God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (12 page)

It is impossible to know for sure – arguably all Jesuit conduct before and after the release of the ‘Brag’ was reactive to the peculiarities of time and place – but one thing is certain: the moment the ‘Brag’ and its invitation to a disputatious showdown were released, the mission outlined by the Jesuit General in Rome mutated. Whether Campion and Persons ever meant to court publicity, it is what they would get. Their persistent cry of ‘religion not politics’ would be matched by the plangent government charge, ‘politics not religion’. The louder and longer this counterpoint was played, the harder it became to separate one part from the other.

Campion was in the countryside when his ‘Brag’ was released. He and Persons had left Hoxton early in August 1580, equipped by Gilbert and his men with horses, money, disguises and massing equipment. The Jesuit superior headed for Gloucestershire, then Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Derbyshire. ‘Although all conversation with us is forbidden by proclamation,’ Persons reported, we ‘are yet most earnestly invited everywhere; many take long journeys only to speak to us and put themselves and their fortunes entirely in our hands.’
³⁷
But there was always the threat of unwanted guests. Persons vividly described the nervous tension in the houses of his hosts:

Sometimes, when we are sitting merrily at table, conversing familiarly on matters of faith and devotion (for our talk is generally of such things), there comes a hurried knock at the door like that of a pursuivant. All start up and listen – like deer when they hear the huntsmen. We leave our food and commend ourselves to God in a brief ejaculation, nor is word or sound heard till the servants come to say what the matter is. If it is nothing, we laugh at our fright.
³⁸

Campion began his ministry in Berkshire and continued through Oxfordshire and into Northamptonshire, where, after an absence of
more than a decade, he returned to Harrowden Hall. He was welcomed back by Lord Vaux, ‘by whom I am dearly loved and whom I particularly revere’.
³⁹
In a letter written to the Society General in November, Campion reported on his ministry:

I ride about some piece of the country every day. The harvest is wonderful great. On horseback I meditate my sermon; when I come to the house, I polish it. Then I talk with such as come to speak with me, or hear their confessions. In the morning, after Mass, I preach. They hear with exceeding greediness and very often receive the sacrament …

I cannot long escape the hands of the heretics. The enemies have so many eyes, so many tongues, so many scouts and crafts. I am in apparel to myself very ridiculous. I often change it and my name also. I read letters sometimes myself that in the first front tell news that Campion is taken, which noised in every place where I come, so filleth my ears with the sound thereof that fear itself hath taken away all fear.
⁴⁰

Due in no small part to the efforts of hosts and helpers like William and Henry Vaux, Campion managed to evade the authorities. ‘I find many neglecting their own security to have only care of my safety,’ he wrote. Lord Vaux imperilled his liberty and property by giving Campion a place to sleep and preach.
⁴¹
The congregations at Harrowden may not have numbered as high as the sixty-strong gathering at Lyford Grange in Berkshire the following year, but any extraordinary comings and goings were a risk, especially in a county where there was a preponderance of Puritans, and to a house where the famous Edmund Campion had once taught in the schoolroom.

‘Threatening edicts come forth against us daily,’ wrote Campion. In August 1580, in the wake of the conflict in Ireland, many prominent Catholic gentlemen were rounded up and confined. Close associates of Lord Vaux, including his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Tresham, were placed on Burghley’s list of untrustworthy recusants.
⁴²
On 13 November, Ralph Sherwin, one of the seminary priests who had accompanied the Jesuits on their journey from Rome, was captured mid-sermon only two days after sharing a fire with Persons against the ‘extreme cold’ of the November night.
⁴³
‘The persecution rages most cruelly,’ Campion wrote in his dispatch from an unknown location that month.
‘The house where I am is sad; no other talk, but of death, flight, prison or spoil of their friends. Nevertheless, they proceed with courage.’
⁴⁴

