God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  Before the court proceeded to judgement, Sir Walter Mildmay spoke. After rehashing the anti-papal, anti-Jesuit speech he had delivered in Parliament at the beginning of the year, he summed up the case against Vaux, Tresham and Catesby, noting two things in particular: one, that their refusal to swear to their previous denials ‘manifestly’ suggested that they had lied. ‘The other (& that the greater)’: their refusal was contemptuous and indicative of ‘an utter failing in their duties’ towards the Queen.

  Therefore, seeing the running about of these lewd Jesuits and priests is so dangerous to her Majesty and the realm, and seeing that my Lord Vaux & th’other[s] have refused to confirm by oath or otherwise their former sayings, as they were lawfully required by persons of the greatest authority under her Majesty, this doing of theirs cannot be but taken for a great offence & contempt to her Majesty and her government, and such as deserveth punishment answerable to so great a fault that others thereby may be warned not to fall into the like hereafter.

  He recommended that they be fined and returned to prison. He posted Lord Vaux’s fine at £1,000, Tresham and Catesby’s at 1,000 marks (£666) apiece. The Lords in the Star Chamber put it on record that they deemed the sentence too light. Lord Chief Baron Manwood argued that the offence proceeded from ‘malice & not ignorance or zeal’, while Francis Knollys thought it ‘participating of treason & little differing from treason’. Lord Buckhurst agreed, declaring it ‘an odious act’ that ‘concerned the state greatly’. Lord Norris branded the defendants ‘ungrateful & faithless subjects’. All the lords agreed that the fines were minimal. Lord Chancellor Bromley was the last to speak. He opined that the prisoners were ‘guilty of receiving Mr Campion’, and he noted ‘obstinacy & undutifulness’ in their refusal to swear:

  He urged against the Lord Vaux that he was at full years at her Majesty’s coming to the crown, who at that time did his homage whereto he was sworn … [but now] in the refusing to swear, he had violated the same, which was a grievous offence.

  He ordered the defendants back to prison, ‘to continue there till they had sworn’, and specified that they should not be released ‘without her Majesty’s special favour obtained first therein’.

  ‘And herewith,’ the report ends, ‘the court did arise & the prisoners were carried away.’

  A fortnight later, on 1 December 1581, Edmund Campion was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. From the scaffold, he begged the forgiveness of all those ‘whose names he had confessed upon the rack’, claiming that he had only revealed them ‘upon the commissioners’ oaths that no harm should come unto them’.23

  fn1 Robert Persons (‘Memoirs’, p. 27) claimed Tresham and Catesby as early converts of the Jesuit mission, which is to say that their Catholicism was revitalised and raised to a new level of intensity. In practical terms it meant a renewed commitment to Rome and a renunciation of outward conformity.

  fn2 The river Fleet has long since been covered, but it can still be heard in Clerkenwell, coursing underground beneath a grate in front of the Coach & Horses pub on the corner of Warner Street and Ray Street.

  4

  Worldly Woes

  … which future half-year, if it equal in sequel this now past … then shall I, wretched man, be so plunged in a sympathy of miseries that my only comfort must consist in most desired death … wherewith I shall then give end to these my endless worldly woes.

  Draft letter of Sir Thomas Tresham to

  Sir Christopher Hatton, 10 February 1582.1

  The Catholic community was quick to rally round Mary, Lady Vaux, who by a single verdict had been deprived of both husband and brother. She removed with a small staff to Southwark, taking lodging at the house of Francis Browne in St Mary Overy’s. He was the younger and more radical brother of Viscount Montague (not to be confused with the Montagus of Boughton) and was a valuable asset to the mission, having harboured priests and allowed the Jesuits to use his house for their clandestine press.2 Two priests, Stamp and Bayarde, frequently visited the house, and over the Christmas of 1581 Lady Vaux also benefited from the ministrations of Edward Osborne, a seminary priest from Kelmarsh in Northamptonshire and a distant kinsman. Assisted by the Vaux servant, Henry Tuke, he celebrated three or four illicit Masses before the lady and her household.3

