God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  23

  In the Hole

  ‘We had prepared,’ John Gerard wrote simply.1 It still must have been a shock for the seventeen-year-old Edward, Lord Vaux, to ride home around midday on Tuesday, 12 November, and find it surrounded by one hundred armed men. William Tate of Delapré had used ‘all possible expedition’ and ‘as much secrecy as could be’ to catch the inhabitants unawares. As he informed Salisbury the following day, ‘we encountered the Lord Vaux returning out of the town, with whom we presently entered, making no stay in any place until we came unto his mother whom we found retired in her chamber through some indisposition of health.’ (Eliza had been similarly ‘indisposed’ during the Irthlingborough raid of 1599.) Upon request, she immediately surrendered the keys of her closet, cabinet, trunks and coffers. Tate secured everything, rounded up the servants and, leaving some men ‘to observe Mrs Vaux’, commenced the search:

  As we passed through every room, we shut up the doors fast & kept the keys, which I yet retain, not admitting anyone to use them without some servant of mine own to accompany them. And after we had thus proceeded, having left no place unsought, outward or inward, we returned to Mrs Vaux her closet, where we applied ourselves with vigilant eyes to discover some matter of moment for the service. But having perused the rejected and treasured papers we found nothing that in any point did concern this late occasion. Then I ransacked the coffers of linen, trunks of apparel, the young Lord’s lodging and his evidence house, to which he very honourably gave passage, and in all things disposed himself to expedite the service that he might stand justified from all imputation.

  Tate questioned Lord Vaux informally, attempting ‘by private discourse to evince something of circumstance’ and ‘by persuasion, nobly to discover what he knew in this late intended treason’. Vaux expressed his ‘vehement detestation of the treason’ and stiffly denied any knowledge of it, as did ‘the mother’, whom Tate worked on afterwards. As raids went, it had been ‘very exact’, but fairly civilised. ‘There is neither armour nor stranger in the house,’ Tate concluded, and ‘I do keep a very sufficient watch about the house night & day so that no man can enter or issue forth without our knowledge.’2

  On Day 2, Tate ‘intermitted’ the search and concentrated on questioning the servants and those caught in his cordon. Eliza’s baker, Francis Swetnam, was interesting. He said that on the evening of 5 November he had gone to Wellingborough ‘at the entreaty’ of a man called Matthew, who bought twenty pounds of gunpowder from a local mercer. Swetnam did not know Matthew’s surname, but he had claimed to be ‘a Lancashire man’ who ‘served the Lord Monteagle’. Apart from that week, when he had stayed in town ‘four or five nights’ and resorted to Eliza ‘divers times’, Swetnam had not seen him. The man was Matthew Batty, one of the three men whom Eliza was so keen to have freed from Verney’s custody. Like Huddlestone’s servant, William Thornbury, who was arrested at the same time and had previously been implicated in the Babington Plot,3 Batty seems to have been one of those stalwart recusant servants who could be very useful, but also quite damaging, to the English mission.

  Although Batty had a story about sending the gunpowder up to Lancashire by a carrier in Kettering, he admitted to Swetnam (or so the baker claimed) that he intended to keep part of it ‘for his own use’ and part ‘to bestow amongst his friends’.4 The powder purchased late on 5 November would have been too late for Westminster, but not, perhaps, for the Midlands rebellion, or so the investigators might have wondered. Batty’s version of events did not look good for Francis Swetnam:

  Mathew Batty saith that he, serving the Lady Monteagle and living at Mrs Vaux’s and Sir Francis Tresham’s some few days before Allhallow-tide, did on Tuesday the vth of November buy a barrel of gunpowder, which he left with Francis, Mrs Vaux her man.5

  Swetnam was taken to London for further questioning, ‘but denieth that he was ever at any Mass, or that he knoweth any priest, and cannot deliver any other material thing to be set down’. He admitted that he was a recusant, ‘but will now come to the Church, for that he had rather adventure his own soul, than loosen his five children’. (At least one son was safe in the Catholic fold: John Swetnam had been ordained abroad the previous year and would eventually return as a Jesuit missionary.)6