With the coming of the Jesuits, the rules of engagement between the government and the Catholic community changed. In the face of such a public challenge, and with recusant numbers increasing, the Queen and Council could no longer maintain the unofficial ‘don’t-ask-don’t-tell’ position of the past twenty years.
⁴⁵
‘The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun,’ Campion had trumpeted in his ‘Brag’, but he had only reckoned the expense of the mission for himself and his fellow Jesuits. He knew that it might lead to the rack and the rope. It was a price that he, already ‘a dead man to this world’, could pay ‘cheerfully’. But for those English Catholics trying to balance their civil and religious obligations, the accounting procedure was more complicated. They had not vowed to be poor or chaste or obedient only to the Pope. They rather enjoyed the ‘wealth, honour, pleasures and other worldly felicities’ that Campion had renounced.
⁴⁶
They had families to support and houses to run. They had, in short, more to lose than their lives.

Campion was not concerned with household accounts or worldly attachments. He left Harrowden Hall and continued on his circuit, all the while insisting upon absolute recusancy and agitating for a public debate. Back in Northamptonshire, on 22 September 1580, Lord Vaux signed a certificate of musters at Rothwell.
⁴⁷
Christmas came and went and as the New Year approached, he dusted off his parliamentary robes and prepared to journey to Westminster. Twenty-five miles away at Apethorpe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, polished a speech that would set the agenda for a new bill. Once passed, the lay Catholics of England would have to reckon new expenses. They were about to realise quite how much the enterprise was going to cost.

^fn1
Those priests not part of a religious order like the Jesuits or the Benedictines.

2

To be a Perfect Catholic

Parliament met on 16 January 1581. Lord Vaux took his seat four days later and was in regular attendance till the close of session on 18 March.
¹
On 25 January, Sir Walter Mildmay rose in the Commons and delivered an excoriating speech against the ‘implacable malice of the Pope’, the insolence of the ‘stiff-necked Papist’, and the ‘hypocrites naming themselves Jesuits, a rabble of vagrant friars newly sprung up and coming through the world to trouble the Church of God’. He depicted the Jesuits’ antics – ‘creeping into the houses and familiarities of men of behaviour and reputation’ – as part of a strategy ‘to corrupt the realm with false doctrine’ and ‘under that pretence, to stir sedition to the peril of her Majesty and her good subjects’.
²

The Queen’s ‘favourable and gentle manner of dealing’ with her Catholic subjects had failed. Indeed, the Jesuit mission had spawned ‘many, yea very many’ more recusants. New legislation was required to meet the renewed threat. The result was ‘An Act to retain the Queen’s Majesty’s Subjects in their due Obedience’.
³
Also known as the ‘Act of Persuasions’, it increased the scope of the 1571 law against Catholic conversions. From thenceforth, anyone attempting, ‘by any ways or means’, to ‘absolve, persuade or withdraw’ any of the Queen’s subjects from their ‘natural obedience’ to her or, ‘
for that intent
’,
^fn1
to persuade them to forsake her Church for ‘the Romish religion’, would be committing high treason. Anyone who was reconciled to Rome would also be adjudged a traitor. Anyone who assisted in, or had any
knowledge of, a treasonable act of reconciliation and failed to report it within twenty days was to be found guilty of misprision (non-disclosure) of treason.

The saying and hearing of Mass would be punishable by fines of 200 marks and 100 marks respectively; both offences also incurred the sentence of a year’s imprisonment. Anyone over the age of sixteen who refused to go to church would be charged £20 a month. If they persisted in their ‘obstinacy’ for a year, they would have to post a bond of £200 ‘at the least’ for good behaviour. This amounted to a massive £460 per annum.
^fn2
Failure to pay within three months of conviction would lead to imprisonment until conformity or the settlement of the account. Further sections of the Act concerned the recusant schoolmaster (banned from teaching, imprisoned for a year, his employer fined £10 for every month of service retained) and against the conveyancing of property for the ‘covinous purpose’ of evading the fines. This was meant to prevent the common recourse to trusts. Any such transactions made since the beginning of Parliament were declared void. Another clause dealt with the owners of private chapels. They were exempted from the penalties of nonconformity if they used the right service book and provided they put in an appearance at church four times a year.

