God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  The rising had occurred miles from Northamptonshire and Lord Vaux, serving on the county commission for musters, had had nothing to do with it. He felt the heat nonetheless. On 18 November 1569, he subscribed to a statement of loyalty tendered to past and present justices of the peace. He promised to worship ‘devoutly’ according to the official prayer book, at church ‘or upon reasonable impediment’ in his chapel, and to oppose anything said or done in contempt of the established religion. A couple of months later, the baptism of his youngest daughter, Merill, was registered at Irthlingborough parish church.53

  Such tokens of conformity were no longer deemed sufficient proof of loyalty. The northern rising had exposed the Catholic Church militant in England and undermined the claims of all its worshippers to be good Elizabethans. Far from winning allegiance, the Queen’s ‘natural clemency’ had apparently emboldened rebellious spirits. The shooting in Scotland of Regent Moray on 23 January 1570 confirmed Protestant fears that assassins were active in the British Isles. If there was any doubt that Elizabeth I was also a target, it was removed the following month when she was excommunicated by the Pope.

  The papal bull Regnans in Excelsis condemned Elizabeth as a heretic, whose ‘monster-like’ usurpation of the English throne had brought ‘miserable ruin’ upon the kingdom. It deprived her of ‘the right which she pretends’ and absolved all Catholics from any previous oaths of allegiance. The time had come for absolute obedience to the papacy: ‘there is no place left for any excuse, defence, or tergiversation.’ Thenceforth, any Catholic peer or subject (the bull made the distinction) ‘shall not once dare to obey her or any her directions, laws, or commandments, binding under the same curse those who do anything to the contrary’.54 The ‘curse’ was the sentence of anathema. Catholics could either obey their Queen and consign their souls to damnation or they could obey the Pope and surrender their bodies to temporal punishment. They could not, in good conscience, do both. It was the choice of two betrayals and theoretically it put Lord Vaux and his co-religionists in an impossible position.

  The irony of Regnans in Excelsis is that it did more damage to the English Catholic community than any Protestant proclamation could have done. Pope Pius V had issued it at the behest of the northern earls, but by the time it appeared in England, all that was left of the rebellion were the corpses, hanging ‘for terror’ in the marketplace.55 Many Catholics resented the insensitivity of the Pope’s ultimatum and, according to William Allen, ‘did think hardly of that deed’, wishing that ‘so great a matter’ had been left to the judgement of God. Even Philip II of Spain was vexed, but chiefly because he had not been consulted: ‘My knowledge of English affairs is such that I believe I could give a better opinion upon them and the course that ought to have been adopted under the circumstances than anyone else,’ he huffed in a letter to his ambassador in London.fn8 56

  The Protestant backlash was inevitable. Those who had always suspected that the true colour of English Catholicism was papal purple now felt vindicated in their attacks on the community. ‘Papists’ were portrayed as the enemy within, potential fifth columnists, who were biding their time in feigned conformity until the call to strike. In Lord Vaux’s county, a gloating tract was ‘cast in the streets of Northampton’:

  And this is true, the time is come,

  I’ll tell you truer news:

  All papists which have traitorous hearts

  and do their prince refuse,

  Must now relent, and turn forthwith,

  and true become God knows:

  Or else prepare to give their flesh,

  at once to feed the crows.

  …

  Your wresting long of God’s true word

  can nothing you prevail:

  Have done I say, dispatch therefore,

  pluck down your peacock’s tail.

  Down on your knees you asses stout,

  pray God and Queen for grace:

  You can no longer now prevail,

  your practise takes no place.

  It boots you not to Pius now

  for mercy for to seek:

  For you be traitors proud at home,

  his Bull is not worth a leek.