  Tate’s cordon, which extended three miles from Harrowden Hall, netted its first good catch on 13 November in the person of John Laithwood, a Lancashire man in his early twenties, who was approaching from the south. ‘At his first examination,’ Tate reported, ‘he was insufferably insolent, but on the morrow he became of a better-tempered spirit.’ He said he was returning home to Lancashire, via Kettering, and that he was a Catholic who had neither gone to Church nor travelled overseas. Tate was dubious: ‘these priests & Jesuits masking under other habits, make me become jealous of any unknown to me professing themselves Catholics.’7 He was right to be suspicious. Laithwood was a priest and had been staying at Harrowden Hall before the crisis. John Gerard tells his story:

  A few days before, when we first got word of the plot, he had left at my suggestion in order to see Father Garnet and ask him what we should do … On his way he was captured but managed to escape. Seized on the road and brought to an inn, he was to have been examined and committed to prison at once. But entering the inn, he took off his cloak and sword and walked out again to the stables as if he were going to attend to his horse and take him to drink. There was a stream near the inn and he asked the stable boy to lead his horse there at once. He went with him and when he reached the stream, he turned to the boy.

  ‘Go and get the hay ready,’ he said, ‘and put down some straw for my horse to lie on. I’ll be back myself when he has finished drinking.’ The boy returned to the stable without further thought. Meanwhile, the Father mounted his horse, spurred him into the stream and swam him across to the other side. As his cloak and sword were lying in the inn, his stratagem was unsuspected until they realized he had been away a long time and the boy told them what had happened. Immediately they set off in pursuit. But they were too late. The good Father knew the countryside well and reached a Catholic house before nightfall. There he hid for a few days, but when he found he could not get in touch with Father Garnet, he tried to return to me, thinking the danger had passed. He avoided Charybdis to fall into the clutches of Scylla.

  Laithwood was sent to London for interrogation, ‘but his priesthood could not be proved and his brother was allowed to pay a sum down for his release’.8

  On Day 3 – Thursday, 14 November – William Tate, frustrated by his previous ‘unprofitable endeavours’, resumed the search of Harrowden Hall and concentrated on finding Gerard. He ‘left no place unsought’ where he thought ‘any possibility might be of such secret retreat’ and finally came to ‘the place where this hidden serpent should seem to lurk’. There was nothing to give it away, even to the ‘most exquisite inquisitor’, but Tate ‘insisted long upon that part of the house, upon some intimation given that there was a secret receptacle in the roof’. He used ‘all sedulous industry to examine every corner’ and threatened to break through the wall if the hide was not revealed. ‘After some debate,’ Eliza’s butler relented, ‘whereat I entered,’ Tate reported,

  and searched the same and found it the most secret place that ever I saw & so contrived that it was without all possibility to be discovered by any man that knew it not. And there I found many popish books & other things incident to their superstitious religion, but no man in it. And I am well assured that none could evade out thence after I entered the house, having guarded it day & night, round about & within, myself & my servants keeping the keys of all the doors from my first entrance.9

  ‘I was in my hiding-place,’ Gerard admitted in his Autobiography four years later.

  I could sit down all right, but there was hardly room to stand. However, I did not go hungry, for every night food was brought to me secretly and at the end of four or five days, when the rigour of the search had relaxed slightly, my friends came at
night and took me out and warmed me by a fire.10

  These friends also furnished Gerard with the details that can now be read in his Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot – how ‘the house was beset with at least a hundred men’, how Eliza ‘willed them to use their pleasure’, how they probed the cellars and ‘dark corners’ with candles:

  They searched every cabinet and box in her own closet for letters, in hope to find some little scroll that might show Father Gerard had been an actor in this treason or that she or her son had received some knowledge of it. But they found not with all this diligence the least tittle of advantage in the matter, insomuch that the chief man in commission for this search (though an earnest puritan) yet sent a very full information unto the Council that he had found the house most clear, the young Lord and his mother very respective unto authority – admitting any kind of search or inquiry that he could desire – and yet very confident in their own innocency; and that he found not any preparation in the house for war or any show at all that they had the least knowledge of any such attempt intended.11

