had rather adventure his own soul than lose his five children’. There were many more exalted than Swetnam the baker who preferred their own advancement and that of their family, to the practice of the Faith in which they had been brought up. The fines, as they mounted, weighed like lead. Only the rich could afford them and even their fortunes began to dip as they were obviously pursued with more enthusiasm than the poor. As A. L. Rowse has written, a family like the Arundells of Cornwall were paying a vast amount of money every year for ‘the luxury of going to church’.5 Meanwhile, in a sinister development, the Exchequer began to see the recusants not so much as heretics to be converted but as a prime source of revenue to be exploited.
And yet nothing was quite what it seemed. From the point of view of many Catholics, there were two worlds in England. One was the gallant world of the court, and those who ruled the country: a masterful, glittering world of honour where prizes were to be won, fortunes established. This was, essentially, the world of the Protestant Church since, by the Act of Supremacy at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, further tightened in 1563, allegiance to the sovereign as head of the Church had to be sworn by all office-holders and clergy. This Oath of Supremacy, specifically acknowledging that the (supreme) spiritual authority was vested in the crown, was one to which Catholics who acknowledged the spiritual authority of the Pope could not swear. Then there was the spectral world of their forbidden religion.
Catholics – pious Catholics – often slipped silently between these two worlds. They were like ghosts, freed by the darkness to worship as they pleased, but compelled to become conforming Protestants at cockcrow. Hypocrites? Not necessarily. Survivors? Certainly. These were the men and women of whom King James had spoken approvingly while in Scotland – with the obligatory reference to Mary Queen of Scots. ‘Papists’, he said, ‘might be honest folks and good friends to him, for his mother was a Catholic and yet he behoved to say she was an honest woman.’6
These ‘honest folks’ included some who had connections to the leading luminaries of the Elizabethan court, many of whom were themselves suspected, not without reason, of Papist sympathies. It was helpful that the Queen herself made personal loyalty more of a touchstone than doctrinal orthodoxy. Besides, she ‘was always slow to condemn without good proofs any man whatsoever’.7 She came of a generation which understood how the heart might remain Catholic even if the mind was politically correct – and Protestant. Not only had she herself been born a Catholic (although denounced in the womb by the Pope) but she had lived through some extremely tricky periods of religious change. Many of her own devotional tastes were in essence Catholic, and she disliked married clergy, even if their marriages were officially permitted by the Anglican Church. The Queen was always prepared to smile graciously on those Papists or fellow travellers whom she considered to be her loyal subjects.8
The respected and apparently inviolable position of Magdalen Viscountess Montague was an example of how the most pious Catholic could survive if he (or she) did not challenge the accepted order. This remarkable and stalwart Catholic lady had as a girl walked in the bridal procession of Queen Mary Tudor when she married Philip II of Spain in Winchester Cathedral. Her husband died in 1592 but as a widow Magdalen Montague made no concessions where the practice of her religion was concerned. Her own mansion near Battle, in East Sussex, was so full of priests and chapels and secret chambers that it was known locally as ‘Little Rome’. What was more, Lady Montague, a tall and striking figure, had the habit of walking in public, ‘her gait full of majesty’, in clear possession of rosary beads and crucifixes, although these were strictly forbidden objects. Most of her ‘great family’ of eighty persons – that is, her household – were Catholics, according to her chaplain Richard Smith, who compared her to the fourth-century widow St Paula, friend and supporter of St Jerome. In Southwark there was another great house, with another big household which was similarly honeycombed with Papists, including priests.9
None of this could have been unknown to the authorities. Nevertheless Queen Elizabeth chose to pay a ceremonial visit to Magdalen Montague at her Battle house in 1591. Afterwards the Queen sent a gracious message by a Lady of the Bedchamber to say that she was convinced ‘she fareth much better for your prayers, and therefore desireth you ever hereafter to be mindful of her’ in them.10
So this dignified old matriarch (she had eight children) managed to combine piety and loyalty – helped along by that famous obstinacy which her chaplain wrote could be seen in her actual face: a short sharp nose held high, and a very strong chin. But, at the same time as Magdalen Montague jangled her rosary in public, it was an offence of Praemunire, punishable by life imprisonment and confiscation of goods, to import such hallowed tokens, let alone display them in public. To the government officially, this was nothing but ‘vain popish trish-trash’. A servant found in possession of a brass crucifix became (unlike Lady Montague) an object of immediate suspicion; he was compelled to acknowledge the Queen’s supremacy and declare that he abhorred ‘all popish trifles’.11 So thorough was the government detestation of the ‘trish-trash’ that during the searches gentlewomen were turned out of their beds in the middle of the night, in case anything of a subversive nature was concealed within the bedclothes.