  Therefore as thousand traitors are,

  by thousands all agree:

  To turn to God, or else make haste,

  to scale the gallow tree.57

  The official response was more measured, though hardly less hostile. Parliament was called with the intention of flushing out all the ‘traitorous hearts’ and, for the first time in the reign, Lord Vaux answered the summons to attend. He sat in the Lords alongside the newly ennobled William Cecil, Baron of Burghley, on almost every day that the House was in session. New treason legislation was enacted condemning anyone who questioned the validity of the Queen’s religion or her right to rule. It became high treason to ‘reconcile’ anyone to Rome using papal bulls or instruments, and for anyone to be thus reconciled. Abetters and harbourers of such people were liable to loss of lands and goods. The ‘Act against Fugitives over the Sea’ demanded the return, within six months, of anyone who had gone abroad without permission since the beginning of the reign. Those who stayed away risked forfeiture of goods, chattels and estate profits. ‘An Act against the bringing in and putting in execution of Bulls and other Instruments from the See of Rome’ ruled that knowingly to import, receive or handle documents stamped with the pretended powers of the papacy was treason. The real sting in the Act came in the fourth section, which also banned any Agnus Dei, cross, picture, bead ‘or such like vain and superstitious things’ blessed by the Pope or his priests. The importation or receipt of such ‘hallowed’ objects would incur the forfeiture of lands and goods.58 It was a blatant assault on traditional piety. From thenceforth, even the simple act of owning a rosary was considered dubious.

  Despite his regular attendance in the Upper Chamber, there is no recorded objection from Lord Vaux to any of the legislation that was passed. One bill did, however, compel him to break his silence. The bill ‘for coming to the church, and receiving the Communion’ insisted upon full ecclesiastical conformity and was the most controversial of the parliamentary session. Two clauses in particular aroused strong feeling in both Houses. The first concerned the proviso that exempted anyone of or above the rank of a gentleman who had a private chapel from having to attend his parish church. ‘There should be no difference between man and man,’ argued Mr Aglionby, Member for Warwick, and his colleagues in the Commons appear to have agreed that the exemption should be lifted.

  Aglionby did, however, dispute the second major issue, which concerned the Lord’s Supper. Hearing divine service was one thing, he argued, but no law should ‘enforce consciences’ to receive communion: ‘The conscience of man is internal, invisible, and not in the power of the greatest monarch in the world, in no limits to be straitened, in no bonds to be contained.’59 Thomas Norton, a protégé of Lord Burghley, countered that the exposure of ‘the very secrets of the heart’ was necessary in order to identify ‘the good seed so sifted from the cockle’.fn9 The time for harvest had come. Enforced communion would lead to the exposure of ‘those rebellious calves whom the Bull hath begotten’.60

  The bill was sent up to the Lords on 5 May 1571 with an escort of twenty-nine members, a sure sign of its significance. Letters from the French ambassador suggest that some peers resented the intrusion upon noble privilege.61 This deeply affected Lord Vaux. Hitherto he had avoided scrutiny by worshipping in his private chapel. Compulsory attendance at the parish church and, worse still, enforced communion would openly expose him as a traitor to his faith or, if he refused to attend, a recusant.

  He heard all three readings of the bill and, on 17 May, voted against it with three other Catholic peers (Worcester, Southampton and Windsor).62 Vaux had finally made a stand, though whether it was for noble privilege or general freedom of conscience cannot be conclusively determined. Given his previous record, the inclination to be ungenerous and assume the former moti
vation is strong. However, before voting, the Lords had made some alterations to the bill and, according to the parliamentary historian J. E. Neale, ‘the odds are that the Upper House reinserted the proviso’ of noble exemption.63 If this was indeed the case – and the reaction of the Commons seems to point that way – then Lord Vaux did not vote out of self-interest, but on behalf of all his co-religionists.

  Although his own efforts could not defeat the bill, Vaux found an unlikely ally in the Queen, who asserted her power of veto at the end of the session. Despite the northern rising and the papal bull, and despite the long hours put into the bill by both Houses, Elizabeth remained true to her declaration of the previous year: she was ‘very loath’ to substitute ‘princely severity’ for ‘natural clemency’; she would not force ‘an inquisition’ upon her subjects. If, however, any of them dared to break her laws – and after the 1571 Parliament there were more to break – ‘then,’ she warned, ‘she cannot but use them according to their deserts, and will not forbear to inquire of their demeanours and of what mind and disposition they are.’64 This was lenience sixteenth-century style.

  The sun had briefly shone on the application of Elizabeth I’s veto, but there had been too many dark clouds in the 1571 Parliament for celebration. Lord Vaux had anticipated stormy weather. On 10 February 1571, two months before taking his seat in the Lords, he had signed a deed that tied up his estates in a series of trusts. Perhaps mindful that cash might not always be available, he also made provision for the dowries of Eleanor, Elizabeth and Anne, his three daughters by his first wife. The agreement bound his brother-in-law, Thomas Tresham, to pay £500 for each of the girls at the time of their marriage. In return, Lord Vaux would give Tresham £100 annually for fifteen years.