  On Sunday, 7 January 1582, Osborne was secreted into Lord Vaux’s chamber in the Fleet where he said Mass before several recusant inmates. The prisoners’ ‘close’ confinement had evidently been relaxed somewhat since their recommittal. The Spanish ambassador revealed on 11 December 1581 that ‘by means of priests’ he was in ‘constant communication’ with Tresham. He added that Sir Thomas was ‘extremely prudent and circumspect in his actions’. The same could not be said for Thomas’s younger brother William, who abandoned England for France in January, leaving behind a pile of debts and a number of indiscreet letters to the Queen and the Lords of the Council. One parting shot to his former patron, Sir Christopher Hatton, accused him of being ‘like a grasshopper who flourisheth in the summer’s heat and yet is killed with the first Bartholomew dew’.4

  More ominously, William Tresham was machinating with Robert Persons over a papal–Spanish invasion of Scotland, to be followed, after the conversion of the Scots, by an invasion of England and the deposition of Queen Elizabeth. All the usual suspects – Mary Queen of Scots, her cousin the Duke of Guise, Pope Gregory XIII, Philip II of Spain and William Allen – were involved in the scheme at varying levels of commitment, but it was aborted when Guise’s Scottish ally, the Duke of Lennox, was overthrown. According to the Spanish ambassador in London, Bernardino de Mendoza, it was William Tresham and his brother Thomas who were ‘the first people to broach this subject, and it is with them that I deal, in addition to the priests who have the matter in hand’.5 It was less than circumspect and certainly less than prudent for Sir Thomas Tresham to be dabbling in overt treason from his prison cell. Such a blatant act of disloyalty should be borne in mind when considering his past and future protestations of allegiance to the Queen.

  In February 1582 Edward Osborne was captured in London by a pursuivant called Richard Topcliffe and thrown into the Clink. The priest did not have the strongest dispositionfn1 and was soon talking about the secret Masses for Lady Vaux and her husband in the Fleet. Their servant, Henry Tuke, was arrested that month and imprisoned in the Counter in Poultry.6 On 13 March the Warden of the Fleet was ordered to search the rooms of the recusant prisoners and have ‘a due regard’ to their close confinement. Two days later the Privy Council authorised the examination of Vaux, Tresham and others ‘touching a Mass said there in the Lord Vaux his chamber’.7 One of the interrogators was Topcliffe, the pursuivant who had claimed Osborne’s scalp and would take so many more in subsequent years. His name would become synonymous with cruelty, but as no details of the Fleet interview survive, it is impossible to determine whether or not he gave Lord Vaux an exhibition of the corruption and brutality that would later distinguish his reputation. The man had, apparently, a ‘most railing manner’.8

  On Wednesday, 11 April, Vaux and Tresham found themselves once again in court. Instead of the Star Chamber, it was a session of oyer and terminer at the Guildhall. In place of Sir William Catesby, who had been released on bond the previous month, there was Mr Tyrwhitt, who had attended the Mass in Vaux’s chamber. According to the Recorder of London, all three ‘did stoutly deny’ the offence, but after Osborne produced his ‘lively evidence’, they ‘did most humbly submit themselves unto her Majesty’. Each was fined a hundred marks and returned to his cell.9

  Lord Vaux’s adherence to his faith was becoming incredibly expensive. A six-month recusancy fine (£120) dating back from the previous October came into effect at the same time as the Guildhall charge. There was also the £1,000 penalty imposed by the court of Star Chamber and the mounting costs of bed and board at the Fleet. Presumably he took responsibility for the bond when Henry Tuke was released from the Counter in July 1582 and sometime that year he also promised Jas
per Heywood, the Jesuit uncle of John Donne, £100 towards his collection for the relief of Catholic prisoners.10

  With four sons (Henry, George, Edward and Ambrose) and five daughters (Eleanor, Elizabeth, Anne, Katherine and Merill), it could be said that Lord Vaux was, to use a Tresham phrase, ‘clogged with children’.11 At the beginning of 1582, only Eleanor was of independent means thanks to the widow’s jointure she had received from her short-lived union with Edward Brooksby. However, her father still owed Tresham for her marriage money. According to their 1571 agreement, Tresham was supposed to give £500 for each of the dowries of Eleanor, Elizabeth and Anne in return for a fifteen-year annuity of £100. Tresham had only stumped up £160 for Eleanor, but he had seen nothing from Vaux, ‘nor any farthing thereof, nor jot of recompense’.12 In 1582, the middle sister, Elizabeth, resolved to become a bride of Christ. She was smuggled across the Channel in March and entered the closed community of the Poor Clares in Rouen. Eleanor and Anne suspected that Tresham had put pressure on their sister to take the habit and ‘under colour of religion abused her to gain her portion to his own use’ – the entry cost of a convent being cheaper than marriage to a gentleman.13