When a priest named Cuthbert Mayne was seized at Golden in Cornwall in 1577, he was wearing an Agnus Dei round his neck. This was a little wax oval made from the remains of an Easter candle blessed at St Peter’s by the Pope. At his trial, his Agnus Dei was one of the strong pieces of evidence against him.12 Father Cuthbert Mayne’s still-breathing body was hacked to pieces as the penalty for treason. For it was postulated by the English government that all Catholic priests were agents of a foreign power, either a spiritual one like the Pope (who had issued that Bull against their sovereign) or a temporal one like the King of Spain (who had attempted several invasions of their country).
With such an emphasis on patriotism, many Papists attempted to ensure their survival by taking particular trouble to demonstrate their loyalty to the Queen. One Cornish Arundell, in prison for his faith, announced boldly at the time of the Armada that he would support the Queen, not the Pope. Two Catholic peers, Lord Montague (Magdalen’s husband) and Lord Dacre (her brother) attempted to make a subtle – and self-preserving - distinction. They declared that they had a duty to support the Pope if he came in peace, but would act against him in the field if he came in war. This division between the Pope’s spiritual powers and his temporal powers might not be good theology in Rome, but the Holy City and the Holy Father were a long way off. Sir Thomas Tresham was another of the leading Catholics who were anxious to paint themselves as ‘honest folks’. This Northamptonshire magnate spent many years in prison as a recusant. But, as he wrote in a petition of 1581 from the Fleet prison, he did not wish ‘to live one hour without her Majesty’s grace, and favour’. He held ‘nothing against her Majesty’s person and dignity’ – that is, her title to the crown - and, above all, nothing ‘against my dear and native country’.13
How earnestly Henry Howard, who would be known to history as the Earl of Northampton, longed to be viewed as just such a patriot! It has to be said that the Howard/Norfolk family tree had some fearful blots on it where loyalty was concerned. His father, the poet Surrey, had been executed by Henry VIII for alleged royal pretensions when Howard was only six; his grandfather had been spared the axe only by the death of the King; his brother Thomas Duke of Norfolk had been executed by Elizabeth twenty-five years later for plotting the escape of Mary Queen of Scots. In Howard’s opinion he had been unfairly demoted not once but twice from that high place ‘by birth my due’, thanks to the wrongdoings of others. That made him a slippery, ambitious man obsessed by his family heritage. But, although a Catholic by predilection – he thought it the natural religion for a gentleman – he was perfectly prepared to conform outwardly to the Anglican religion if he could worm his way back into royal favour.14
Howard was not generally trusted at court, and with good reason, since while he fawned on the Queen he maintained connections to the Spanish Ambassador in case the wind should blow in that direction. (Even the Spanish, who provided Howard with a secret income, did not exactly trust him: the Spanish Ambassador described him as being ‘not as straight as he might seem in his speech’.) There is a story told of Howard’s attendance at the Queen’s chapel which sums up, albeit at the grandest level, the attitude of certain ambivalent Catholics. He could not, to be frank, endure the services there unless the Queen herself was to be present. Then Howard would hasten to arrive and ostentatiously ‘continue at prayers’.15
A more edifying example of an Elizabethan Catholic who inhabited both worlds of sunshine and twilight is provided by William Byrd, described by Father William Weston as ‘the very famous English musician and organist’. Byrd’s patrons were Henry Howard as well as the Catholic Earl of Worcester and another important peer with Catholic sympathies, the 8th Earl of Northumberland (Byrd taught Northumberland’s daughter). Byrd was probably always a Catholic at heart, and his wife Juliana was indicted as a recusant as early as 1577.16 But given his dulcet talent, as a musician - an organist – and a composer, he was able to maintain his position at court by adequate public conformity.
However, Byrd led simultaneously another secret life of music among his recusant friends, who included his neighbour Sir John Petre of Ingatestone Hall near Chelmsford (a house termed by Byrd in a dedication ‘truly most friendly to me and mine’). Here and at other recusant centres, Byrd’s Masses were sung. Given the occluded nature of these occasions, it was no coincidence that they were written for modest numbers, trios of sacred music, Masses for only four or five voices.