  The deed also entrusted the three girls and their brother Henry to the custody of their grandmother Elizabeth Beaumont. They were to go and live with her in Leicestershire for ten years. Lord Vaux would pay £20 a year for ‘the education, finding and bringing up’ of Henry, and £10 a year for each of the girls. The rest of the six-page document secured the jointure of the current Lady Vaux, and the inheritance of Vaux’s sons by both his marriages. It bore the seals of ten men and committed a number of neighbours and kinsfolk to the preservation of the Vaux patrimony. Two names stand out: Tresham and Catesby. These two families were closely bound to the Vauxes long before the Gunpowder Plot would make their association infamous.65

  In the Vatican archives there is a document written in Italian and set in cipher. Undated, but belonging to March 1571, it is purportedly a letter of instruction from the Duke of Norfolk to a Florentine banker called Roberto Ridolfi. The banker was to travel ‘with all possible celerity’ to the Pope in Rome and thence to Philip II in Madrid. He was to advise them on ‘the miserable plight in which this island is’, and ‘the afflictions and cruel usage to which the Queen of Scotland and myself, as also all the Catholics of these kingdoms are subjected’. Ridolfi’s brief was to secure aid:

  in the just enterprise, which has the promise of assured success if they would but grant the succour that is craved for the furtherance of the Queen of Scotland’s title, the re-establishment of the Catholic religion, and the suppression of those that are of the opposite side.66

  The ‘succour’ was to take the form of men, money, munitions and ‘a person experienced in leading an army’. As Philip II understood the plan, Elizabeth I was to be ‘either killed or captured’.67 According to the Vatican document, there were forty English noblemen who had pledged ‘to expose themselves to all peril of battle’. They could muster many thousands of men and were, allegedly, at Norfolk’s ‘beck and call’.

  This ‘tree of treason and rebellion’, as Lord Burghley later termed it, had many branches.68 In addition to Norfolk’s brief, Ridolfi travelled with a letter of credit from Mary Stuart. He also visited the Grand Duke of Tuscany and Philip II’s governor-general in the Netherlands, the Duke of Alba. Everyone, except Alba whose objections were largely practical, embraced the proposal. Philip II, whose policy, it has been argued, was guided by a ‘messianic vision’, truly seemed to believe that he had God’s mandate for ‘the Enterprise of England’. He announced that ‘this was the occasion and the opportunity for which he had waited’ and no matter how flawed the strategy, God would help them ‘get things right’.69

  But Ridolfi had also been talking to the English government. Since the late 1560s he had been on Lord Burghley’s radar. In September 1569 he had transferred papal funds to the Queen of Scots and the following month, just before the northern rebellion, he was arrested and imprisoned in Francis Walsingham’s house in Seething Lane. Although he faced twenty-five separate charges, he was soon released. A year later, at a meeting with Walsingham about the Anglo-Spanish trade war, he offered to mediate between the two courts. Walsingham wrote to Burghley of his hope that the Florentine would behave ‘both discreetly and uprightly’. In March 1571, on the eve of his departure for the Catholic courts of Europe, Ridolfi had an audience with Elizabeth I, ostensibly about trade. He received ‘a very favourable passport’ and, armed with ‘Instructions’ from the Duke of Norfolk and the Scots Queen, he went on his conspiratorial way.70

  Clearly more than just a messenger, Ridolfi seems to have been playing a double game, but on whose behalf? Norfolk, Mary and the Catholic leaders they petitioned for aid? Or Burghley, Walsingham and Elizabeth, who granted him easy passage to the Continent? Or was he a maverick, who thrilled to the spying game and was happy to play each side off against the other as long he retained access to powerful people and a hand in their purses? We will probably never know quite who were the players and who were the pawns in the Ridolfi Plot. The eponymous conspirator would resurface in Florence as a papal senator; he clearly relished intrigue.

