God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  The following month Burghley was quick to make his own discovery: another murder plot, this time involving several Irish soldiers from the renegade regiment of Sir William Stanley (the same unit of which Henry Walpole had been chaplain). As far as Garnet was concerned, this plot was ominous because an English Jesuit in exile, William Holt, was accused of recruiting the assassins. One of the Irishmen also claimed that Walpole had known about the plan and had advised him in Calais to cross the Channel in secret. Again, though, all was not quite as it seemed: the confessions of the assassins-designate – so swift, so voluntary, so many of them – kept changing. Two of the Irishmen had been known to Burghley for nearly two years. One he had not deemed a significant threat; the other was an informant and probable plant. Whatever this was, it was not a state of emergency.35

  It is an axiom of ‘spiery’ (as the Elizabethans called it) that if one presses hard enough for a certain kind of information, and pays sufficiently well, it might be received. Prejudices and political ambitions have no place in intelligence work,fn7 but in the sixteenth century they sometimes intruded and the result was an occasional – and occasionally deliberate – blurring of perception and reality. Yet it must always be remembered that amidst the wild rants and inchoate posturing of angry young men, which was a fair constant for much of Elizabeth’s reign, there were indeed real plots to kill her and invade the realm. There were Catholics, and not just from Stanley’s regiment, who were prepared to kill as well as die for their faith, and as events elsewhere in Europe had shown, assassins were not bound to fail. The recent performance of Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris at the Rose Playhouse in Southwark reminded Londoners of Catholic capability. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the consequence of the revelations of early 1594 was a closer watch on the ports and a strike on suspicious targets, the most suspicious being the recusant community in London and, within that community, the English superior of the Society of Jesus. It should not be forgotten either that one of the Queen’s most determined enemies, Robert Persons, S.J., was Garnet’s regular correspondent at this time, as well as the son of ‘the old woman’ who lived under the Vaux sisters’ roof.

  On Friday, 15 March 1594, teams led by Justice Richard Young descended on all known recusant properties in and around the capital. They were quick to proclaim the night a success – a haul of Catholic materials and manuscripts were seized along with several laymen in a house in Golden Lane, Clerkenwell. Garnet had recently stayed at this ‘notorious den of priests’ and John Gerard had been on his way there that night until Garnet had ‘importunately stayed him’ at his suburban retreat four or five miles from London. The priests remained safe, but some of their ‘friends and chiefest instruments’, including Richard Fulwood, who ran Garnet’s smuggling operation, were taken. ‘Some of them have been tortured,’ Garnet wrote.36

  Gerard moved on to Braddocks, the home of William Wiseman in Essex, but before daybreak on Easter Monday he heard galloping hooves. His narrative of the raid, even translated from the original Latin, shows what a fine storyteller he was:

  I was hardly tucked away when the pursuivants broke down the door and burst in. They fanned out through the house, making a great racket. The first thing they did was to shut up the mistress of the house in her own room with her daughters, then they locked up the Catholic servants in different places in the same part of the house. This done, they took possession of the place (it was a large house) and began to search everywhere, even lifting up the tiles of the roof to examine underneath them and using candles in the dark corners. When they found nothing, they started knocking down suspicious-looking places. They measured the walls with long rods and if the measurements did not tally, they pulled down the section that they could not account for. They tapped every wall and floor for hollow spots, and on sounding anything hollow they smashed it in.37

  Throughout the four-day search for him, Gerard hid in an Owen-built priest-hole beneath the chapel fireplace. He had a couple of biscuits and the quince jam that Mrs Wiseman had thrust upon him at the last minute. On the final evening the officers lit a fire over the false hearth, sending a shower of hot embers into the hide, but Gerard remained silent and undiscovered. Three weeks later, having returned to London, he was captured with Nicholas Owen. This time, ‘there was no escape’.38

  The summer brought more grief for Garnet – a priest and three laymen executed in Dorchester; several youths bound for the Continent taken from their boats. ‘One danger followed close on the heels of the next,’ he reported,

  so that from that time hardly a week passed without some great hazard or some exceptional loss. And along with these hardships were the watches kept on the ports, the continual opening of letters, the searching of private houses, so that we were scarcely permitted to breathe.39