A young Frenchman happened to find himself at one of the country-house musical celebrations, a gathering to which numerous Papists of the gentry, both male and female, had come in their coaches. Byrd played the organ (as he had also done in the Queen’s chapel). Father Henry Garnet, who had a ‘rare and delightful’ singing voice, may have been among others who took part. But the Frenchman was innocent of the significance of the occasion, ‘not knowing them to be Jesuits on account of their disguises’.17
Howard and Byrd were in their different ways Church Papists, a term convenient for denoting those who attended Church of England services, as required by the state, but secretly considered themselves to be Catholics. (A definition of 1582 described them as ‘Papists which can keep their consciences to themselves’.)18 Some Church Papists also went to Mass in private. Others intended to be reconciled to the Catholic Church on their deathbed, when spiritual considerations would at the last predominate over more worldly ones. Not a few male Church Papists were heads of households who had an arrangement with their wives, whereby she would cling to the Old Faith in private and might even raise her children in it, with the possible exception of the eldest son.
Dorothy Wiseman of Yorkshire, that stronghold of the Faith, was an outstanding example of a Catholic wife who stayed married to a Protestant.19 She came from a pious Catholic background, her mother having been imprisoned as a recusant. However, Roger Lawson, whom Dorothy married in 1598 at the age of seventeen, was the Protestant heir to great estates. Dorothy did not let her husband’s religion deter her: she immediately set about installing a priest clandestinely within her household so as to have Mass celebrated there at least once a month. Her husband was by profession a barrister and when he was away, Dorothy allowed in numbers of priests for the night to take refuge. ‘Dexterously’ she acquired Catholic servants.
She also acquired children, giving birth to at least fifteen. One became a Jesuit, one a Benedictine monk, one a Benedictine nun, and four followed the new order of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. With such an enormous family, it is comforting to read that her sweetness of disposition remained constant and converted some to Rome whom scholars could not win over ‘by subtlety and learned argument’. Yet Roger Lawson himself converted to Catholicism only on his deathbed. This, given the devout nature of his children, was surely a last-minute release from a conformity which must have been practised for worldly reasons (including his own career as a barrister).
It is impossible to be sure of the numbers of similar marriages involved. But this counterfeit conformity – and there were other tricks – draws attention to one aspect of English Catholicism which was of crucial importance immediately after James’ accession: the unreal perception of Catholic numbers in the minds of the government. How could the government know exactly who was and who was not a Papist at heart? A forbidden religion, like an ethnic minority whose existence and language are obliterated by government decree, does not advertise its numbers. In short, all recusants were Catholics, but not all Catholics came out into the open, or were forced out into the open, as recusants.
In contrast to the vague numbers of Catholics, the names of actual recusants appeared, by definition, in government records.20 Some five thousand names, for example, are listed as having paid fines between 1593 and 1600, thickest in Yorkshire and Lancashire but with other concentrations in the midlands and borders of Wales. When King James arrived in England, the Protestant bishops happily reported to him that, out of over 2 million Church of England communicants, there were only about 8,500 adult recusants.’21 This picture of a small, depressed, declining community took of course no account of the multitude of people – Church Papists – who would go to Mass if they could, the moment that conditions were more relaxed. There were the seeds of a dangerous misunderstanding here.
The estimable – but Catholic – lifestyle of Dorothy Wiseman draws attention to another aspect of English Catholicism which affected its entire fabric and frankly baffled the authorities. This was the comparatively privileged position of recusant women under the law. Ironically enough, this privilege arose out of a woman’s absence of legal rights, based on the theory that she was inferior. The ‘weaker vessel’, as St Paul (translated in the Tyndale Bible) had memorably described the female, had no rights in common law. Any rights she might have had were assumed by her father before her marriage and her husband after it. Other categories – adult unmarried women and widows – somehow fell through the net of this theory: ‘all of them are understood either married or to be married’ (as we shall see, Catholic women of spirit took advantage of that too).22 But this lack of rights, and thus of property, meant that it was extremely difficult to impose a fine upon a recusant woman – unless of course her husband was compelled to pay it.