  By the autumn of 1571, Burghley had gathered enough evidence – from intercepted letters and ciphers, spy reports and interrogations under the threat of torture – to expose many branches of the conspiracy. He did so very publicly, using the printing press to leak the details of the plot and smear one suspect in particular: Mary Queen of Scots. Now the English public and the courts of Europe could read, in a work translated from Latin into imitation Scots under Burghley’s commission, the dossier of evidence that had previously been gathered against Mary ‘touching the murder of her husband, and her conspiracy, adultery and pretended marriage with the Earl of Bothwell’. Although Mary had been discreet in her involvement with Ridolfi, Burghley was convinced that she had transferred her murderous inclinations on to Queen Elizabeth. ‘Now judge, Englishmen,’ the final words of the work exhorted,

  if it be good to change queens. Oh uniting confounding! When rude Scotland has vomited up a poison, must fine England lick it up for a restorative? Oh vile indignity! While your Queen’s enemy liveth, her danger continueth. Desperate necessity will dare the uttermost …71

  In blackening Mary’s reputation, Burghley arguably benefited a great deal from the exposure of the Ridolfi Plot, but he failed in his ultimate aim to have the Scottish Queen destroyed. When Parliament met in May 1572, Mary was denounced as a Jezebel, a murderess and a ‘most wicked and filthy woman’, but Elizabeth refused to heed the clamour for her execution. Nor would she formally exclude Mary from the succession. Instead, after much temporising, she surrendered the head of another conspiratorial cousin, Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk. He was executed for his part in the Ridolfi Plot on 2 June on Tower Hill, where, some twenty-five years earlier, his father, the poet Earl of Surrey, had also placed his neck on the block.

  The failure of the Ridolfi Plot did little to blur Philip II’s ‘messianic vision’. Victory for his half-brother, Don John of Austria, over the Turks at Lepanto in October 1571 and news from France the following August of the ‘St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’ were welcomed in Madrid as God’s handiwork. The Spanish ambassador in France could hardly contain his delight at the slaughter of so many Protestants:

  As I write, they are killing them all, they are stripp
ing them naked, dragging them through the streets, plundering the houses and sparing not even children. Blessed be God who has converted the French princes to His cause. May he inspire their hearts to continue as they have begun.72

  For the Protestants of Europe, there was nothing sanctified about the slaughter of their brethren at the hands of the French Catholics. It was an atrocity that few witnesses – including Francis Walsingham, on secondment at the English embassy in Paris – would forget. Many French Protestants sought refuge in England, each arriving with his own harrowing tale of Catholic bloodlust.fn10 According to the French ambassador in England, many believed ‘that it was the Pope and the King of Spain who kindled the fire in France … and that there is something evil afoot from all three of them against England’.73

  Philip II reportedly laughed at the news of the massacre. It was, he said, ‘one of the greatest moments of satisfaction that I have had in all my life’. Not only would it reduce French interference in the Netherlands, but it also provided reassurance that in those apocalyptic times he was indeed a messiah who could discern God’s purpose. When, a decade later, a medal was struck to commemorate the Spanish annexation of Portugal of 1580, it bore the legend: Non sufficit orbis – The world is not enough.

  Despite the setback of the Ridolfi business, Philip was sure that one day God would help him dethrone England’s heretic Queen. He had to be careful; in April 1572 Elizabeth I signed a treaty of mutual defence with France. As long as the French had the power to intervene across the Channel, peace – no matter how strained – was the defining characteristic of Anglo-Spanish relations. But Philip remained determined to honour his ‘special obligation to God’.74 The Enterprise of England was not abandoned.

  Lord Vaux’s reaction to the atrocities in France is nowhere recorded, nor is his response to the Ridolfi Plot, though he was hardly a disinterested observer. His attendance at the 1572 Parliament that was called to deal with Norfolk, Mary and the ‘safety’ of Elizabeth and her realm suggests that he was still engaged by the issues of the day. He may also have wanted to demonstrate his loyalty to the Queen, for the Italian letter of March 1571 (set under Norfolk’s name, but more probably drawn up by Ridolfi himself) allegedly represented the views of ‘the more part of the nobles of this realm’. Indeed, it had gone further, suggesting that Norfolk could muster ‘twenty thousand foot and three thousand horse’ by forty English Catholics, who were ‘well disposed and ready to act’. Lord Vaux’s name was on the list.75