  It is not known how Gerard came to read Tate’s first report, but it seems that there were no hard feelings between searcher and searched: just over six years later William Tate would stand trustee for Lord Vaux in a deed of conveyance.12 ‘After nine days,’ Gerard concluded in his Autobiography, ‘the search party withdrew. They thought I could not possibly have been there all that time without being discovered.’13

  Tate had to entrust the second half of the search to his deputies, for on 15 November he received orders to take Eliza to London. They were ‘ill accommodated of coach and horses for so sudden a journey’ and made ‘slow, & troublesome’ progress. They reached London on the night of 18 November and Eliza was immediately questioned.14

  She was tired, but ready. She did not know Gerard the priest. Catesby and Digby had visited ‘about 6 or 8 weeks last’. One ‘Greene’ came with Catesby ‘and a day or two before there came in company with certain gentlewomen one called Darcy’. She first heard of ‘the broils at London’ from Sir George Fermor on Wednesday, 6 November, ‘at night after the attempt should have been done’. He had come ‘by accident’ and ‘the rumour at Towcester was that five Scots men should have done it’. She ‘remembereth not the certain contents’ of her Tottenham letter, but Agnes Wenman told her that she was keeping it safe ‘for both their discharges’. She said that Henry Huddlestone had told her about his ride with Catesby on 5 November and had ‘apprehended that all was not well’, but had not pressed Catesby for the reason.15

  Double double, toil and trouble. At least half of Eliza’s testimony was a bubbling cauldron of lies and the Council suspected as much. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, first performed in the months following the discovery of the plot, is a gunpowder play as well as ‘the Scottish Play’. The porter’s speech on the ‘farmer’ (an alias of Henry Garnet) is oft-quoted:

  Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.

  (Act 2, Scene 3)

  But there are other equivocators in the play, including the duplicitous hostess, Lady Macbeth16 and the witches with their strange, ambiguous prophecies:

  MACBETH: How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags, What is’t you do?

  WITCHES: A deed without a name.

  MACBETH: I conjure you by that which you profess, Howe’er you come to know it, answer me.

  (Act 4, Scene 1)

  We cannot know if Eliza Vaux informed Shakespeare’s play in any meaningful way, but John Gerard’s Gunpowder Plot Narrative is a different matter. He wrote it in English (unlike his Latin Autobiography) soon after the plot in order to clear himself, the Jesuits and their allies of the stain of complicity. His account of Eliza’s examination must surely have come from the witness herself, for they were very soon reunited. It is authentic, therefore, if not necessarily the whole truth:

  [She] was examined before the whole Council, where she did clear herself fully from all cause of suspicion in that treason and affirmed constantly that, although she were a firm Catholic and so would live and die by the grace of God, yet that fact [the plot] she did as much mislike and condemn as themselves; and that so she had been taught by those that had care of her soul.

  They urged her that she knew Father Gerard and had received him many times into her house. She answered she hoped none could justly accuse her that she had received either him or any other priest and that she would not accuse herself, the same being a penal law. They insisted she was bound to tell of him, for that he was known to be a traitor and a chief plotter of this action. She answered with serious protestation that she had never the least cause to think so of him (if she did know him, as they presupposed) and said that she had heard so much good of the man (though she did not know him)fn1 that she would pawn her whole estate, yea, and her life also, that he was not guilty of that plot, nor justly to be touched with it.

  Then the Council produced a letter which she had written unto the Sheriff of Warwickshire, her cousin, for the delivery of two priests, who were taken passing through the country after the stirs were begun … She answered that she wrote for them indeed and that she desired much to set them free, but she knew them not to be priests but took them for Catholic gentlemen that came sometimes to her house, as others did, and looked nothing like priests.

  Then finally some of the Council said that whereas she was now in the King’s mercy to live or die, she should have her life and lose nothing of her estate if she would tell where Gerard the Jesuit was to be found. She answered she knew not, but if she did know, she would not tell it them to save her life and many lives.