But in a strange way this obvious solution was not deemed quite correct by the standards of the late sixteenth century. What then was to happen to the propertyless female? One extremely old and extremely poor Catholic woman was condemned to be put in the stocks on market day in order to be displayed as ‘a monster or an owl in daytime’. The local boys ran round her hissing ‘a Papist, a Papist’. It can hardly have been a pleasant experience, and yet the poor old ‘owl in daytime’ was spared prison and fines, both exercises being evidently pointless. At the other end of the social scale, Queen Elizabeth had a low opinion of the female sex in general, counting herself as a ‘Prince’ or what would now be described as an honorary man. As a result, she did not believe that women should be the stuff of martyrs. In the time of Elizabeth, Parliament itself grappled with the awkward problem without ever quite coming to a hard and fast decision.23
As a result, the imposition of fines, as with so much to do with recusancy, largely depended on local administration. Here local vendettas might play their part in bringing about severe fines, but also local loyalties might cause them to be suspended. The husband with the ‘costly’ recusant wife who deducted the fine from her dress allowance may have been emulated elsewhere. Other husbands, wise in their generation, may have pretended to be henpecked by recusant wives to preserve their estates, even if the truth was somewhat different.
There were wives who did do time in prison for their refusal to attend services. Certain stout-hearted Catholic ladies in Yorkshire were offered a choice of twice-weekly Calvinist sermons in their homes or prison: they chose prison.24 But even arrest was not necessarily the purgatory for women that it could have been, under the full rigour of the law. Sometimes women of quality were confined in the houses of aldermen, a form of house arrest. In other cases, a pious Catholic woman, confined in the same place as a number of Catholic priests, might find herself attending secret celebrations of the Mass with far greater ease than at home.
Home itself was not totally barred to a recusant wife during the term of her conviction. Contemporary opinion on a woman’s role in society required that wives be released for such conjugal duties as cooking the Christmas dinner or bearing children. A husband had the right to his helpmate’s company – recusant or no recusant. The extent to which Catholic women took advantage of their alleged weakness is demonstrated by the angry exclamation of Robert Cecil’s elder brother Lord Burghley. How ‘pernicious’ the female recusants were grown, he complained angrily in 1593.25
This sense of female immunity, due to fundamental female irresponsibility, meant that the Catholic women who ran large households had a vital role to play with regard to the priesthood.26 Within these households the priests might reside concealed as innocuous but necessary male servitors such as tutors, but their ultimate safety depended on the courage and wit of the lady of the house. It was an interesting role reversal. In all matters of the soul, these submissive ladies were utterly dependent for guidance on their spiritual pastors; but, when it came to the body, it was the pastors who were often utterly dependent for protection on the submissive ladies.
Furthermore, the idea that these ladies could – if absolutely necessary – defy their own husbands in the cause of religion was an extraordinarily subversive one. Conventional Catholic devotions of the time continued to hammer home the familiar theme of woman’s weakness, suggesting – rather against the facts – that women were especially prone to heresy. But Catholic devotional writing and Catholic reality, in time of danger, were two different things. Father Henry Garnet, in A Treatise of Christian Renunciation, preached a very different message concerning recusant wives in dispute with Protestant husbands. It was in effect a revolutionary doctrine: ‘your husbands over your souls have no authority, and over your bodies but a limited power’, he wrote. The Treatise provided many helpful examples of families, in the days of the early Christian Church, broken asunder by religious differences.27
It was a point that the canny King James himself summed up. He pointed out that, where most women were concerned, their vows were ‘ever subject to the controlment of their husbands’. Catholic women were however potentially different: ‘their consciences must ever be commanded and overruled by their Romish God as it pleases him’.28 To use a modern term, recusant women were empowered by the perils that all Catholics faced. (Just as women have throughout history been empowered in times of war when their services are seen to be vital to survival, only to lose it all when the national danger has passed.)
It was true that there were women, as there were men, who died for their Faith: three laywomen and fifty-eight laymen were put to death before 1603. In 1586 Margaret Clitheroe* endured the vile torment known as peine forte et dure. This (legal) punishment entailed being stripped before being, literally, pressed to death with weights to the value of seven or eight hundredweight because she would not plead either guilty or not guilty: ‘Having made no offence, I need no trial.’ Margaret Clitheroe may well have taken this extreme course in order to avoid betraying the whereabouts of priests, but by refusing to opt for trial by jury she also spared her servants and children the need to testify, which would have led to their own arrest (or to perjury). Her estates were not forfeit, since she had not been condemned for treason.29
But, for the vast majority of Catholic women, their role was both crucial and courageous – if not quite as testing as that of martyrdom. It was the women who taught the Catholic catechism to their servants and their children: mundane but crucial tasks which preserved the Faith. And as the zealous Jesuit missionaries began to come from abroad in the 1580s – to the horror of the government, which denounced them all as Spanish spies and responded with a special Act against them – the role of the female as nurturer and protector became all-important.