  They were, at least, free. John Gerard, on the other hand, was taken to the Counter prison in the Poultry and placed in a cell next to the privy. The stench was ‘not slight’ and kept him awake at night. He was examined by Justice Young and Richard Topcliffe and put in irons. ‘When the prisoners below started singing lewd songs and Geneva psalms,’ he related, ‘I was able to drown their noise with the less unpleasant sound of my clanking chains.’ After about three months he was transferred to the Clink, where, for now, we leave him. ‘He will be stout,’ wrote Garnet, ‘I doubt not.’40

  fn1 Robert Persons, Joseph Creswell, Thomas Stapleton and Richard Verstegan all wrote ‘evil counsellor’ tracts in response to the proclamation. Persons’ rejoinder, popularly known as ‘Philopater’, was funded by Philip II and appeared in several editions in 1592–3. His argument that Catholics could use violence to remove a heretical ruler did his co-religionists in England no favours.

  fn2 At the execution (for harbouring) of the recusant gentleman Swithin Wells on 10 December 1591, Topcliffe’s taunt that papists ‘follow the Pope and his Bulls; believe me, I think some bulls begot you all’, was parried by Wells with: ‘If we have bulls to our fathers, thou hast a cow to thy mother.’ Wells immediately apologised, but his unguarded swipe at the Queen might have been more representative of private recusant opinion than the formal protestations of loyalty would suggest. (Questier, ‘Elizabeth and the Catholics’, p. 73)

  fn3 Perhaps there weren’t quite as many Catholic assassins out there as the government feared; or perhaps Topcliffe was, perversely, too good an asset, in terms of negative publicity, to lose.

  fn4 Ben Jonson is said to have stated that had he written Southwell’s poem ‘The Burning Babe’, ‘he would have been content to destroy many’ of his own works. (ODNB)

  fn5 Horatio Bussino, the Venetian ambassador’s chaplain in 1617–18, thought the city ‘better deserves to be called Lorda (filth) than Londra (London)’. (Razzell, Two Travellers, pp. 116, 177)

  fn6 High lawyer: a full-time highwayman. Ruffler: a beggar claiming to be a discharged soldier seeking employment. Clapperdudgeon: a beggar born. Whipjack: a beggar claiming to have suffered losses at sea by shipwreck or piracy. Dummerer: a real or pretended mute. Counterfeit crank: a vagrant pretending to be epileptic. Prigger of prancers: a horse thief, usually at fairs and markets. (Salgādo, The Elizabethan Underworld, pp. 122–30)

  fn7 Under section 2(2)(b) of the Security Service Act 1989, the primary legislation which put MI5 on a statutory basis and acknowledged the agency’s continued existence, the Director General is required to ensure that ‘the Service does not take any action to further the interests of any political party’. A similar provision applies to MI6 by virtue of section 2(2)(b) of the Intelligence Services Act 1994, although such provision does not prevent MI6 from taking action to further the interests of political parties outside the UK, providing such action is in accordance with the UK national interest.

  14

  Hot Holy Ladies

  If we are to believe John Wilson’s dedicatory epistle in The Treasure of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons, Anne Vaux was honourable and virtuous and absorbed by ‘pious and devout ex
ercises’. She embraced chastity with a ‘sincerity of heart and virtuous manner of life’ and was as close to perfection as was possible for a laywoman. Her ‘virtuous disposition’ was also lauded by Michael Walpole, S.J. (Henry Walpole’s brother), who dedicated his translation of the life of the Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola, to Anne, ‘before all others’, because she had ‘deserved so well of his children living in our afflicted country’.1

  Anne’s allegiance to the Jesuits also inspired criticism, even in priestly circles. In his Quodlibets, or, Decacordon of Ten Quodlibeticall Questions Concerning Religion and State (1602), a secular priest called William Watson launched a vicious attack on the women who ‘mightily dote and run riot after’ Jesuit priests. Such ‘hot holy ladies’, he argued, were seduced by their confessors and turned into ‘parrots, pies or jangling jays, to prattle up and down all that they hear and see’. Watson claimed that there was ‘a whole brown dozen’ of these ‘silly gentlewomen’ about London. Earlier in his tract he identified three of them:

  Here a Lady A. (otherwise truly religious and honourable), there a Mistress A.V., a seeming saintly votary, and every where a whipping Mistress H. (whose tongue goeth like the clack of a mill), so very unwomanly, much more so uncatholic-like do taunt, gibe and despise the secular priests.2

  There was more to this than misogyny. ‘Mistress A.V.’ and her friends had involved themselves in the intra-clerical factionalism that threatened to implode the English mission. With no clear leadership or defined structure, and one group of priests who favoured episcopacy having to work alongside another whose activities cut across parochial boundaries, there were bound to be rivalries and disputes. The Jesuits had arrived after the secular priests and immediately ruffled feathers. They were accused of being provocative, publicity-seeking and aggressively uncompromising. Their refusal to allow any kind of conformity to the established Church (reinforced by Garnet’s An Apology Against the Defence of Schism and A Treatise of Christian Renunciation, both of 1593) was subversive and counter-productive. Their initiatives were flashy, theatrical and morally questionable. They poached all the plum chaplaincies, diverted communal funds into their coffers and, in seeking to appropriate traditional devotions like the rosary, sought to dominate every aspect of the mission. They were proud, patronising and rather too comfortable in their gentleman’s disguises. They meddled in politics and knew Machiavelli’s works better than their breviaries. Their founder was a militant Spaniard and their ‘chief firebrand’, Robert Persons, pushed for a Spanish invasion and favoured a Habsburg over a Stuart succession. ‘In their hearts and practices’ they were ‘altogether Spanish’.3 They were traitors to their country.

  The Jesuits hurled many of the same calumnies at their secular critics.fn1 By condoning occasional conformity and seeking compromise with the government (which sensibly took full advantage of the dispute), they had become politicised. They lived lushly and lazily, languishing in their livings and not doing enough to reconcile the wider community. They were cowardly, cynical and small-minded. Jealous of Jesuit successes, they made the Society the scapegoat of all the Catholics’ ills. They lacked proselytising zeal and all too often apostatised. They pandered to heretics and were morally turpid. They were traitors to their faith.

  Much of the invective spewed out after the death, in 1594, of William Allen, who had commanded respect from all sides and somehow managed to prevent the principal factions from behaving too abominably. Troubles at the English College in Rome and at Wisbech Castle, near Ely, where many priests were detained, were followed in 1598 by Rome’s appointment of an archpriest to assume authority over the secular clergy in England. The Jesuits readily accepted archpriest George Blackwell, unsurprisingly, since the Pope required him to consult Garnet on major issues. A group of secular priests who saw Blackwell as a Jesuit puppet refused to accept ‘the foisting of that poor simple fellow Master Blackwell into an office and authority about whose meaning he knew little’.4 They appealed to Rome for a bishop free of Jesuit influence. Thomas Lister, S.J., labelled them schismatic. William Watson, prominent among the ‘appellants’, called the Jesuit faction a ‘lewd brood’ – and so the controversy rumbled on to the amusement of the government and the edification of none.fn2 5

  Although legitimate concerns were aired, not least about the government of priests in England and the relationship between Catholics and the state, much ink was spilt on unseemly squabbles like the competition over who had the most martyrs. There were also some petty personal attacks. Watson, playing on Robert Persons’ name, accused him of being the bastard son of a country parson. (Garnet quietly investigated the charge and declared it unfounded.) Persons retaliated by calling Watson, who had a squint, ‘so wrong-shapen and of so bad and blinking aspect as he looketh nine ways at once’.6

  As Jesuit superior, Garnet was naturally a target of what he called ‘the lash of a scorpion’s tail’. Students who resented the Society’s management of the English College at Rome branded him ‘a little wretch of a man, marked out to die, who day and night thinks of nothing save the rack and gibbet’.7 It transpires from Watson’s tract of 1602 that Anne Vaux and her ‘foolish virgin’ friends were apt to defend their confessors aggressively. For every critic of a Jesuit, he wrote, ‘you shall have a young Jesuitess ready to fly in his face’ and accuse him of being ‘a spy, an heretic, or at least an unsound Catholic, attainted in his good name ever after’. There was the usual misogynistic paradox here, for while Watson dismissed such ‘women tattlers’ in stereotypical fashion – ‘they know not what a faction means, but as I said before like parrots speak as they be taught’ – he also acknowledged their influence: they were ‘a stain to that sex and a dishonour to womanhood’. Likewise, Christopher Bagshaw, in A Sparing Discoverie of Our English Jesuits (1601), mocked the ‘poor souls’ who had been flattered into fondness for the Society. At the same time, he divulged that some had been admitted into the Jesuits’ secret councils and likened them to ‘sirens’ with powers of enchantment and destruction.8