  ‘Why then,’ said they, ‘Lady, you must die.’

  ‘Why then, I will die, my Lords,’ said she, ‘for I will never do the other.’17

  Gerard included a few piquant details to this scene in his later Autobiography. Instead of ‘some of the Council’ urging Eliza to save herself, it was one formerly friendly lord of the Council,fn2 who ‘courteously accompanied her to the door’ and said:

  ‘Have a little pity on yourself and your children and tell them what they wish to know. If you don’t, you will have to die.’

  In a loud voice she answered:

  ‘Then I would rather die, my Lord.’

  As she spoke, the door was opened and her servants waiting outside heard her. They all burst into tears.18

  It was all good dramatic stuff, but the mother of Lord Vaux was not going to die for harbouring the priest who couldn’t be found or for writing the letter that couldn’t be read, any more than she would for having friends round for supper or for lying about when and from whom she had heard about the news in London. The information against her, which emerged more fully over the coming weeks, was embarrassing, but hardly substantial. Besides, as she impishly informed Salisbury, not many people would ‘put their lives & estates in the power & secrecy of a woman’. Even Lady Tasborough admitted that, while scenting treason in Eliza’s letter, she had considered it, ‘coming from a woman, to be of no great consequence’.19

  Eliza Vaux joined Dorothy Wright, Martha Percy, Elizabeth Rookwood and others in a list of ‘wives & kinswomen of the traitors who it was not thought fit to commit to prisons’.20 They were dispatched to various aldermen of the city, the lot of Eliza Vaux falling on Sir John Swynnerton, who had the charge of the impost on wines. It was a wretched time for them all, even those wives allowed to stay in the country. Lady Digby’s house was stripped ‘to the very floor of the great parlour’ and even her underwear was seized. ‘Wholly destitute’, she resorted to sending begging letters to Salisbury, as did Eliza’s recent guest, Dorothy Huddlestone, ‘great with child’ and desperate for ‘relief to sustain the present wants of myself and my poor comfortless infants’.21

  Eliza’s butler, baker and other servants were committed to several prisons and examined ‘with many menacings’.22 Her younger sister Jane, Lady
Lovell was questioned on 19 November. She admitted that in the months prior to the plot she had been visited by Digby (‘my Lord Vaux with him’ once), Catesby (‘long of her acquaintance’) and other suspect persons. Her servants were examined, her lodgings were ransacked and she was placed under house arrest. She, a widow, and her five- and eight-year-old daughters were put ‘in much fear’; she was not used to such ‘rude & unmannerly’ treatment, she told Salisbury, and she begged ‘the privilege of a poor gentlewoman’ to be relieved of the searches of ‘every base constable’.fn3 23

  The seventeen-year-old Lord Vaux was also questioned, though with more sensitivity than was shown to his outraged aunt. He was examined ‘alone’ by Salisbury and, according to Gerard, ‘cleared himself so by his answer that he was no further restrained, but only commanded to stay in the city of London’. The news soon leaked and there were rumours that the young Lord Vaux was in the Tower. One contemporary diarist, the Puritan Member for Honiton, listed him as one of five noblemen who had, ‘ut fama est’, been privy to the plot.24 It did not help that Fawkes and Vaux were so similar in pronunciation and, indeed, often in spelling – the form ‘Guy Faux’ was common; sometimes even ‘Guy Vaux’ was written. Reporting on 19 November 1605, Sir Edward Hoby wrote of John Johnson in the cellar: ‘his name now is turned to Guy Vaux alias Faukes.’25 No blood relationship has been discovered between Fawkes of York and Vaux of Harrowden.

  Eliza’s ‘great and tried friend’, Sir Everard Digby, tried to protect her and Gerard. In letters smuggled out of his Tower cell, he briefed his wife on his examinations. ‘By that name, I did not know him,’ he had replied when Salisbury had first challenged him about Gerard, ‘nor at Mrs Vaux’s, as he said I did, for I never saw a priest there.’ When, later,