Two women stand out among the many who defied the government in defence of their priests. Both played a prominent part in the events surrounding the Powder Treason (as the Gunpowder Plot was known to contemporaries). Eliza Vaux was the sole head of a large Catholic household, Harrowden Hall, in Northamptonshire, near Wellingborough. She fell into one of those categories which allowed for a certain independence of action on the part of women, for Eliza was a widow, with a large family to organise and an estate to guard for her eldest son, Edward. Her husband George Vaux, heir to Lord Vaux of Harrowden, died in 1594 when she was about thirty. But even before her marriage, as Eliza Roper, daughter of Sir John Roper, she had demonstrated her spirit.†
The marriage had not pleased George’s father Lord Vaux. Above all, it did not please that great Catholic patriarch Sir Thomas Tresham, a man who attempted to dominate everyone within his far-reaching family circle. He certainly dominated poor Lord Vaux, his close friend and brother-in-law.
Sir Thomas, despite his noble sufferings for the Catholic Faith, was an intemperate man where inferiors including women were concerned. He was disgusted to find that his nephew George Vaux was about to make the classic mistake (in late-sixteenth-century terms) of marrying for love. Sir Thomas was determined to rip aside ‘the guileful mask of blinded fleshly affection’ and put to an end what he called ‘a brainless match’ to ‘a creditless girl’.30 Avuncular wrath lost out to fleshly affection. George married his Eliza It was, of course, as such hotly contested matches often are, an extremely happy union, with six children born in nine years, before George Vaux’s premature death.
Thereafter Eliza Vaux fell into an abyss of grief. She kept to her room for a year, and for the rest of her life would not visit the chamber in which her husband had actually died. It was hardly surprising that she swore a vow against remarriage: ‘As she could not give God her virginity, she would offer him a chaste life.’ She also underwent a radical change of purpose. Pursuing the interests of her eldest son and her other children was not to be enough for her, as it was for many women. She felt a call to protect and nurture the Catholic priesthood. As Father John Gerard wrote in his autobiography: ‘I could see she was resolved, to fulfil as nearly as she could the role of Martha, and of other holy women who followed Christ and ministered to Him and His Apostles.’31
Eliza Vaux did not, however, lose her independence, still less her spirit. (After all, there is no reason to suppose that the Martha of the Bible was particularly submissive, given her outspoken complaint about her contemplative sister Mary.) With her large family in mind, and no doubt the interests of the hidden priests as well, Eliza successfully campaigned to get her ageing father-in-law to move to a smaller Vaux property for the last year of his life, leaving her with magnificent Harrowden. In no way did this successful petticoat dominance commend itself to Sir Thomas at neighbouring Rushton. In a postscript to a business letter, he made a bitter astrological joke, blaming Eliza for his old friend’s failure to visit him: ‘Commend me to the captive lord that dare not while the sign is in the dominating Virago to look upon poor Rushton.’32
It was a great advantage to Eliza’s plans that extensive rebuilding at Harrowden, in the name of young Edward, who succeeded his grandfather as Lord Vaux in 1595, tock place about this time.‡ A woman of ‘talents of a high order’, as Father Gerard described her, Eliza was able to have a kind of custom-built refuge constructed, since it was infinitely easier to conceal hiding-places at this point rather than insert them afterwards. So Eliza Vaux as the ‘Dowager of Harrowden’§ was able to maintain what has been described as ‘a Jesuit college in the heart of England’.33
Unfortunately, even the most secure household could be penetrated by treachery. Harrowden, like other suspect Papist strongholds, was subjected to constant searches. On one occasion the ten-year-old Frances Burrows, Eliza’s niece by marriage, showed that female spirit could start early, by defying the poursuivants (as the searchers were known). The priest was actually at Mass in an upper chamber when a great noise was heard in the house. Through the negligence, real or assumed, of the housekeeper, the poursuivants and constables had already entered with drawn swords. Frances ran down.