  The previous October, Lord Vaux had been confident he could keep ‘misery from my door’, even with an estate that was ‘not in all respects as of late it was’. Despite his daughters’ assertions, it was in no small part thanks to Tresham that it continued that way after the two trials. Tresham may have wailed in February 1582 that he would soon have to ‘beg at the box’, but he was a ruthless estate manager who strived to keep on top of his finances.14 Vaux, by contrast, was careless with money and constantly in debt. Before the end of March 1582, under Tresham’s guidance, he conveyed property to his eldest son, Henry. When the Sheriff of Northamptonshire attempted to levy the fines ‘imposed upon my Lord Vaux’, he found he could not ‘by reason of estates and conveyances made by the Lord Vaux of his lands and goods to his son’. Lord Burghley ordered an enquiry, but no action seems to have been taken.15

  According to the 1581 Act of Persuasions, it was illegal to convey property for the ‘covinous purpose’ of fine evasion, but it was not easy to establish motive. Long-term loans were hard to come by and mortgages were unpopular, so property transactions were fairly common and could be incredibly complex. In the National Archives and at the Northamptonshire Record Office, there is a seemingly endless catalogue of deeds, covenants, licences and trusts that spun the Vaux patrimony into a fairly impenetrable cocoon. The twenty-one-year lease of a farm in Isham, for example, which yielded an annual rent of three pounds, six shillings and four hens, passed through the hands of at least nine men between 1580 and 1594. The names read like a roll call of the Vaux/Tresham affinity – Richard Allen of Hoxton and Rothwell (Tresham’s servant), George Robinson of Hackney (where Vaux would soon reside), Thomas Bawde (Tresham’s cousin and lawyer), John Lee (yeoman of Harrowden), Francis Pettit (executor of Lady Vaux’s will and witness of Lord Vaux’s codicil) and so on.16 Such arrangements could lead to complications, but they also helped deflect the levies.

  On 30 January 1582, Sir Henry Cobham, the English ambassador in Paris, wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham, the Principal Secretary of State:

  It is given me to understand, Sir, how that Nicolson, servant to the Lord Vaux, is come over, passing at Dover, with a great packet of letters, being gone hence to Rheims, from whence, as they say, he goeth to Rome with informations of the Lord Vaux’s troubles and estate, together with new instructions of Campion’s acts and others his confederates.17

  Evidently prison and pecuniary pain had done little to dent Lord Vaux’s enthusiasm for the mission. Nicolson may have gone about in London and Paris as a baron’s servant, but when he arrived at Rheims on 25 January, he was able to drop his cover. He was entered into the seminary register as ‘presbyter’, that is, a priest. After two days at William Allen’s college, he ‘set out for Paris with the intention of returning to England’. The following year, in March 1583, he visited Rome.

  In addition to information on Vaux’s ‘troubles and estate’, Nicolson had also delivered, ‘from his very lips, as truly as we live and breathe’, the latest news on the missionary priests incarcerated in England. Robert Johnson (executed on 28 May 1582), who had been seized in London in 1580 during a search for Campion and Persons, was allegedly racked three times and ‘suffered the pulling asunder and dislocation of all his limbs, with excruciating agony’. Luke Kirby, who would be hanged two days after Johnson, ‘had his body twisted and was then thrown onto an iron ring, so that he endured pain beyond belief throughout his entire body’.fn2 Thomas Clifton, meanwhile, was in chains at ‘that most vile prison’, Newgate, ‘with his body held upright against the wall in such a way that throughout the whole of the day he has no opportunity whatever of sitting or of moving his position’.18

  Nicolson’s ‘instructions’, as Cobham called them, had a didactic purpose and propaganda value. He informed his brethren at Rheims that when Clifton was sentenced to life imprisonment, ‘he went down on bended knees, raised his eyes and hands to heaven and repeated Alleluia, Alleluia as though he were exultantly triumphant’. Here for the missioners-in-training was an inspiring model of Christian fortitude. But the accounts were not unremittingly heroic. Fathers Johnson, Sherwin and Kirby, the Rheims registrar noted, were ‘admirable priests’, but reportedly

  had such terrible punishments and such carefully contrived tortures inflicted on them that they revealed everything they knew about the soldiers sent to Ireland by our most Holy Lord, and during the actual torturing said that they had been sent by his Holiness to England to stir the English people under the seal of confession or by other means to treason and to the taking up of arms against the monarch.