The provisions of the Act had been hammered out in eighteen meetings by a joint committee of Lords and Commons. Early drafts had been a great deal harsher, but that was small comfort to the Catholics of England who faced an unprecedented onslaught on their social and financial standing. The maximum penalty for a year’s recusancy was roughly equivalent to the annual income of a landed gentleman.
⁴
If successfully enforced, the Act would confront all but the wealthiest recusants with a stark choice: conformity or ruin.

In May 1581 Lord Vaux was cited as a recusant. It was a sign of the government’s determination to enforce the new legislation. A more discreet approach to the problem of the recusant nobility had been attempted the previous year. In a dispatch to Rome in November 1580, Robert Persons had mentioned an offer, ‘lately proposed to certain noblemen’, that required just one church outing a year with ‘a previous
protestation that they came not to approve of their religion or doctrines, but only to show an outward obedience to the Queen’. Persons had been delighted to report that ‘all most constantly refused’.
⁵

The recusant grandee presented a particular problem to the authorities, not only because people looked to his example for guidance in their own conduct, but also because of the protection he could afford his dependants. That is why the Jesuit General had instructed Campion and Persons to target the upper classes. The 1581 Act aimed to close the umbrella of protection held by influential recusants by threatening to undermine their personal standing in society and strike at the heart of their household.

The entry for Harrowden in the Visitation book of the Archdeacon of Northampton provides a case in point:

We do present the right honourable William Lord Harrowden, his household and familiars and divers servants not to frequent the parish church of Harrowden aforesaid, nor receive the holy communion in the parish afore rehearsed … Also we present my Lord’s schoolmaster.

Further down the page, which has been invaded by damp, one of Lord Vaux’s yeoman servants is mentioned:

Item, we present Athony [
sic
] Carrington’s child, being born before Shrovetide last, not to be baptized nor presented to the congregation, nor the said Athony’s wife churched
^fn3
nor repaired to the church since the said deliverance.
⁶

Lord Vaux defended himself and his household by claiming that Harrowden Hall was ‘a parish by itself’. Men like Mildmay may have regarded such insularity as contempt for the Queen’s authority, but others, including the churchwarden who ‘affirmeth’ Lord Vaux’s statement, may have preferred to view it as a harmless matter of private devotion.
We
know that Campion the Jesuit had been welcomed through the gates of Harrowden Hall ‘sundry times’ the previous summer, but it cannot be told whether this was a factor in Vaux’s
citation. However his defence was construed, it was no longer adequate in the law. Gone were the days when he could pay lip service to the regime and then entrench himself at home. Private worship was still permitted at the family chapel – provided, of course, that the correct service was used – but thenceforth Lord Vaux, along with his recusant servants, his recusant schoolmaster and the rest of his recusant household, would also have to be seen to attend the Queen’s Church.

The presentment for recusancy was a singular humiliation for a peer who stood on his honour as much as Lord Vaux, but it would be eclipsed by the loss of two stalwarts of the English mission. At the end of June 1581, George Gilbert was smuggled across the Channel to France. He had encouraged his friends ‘to imitate the lives of apostles and devote themselves wholly to the salvation of souls’ and he had led by example, putting himself ‘and all that he had, even his very life, to frequent hazard in defence of the Catholic faith’.

Since Father Persons’ arrival in England, Gilbert had been his ‘good angel’. Not only was he the funder-fixer of the mission, but he had also performed the roles of ‘counsellor, companion, servant [and] patron’ to the Jesuit superior. ‘If we have done any good,’ Persons wrote in a letter of recommendation to Rome, ‘a great part of it is to be attributed to this youth.’
⁷
By mid-summer 1581, however, ‘the rarest spectacle to all England’ was too prominent. ‘We had more trouble and anxiety in protecting him than ourselves,’ wrote Persons. No longer able to operate in England ‘without plain peril of his life’, Gilbert was finally persuaded to flee his homeland and ‘keep himself for happier times’. Having hidden in a cave until his ship came into view, he escaped to Rheims and thence to the English College at Rome.