‘Oh, put up your swords,’ cried Frances, ‘or else my mother will die, for she cannot endure to see a naked sword.’ Frances pretended to fetch wine to revive her fainting mother, but actually gave the warning. On another occasion the intrepid Frances had a dagger put to her breast to make her reveal the secret hiding-places. When she declined, the poursuivant was sufficiently amused by the resolution of this small person – Frances was undersized for her age, and delicate – to offer a hundred pounds to buy her and present her to the Bishop of London: ‘a maid of her courage should not be spoiled with Papistry’. The offer was declined. Frances was finally smuggled abroad to find, one hopes, greater tranquillity as a nun in Louvain.34
Father John Gerard, the dashing Jesuit priest who was Eliza Vaux’s confessor, was one of those who had a narrow escape at Harrowden. Gerard’s easy manner, his zest at hunting and hawking, his skill as a swordsman – the traditional pursuits of a gentleman – were all assets in covering up his true profession of priest. They also made him an attractive and persuasive proselytiser. Even his taste for ‘very gallant … apparel’ was an advantage, since dress officially betokened the rank of the man. Criminals for example were wont to disguise themselves as gentlemen in order to have the same freedom of progress as the upper class – and of course priests were criminals according to the government. None of this had saved Gerard in 1594 when he was captured and held in the Tower of London, then severely tortured. But a dramatic escape from the Tower itself brought Gerard back into the clandestine Catholic community in time to exercise an important presence there at the accession of James I.
George Vaux’s unmarried sister Anne‖ was the other member of the family who played a crucial part in the circumstances surrounding the Powder Treason. Mistress Anne Vaux was a ‘maid’ in the parlance of the time, but what we would call a spinster. She was born in 1562 and was therefore over forty at the time of James’ accession: this spinsterhood was almost certainly a deliberate choice in that Anne Vaux held herself to be dedicated to the service of God. From the 1590s onward she saw this service as best performed by protecting and managing the affairs of Father Henry Garnet, the Superior of the Jesuits. Garnet’s own sisters had gone abroad and became nuns at Louvain: this left Anne Vaux able to pose as his sister ‘Mistress Perkins’ in order to avoid awkward questioning about the priest’s precise status. In private Garnet called Anne his ‘sister in Christ’.
Father Henry Garnet had been born in 1555, some seven years before Anne, at Heanor in east Derbyshire. His family antecedents were not quite so glamorous as those of Father Gerard, but he did have a notable taste for scholarship. He was a brilliant linguist, expert in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Having been educated at Winchester, he acted as a corrector in a legal press, and then went abroad, becoming for a while Professor of Hebrew at Rome. As a priest, his scholarly bent made him a natural devotee of theology and theological debate. He also had a great love of music: he had a ‘rare and delightful’ voice, already mentioned in connection with Byrd, he had an ability to set songs extemporarily, and was skilled with instruments, especially the lute.35
Certainly Garnet was the opposite of a man of violence, believing with ‘his usual modest cheerfulness’, in the words of one who knew him well, that things were best settled by submission to the will of God. This applied to the reconversion of England to the Catholic Faith: political manoeuvres, let alone armed risings, were much less likely to be efficacious than prayers, the maintenance of Catholic rituals and the celebrations of Masses. Contemporaries also bore witness to Garnet’s kindheartedness and compassion. He thought it his duty to attend (in disguise) the hideous public executions of his priests in order to administer the last rites to them if he could. Such ordeals filled this sensitive and scrupulous man with apprehension: would he be able to act so bravely if and when his own turn came?
Anne’s father Lord Vaux once reflected wistfully: ‘St Paul admonisheth that women should learn in silence and subjection: in their houses they themselves should learn by demanding of their husbands; who doth not permit them to teach in their presence, but to be silent.’ But Anne Vaux (like her widowed sister-in-law Eliza) did not have a husband from whom to learn. Buoyed up by her Faith, in the words of Father Henry Garnet, ‘this brave Virgo became a veritable Virago’.36
Father Garnet, unlike Sir Thomas Tresham, meant the word ‘virago’ as a compliment. Nevertheless, for all her piety, Anne did, like Eliza, take on Sir Thomas himself, suing him in the Court of Wards as a trustee for her marriage portion. Since she had not married and had no intention of doing so, it was a bold gesture undoubtedly provoked by her desperate need of funds to help the priests. Sir Thomas was once again furious and this time managed to fight back by forcing Anne Vaux to come to Rushton, to beg for the money personally. If she showed herself ‘stomachful’ (uppish), she still would not receive it. Anne was in her turn extremely angry. Hauling along her widowed sister Eleanor Brooksby (equally pious but much more timid), Anne Vaux indulged in ‘verbal combat’ with Sir Thomas in his own house from noon until four in the afternoon, stopping him from eating his dinner. She got her money.37
As a single woman with a handsome fortune at her disposal and a convenient widowed sister to provide domestic respectability, Anne was able to play a crucial part in renting houses in which Jesuits might gather in safety. The Jesuit rule required priests to meet at least once a year – hopefully twice – in order to give an account of their conscience to their Superior and renew their vows. Such a congruence of Jesuits inevitably presented dangers which single priests, operating alone, did not face. For this purpose Anne Vaux rented Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire from the antiquarian Henry Ferrers.