  According to one master at Rheims, accounts like Nicolson’s only made the students more hungry for combat: ‘Our brethren are so animated by those dangers that it is difficult to hold them back.’19

  The traffic between Allen’s seminary and the English Catholic community was increasing in both directions. Despite strict laws on unlicensed travel, the student body at Rheims had swollen from 55 in May 1578 to over 120 at the beginning of 1582. According to Allen, writing on 15 January 1582, ‘gentlemen and others driven away by the persecution’ were arriving ‘every day’ from England. Not all came with the intention of taking holy orders. Some sought a Catholic education and stayed on as lay students. Others paid shorter visits, ‘to have cases of conscience solved, or for instruction or consolation’. Although money was always tight, Allen was proud of his open-door policy: ‘And to show the heretics that we have not been tired out and forced by necessity to send away students, thirty of our number prefer to live on less than a crown a month with some fragments from our table rather than leave us.’20

  In April 1582, the registrar noted new arrivals:

  On the 18th two noble boys came to us from Rouen, Ambrose and Edward Vaux, the sons of the most noble baron Lord Vaux, who has been imprisoned in England for his most steadfast profession of the Catholic faith. They were at once admitted to our community.

  Ambrose and Edward, around twelve and thirteen respectively, stayed for just under a fortnight. The registrar recorded their departure on the last day of April (New Style): ‘The two Vaux boys left, whom I said above had flown to this city on the 18th of this month.’21 They had flown (advolasse) from Rouen, the historic capital of Normandy, about 130 miles west of the seminary. The verb suggests some urgency. Rouen was the location of Elizabeth Vaux’s convent. Since she had left England the previous month, it is possible that her two half-brothers had provided an escort and then sped on to visit Allen’s famous seminary. Perhaps they were on a tight schedule. But Rouen had also become a byword for Catholic intrigue. It harboured a sizeable community of disgruntled expatriates and was the current refuge of Robert Persons and his printing press. When William Tresham had fled there earlier in the year, it was made known to his brother that the Queen ‘doth greatly dislike’ th
e place and ‘feared that he cannot long continue there a good subject’.22 Persons was secretly housed in the city by its archdeacon, who was a future regional chief of the Catholic League, a militant confederation of zealots first formed in 1576 and reconstituted by the Duke of Guise in 1584. Persons’ association with the Leaguers drew him into Guise’s plans for the deposition of Queen Elizabeth. The latest scheme, over which the Spanish ambassador in London had liaised with the Treshams, was the invasion of England through Scotland. It would be abandoned upon the fall of the Duke of Lennox, but in May 1582, a month after Ambrose and Edward’s speedy journey from Rouen to Rheims, Persons set off for Paris to discuss the proposal with Allen, Guise and others.23

  Ambrose and Edward were almost certainly too young to know about any of this – even if they might perhaps have been asked to carry messages – but two days after their arrival at the seminary, Ambassador Cobham reported from Paris: ‘The Lord Vaux sent hither a man with letters to Morgan, Copley and Doctor Allen who returneth with letters from the papists.’24 A suspicious mind would have no trouble casting a sinister light on this report. Doctor William Allen, as we know, was not only the seminary founder, but also the effective leader of the English Catholics in exile. He, like Persons, was up to his neck in plots against Queen Elizabeth, though he tried to keep his intriguing separate from seminary business and claimed to have banned any discussion at Rheims of the papal bull of deposition.25

  Thomas Copley was another prominent Englishman in exile. He had converted to Catholicism early in Elizabeth’s reign and left the country in 1570. In May 1582, he would settle in Rouen. He consistently protested his temporal loyalty to Queen Elizabeth and begged to be restored to her favour, but he received a knighthood from the King of France and a pension from the King of Spain. In December 1582, the Jesuits paid him four hundred crowns ‘towards his maintenance’.fn3 26