  *

  ‘Lawsuits between Catholics for any cause whatever are scarcely ever heard of,’ an idealistic young priest had written in 1582. ‘If a controversy arises, it is left wholly to the arbitration of the priests.’9 Someone neglected to show Anne Vaux and Sir Thomas Tresham this roseate image of Catholic harmony. In Michaelmas term, 1593, Anne sued Tresham for her marriage portion.

  It will be remembered that Tresham, whose sister was Anne’s stepmother, had stood trustee for the dowries of Anne and her two sisters in 1571. According to the agreement, he was to provide each girl with £500 upon her marriage in return for instalments of £100 every year for fifteen years. The eldest daughter, Eleanor, had married Edward Brooksby and received just £160 of her share. The second sister, Elizabeth, had become a nun and seems to have received £300. The youngest sister, Anne, in need of cash for rents, bribes, travel, prison costs and everything else that she contributed to the mission, decided it was high time she received her dues. Presumably she thought it not unreasonable, as an effective bride of Christ, to request the sum that her father had intended for her future; if she could not receive it, she at least wanted it returned.

  Tresham refused: theoretically Anne was only entitled to the money upon her marriage or her father’s death; practically, she could not have it because Lord Vaux had failed to pay the full and regular instalments. Tresham nevertheless claimed that he would have dealt ‘bountifully’ with Anne had she not resorted to ‘her clamorous bill of complaint’.10

  It is difficult to get to the bottom of the dispute because the evidence is one-sided. Only Tresham’s notes survive and, as his letters and more than twenty other lawsuits reveal, he was very good at being aggrieved. He liked to be in control of Vaux affairs and was irked by the ingratitude of the next generation, who inevitably pulled away from his ‘kinsmanliest counselling’.11 (Anne was not the only one, as we shall see.) He also resented the intrusion of Anne’s ‘uncle judge’, Francis Beaumont, who st
outly defended the interests of his late sister’s children in this and other respects.

  Anne’s challenge was also offensive to Tresham because she was a relative and a woman and a Catholic – or at least, in a sentence loaded with spite, he wrote that she was ‘reputed a zealous and virtuous catholic maiden, in exterior show renouncing (as it were) the world, to live a Christian virgin life’.12 There are shades here of William Watson’s ‘seeming saint’ jibe at Anne and it is true that she pursued Tresham with the same ruthlessness with which she defended the Jesuits. Her resort to the Court of Chancery, a public institution of a persecuting Protestant state, was, Tresham opined, just about the most ignominious and ‘irreligious’ action that one Catholic could take against another. Worse, she had paid her lawyers with money that he had lent her and she had persisted in her suit even after he was made a close prisoner in the Fleet, ‘she joying whereat true Catholics ought to have had Christian commiseration’. This ‘too too passionate and scandalous course’, wrote Tresham, revealed Anne to be ‘senseless’, devoid of charity and cut off from the body of the Catholic community. ‘I sooner would have begged my bread,’ he protested, ‘than in such sort have my fellow’s bane.’13

  While the lawyers were arguing and Tresham was stewing in his cell, Anne and Eleanor travelled up and down the country threatening and abusing him with ‘ingrate, injurious, and infamous speeches’.14 The most dangerous allegation, which was presented in court, was that Tresham had married the middle Vaux girl off ‘to a monastery instead of a man, and there relieved and maintained her in a seminary beyond the seas’. Anne’s point was that Tresham had duped her sister to gain her marriage portion, but in exposing his contempt for the Queen’s proclamation against the maintenance of children beyond the seas, she embroiled him in ‘a matter of state’. Thus, he accused her of ‘bloodily’ seeking his life.15