Baddesley Clinton was a secluded early Tudor mansion, with a moat, set amid woods about a hundred miles from London. The situation was perfect for the purposes of retreat and Anne immediately set about having a talented lay brother called Nicholas Owen (who will play an important part in this story) devise enough hiding-places to conceal twelve or more priests.a By using the moat and the levels of a sewer, together with secret turret trapdoors and stairways, Owen was able to ensure that Father Garnet and others survived a notorious search in 1591. They stood for four hours, half immersed in water. But they were not captured.
Not all the houses Anne Vaux and Eleanor Brooksby occupied were in the midlands. White Webbs, rented in 1600 on behalf of Father Garnet, was deep in Enfield Chase, on the borders of Hertfordshire and Essex. This was another ‘spacious house’ – but nearer to London – which could be honeycombed with escape routes and refuges. And of course not every visitor to White Webbs would actually be a priest. There would also be members of the vast Catholic cousinage to which Anne Vaux belonged by birth.
In this small world, which for security’s sake perpetuated itself by intermarriage, it is perhaps simplest to state that almost everyone was related to almost everyone else. This was certainly true of Anne Vaux, with a Throckmorton grandmother as well as a Tresham step-mother. Thus visitors to White Webbs who were her relatives included the two first cousins, children of Throckmorton sisters, Robert Catesby and Francis Tresham. They were respectively ten and six years younger than Anne and they regarded her with that affection which kindly maiden-aunt figures are inclined to inspire in their juniors.
It would be some years before the interweaving in time and place of these rash Elizabethan gallants with the forbidden English Jesuits would prove to have terrible consequences for the latter. In the meantime, it was understandable that with such women as Eliza and Anne Vaux at work, Father Robert Persons should conclude that the continuance of the Faith in England was due to the courage of its women.
So the sombre picture of ruthless persecution painted by Father Weston was not in fact unrelieved by light. First, there was the way in which Catholics managed to survive, their Faith more or less intact, by leading a kind of schizophrenic existence. Secondly, while there were ‘honest’ Papists in King James’ phrase, there were also brave priests and their courageous helpers, often female.
There was hope for the future, not only practical hope but also spiritual hope which Robert Southwell, the Jesuit put to death (after torture) in 1595, described in his poem The Burning Babe:38
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow.
In the last year of Queen Elizabeth’s life, it began to be whispered among English Catholics that King James had already made them promises of genuine toleration to be redeemed when and if he came to the throne.
* Canonised by the Catholic Church in 1970, along with other English martyrs including Anne Line, who was executed in London in 1601 for harbouring priests.
† The Reports were connected to Sir Thomas More: they descended from William Roper, whose brother married More’s daughter Margaret.
‡ Harrowden Hall was rebuilt once more in the early eighteenth century. A Grade I scheduled building, it is now the site of the Wellingborough Golf Club; nevertheless within its walls lies at least one of the numerous late-sixteenth-century hiding-places. This is in the former stable block, now the caterers’ flat, somewhere behind a thick wall at the top of a short staircase. If there are still hiding-places in the main house, which was largely refurbished in the 1970s, their location is unrecorded.
§ Eliza Vaux was known as the ‘Dowager of Harrowden’ or the ‘Dowager Lady Vaux’ since she was the mother of the Lord Vaux of the day, although she never bore the actual title of Lady Vaux of Harrowden, given that her husband died before his father.
‖ Anne Vaux was in fact the step-sister of George Vaux, her own mother having died as a result of her birth, after which Lord Vaux married Sir Thomas Tresham’s sister Mary; but the term ‘step’ was never used during this period, nor the distinction made, at a time when so many women died young in childbirth leaving their babies to be brought up by their husband’s next wife as their ‘mother’.
a Baddesley Clinton, now a National Trust property, still retains its air of romantic mystery; and the hiding-places so skilfully constructed by Nicholas Owen can still be inspected.