God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (14 page)

It should not be forgotten that Campion the saint (canonised in 1970), or Campion the traitor, was also Campion the scholar, poet, philosopher, historian, dramatist and, for the Vaux children, the schoolmaster. He was as capable as any man of human frailty and as susceptible as any prisoner to torture.

Towards the end of 1580, the Privy Council had specially authorised the use of torture on Jesuit priests ‘to make some example of them by punishment to the terror of others’. On 30 July 1581, with Campion then in custody and having undergone a preliminary examination, the Council had granted that he might be put to the rack.
²⁷
This was a contraption that mechanically stretched the body, exerting excruciating pressure on the joints. Often it was enough just to give prisoners sight of it. William Allen, writing from the safety of exile, claimed that
Campion, when asked how his hands and feet felt after a session on the rack, had replied, ‘not ill because not at all.’

And being in that case benumbed both of hand and foot, he likened himself to an elephant, which being down could not rise; and when he could hold the bread he had to eat between both his hands, he did compare himself to an ape.
²⁸

At his arraignment, Campion could not raise his hand to make his plea without assistance. Inside the Spanish and Venetian embassies, it was said that he had also suffered another form of torture, ‘the most dreadfully cruel of them all. This is to drive iron spikes between the nails and the quick’, with the fingernails subsequently being ‘turned back’.
²⁹

In the furore that followed, Thomas ‘Rackmaster’ Norton defended his treatment of Campion by arguing that torture was only applied carefully, not cavalierly or cruelly, and only on those ‘known to the Council to be guilty of treason’. (He was also at pains to point out that although he may have interrogated Campion, he had not turned the ratchet himself.) Torture, Norton argued, was not a punishment, but a means of extracting the ‘truth’.
³⁰

There has been much debate over the nature and extent of Campion’s disclosures on the rack. He did not renounce his faith. Nor, he protested, did he reveal where he had said Mass or provide any information that the government did not already know. But in a reply to Thomas Pounde, who seems to have believed rumours of Campion’s backsliding and sent him a letter of reproach, he did admit to having surrendered the names of some of the people who had sheltered him. He consoled himself that ‘I never discovered any secrets there declared’. When it was put to him at his trial that the withheld secrets must have been treasonous, Campion protested that they only related to the confessional: they were ‘such as surcharged the grieved soul and conscience, whereof I had power to pray for absolution. These were the hidden matters, these were the secrets’ and he would never give them up, he said, ‘come rack, come rope’.
³¹

The summer of 1581 was a febrile, frightening time for all those who had given Campion hospitality. No one could be quite sure what truths or untruths he was providing. ‘Rack’t carcasses make ill anatomies,’
John Donne would write.
³²
There were plenty of rumours: that Campion was about to recant, that he would buy his pardon by accusing friends of treason, that he had taken his own life. On 10 August 1581, Lord Burghley sent a message to Walsingham in Paris: ‘We have gotten from Campion knowledge of all his peregrination in England … We have sent for his hosts in all counties.’
³³

Three days earlier, the Privy Council had ordered Francis Hastings to examine his elderly kinswoman Elizabeth Beaumont, and search her home. This was the house in Leicestershire where the Vaux children had lived for much of the previous decade. Their grandmother was suspected of having harboured Campion, but Hastings was frustrated in his commission, complaining to the Earl of Leicester on 18 August that ‘our authority was hardly large enough in that we could minister no oath to her, nor examine any servant in the house’. Had he been given greater power, he wrote, ‘we should have understood more than now we do’.

Undeterred, Hastings suggested that it would be fruitful to search a number of other places in the county, including ‘the house of Mistress Brooksby, daughter to the Lord Vaux and wife to Brooksby’s son, but now a widow’. This was Eleanor, Lord Vaux’s eldest daughter, whose husband, Edward, had recently died. ‘I like not to take upon me the office of a promoter in any thing,’ Hastings wrote, ‘but in this case love to the persons whose conversion I wish with all my heart, love to my country … and love to her Majesty … have moved me to presume to put your lordship in mind of these persons.’ Hastings hoped that the Queen would ‘soon be rid of such dangerous people (for subjects I cannot call them till they obey better)’. His belief that their ‘obstinacy’, if not checked, ‘may happily infect the heart and mind of many a simple subject’ was undoubtedly genuine; most of his letters are peppered with anti-Catholic statements. However, it seems that, in this instance, his love for Newark Grange, the reversion for which he petitioned in a postscript to his letter, may also have encouraged him in his civic duty.
³⁴

Lord Vaux was in no position to help his mother-in-law or his daughter. On 6 August 1581, the Privy Council issued Sir Walter Mildmay with a warrant:

to send for the Lord Vaux (at whose house Edmund Campion hath upon his examination confessed that he hath been) and to examine him touching the said Campion’s being there, or if one Persons, or any other Jesuit or priest … and after that he shall have examined him in this sort, then to send him to the house of some honest gentleman well affected in religion in that shire, to remain for a time under his charge without having conference with any others.
³⁵

The storm clouds had gathered over Harrowden Hall. They would not disperse in Lord Vaux’s lifetime.

^fn1
The phrase ‘for that intent’ is ambiguous. It could be read to mean that any reconciliation to Rome was necessarily a withdrawal of allegiance from the Queen and therefore treasonous, or it could provide defendants with a loophole: their ‘intent’ was purely religious and not related to treason. In practice, the courts tended to apply the former interpretation.

^fn2
By the common law there were twenty-eight days in a month and thirteen such lunar months in a year. Thus the yearly sum of a recusant’s fines was £260.

^fn3
Churching was the ceremony that marked the return of a mother to the congregation after the birth of her child.

^fn4
Alas for Campion and for readers of Evelyn Waugh’s sparkling biography, ‘the vast red wig’ never ‘nodded acknowledgement’ of the Jesuit, nor did ‘the sunken, painted face’ smile in recognition (Waugh, p. 171). The story that Queen Elizabeth was present at Campion’s first examination is unfounded (Colthorpe, p. 199).

3

Lying Lips

And yet, alas, full many a man we know,

Whom fortune draws, will bear a friendly cheer,

While luck doth serve, and prosperous wind doth blow;

As swallows swift in spring time do appear;

When storms arise, farewell, they will be gone,

They leave him all to sink or swim alone.

Henry Vaux, ‘Of Friendship’ (final stanza)
¹

Lord Vaux was an unlikely criminal. Apart from his citation as a recusant in May 1581 and a few minor episodes concerning unlicensed bear baiting and the unauthorised bailing of poachers, he had never been in trouble. As a peer of the realm, he was involved in the creation and enforcement of the law. He had defended his recusancy by claiming that his house was ‘a parish by itself’, but he did not otherwise segregate from the community. He may have preferred the company of his co-religionists, but he was happy to enjoy the noble pursuits with his Protestant neighbours. He was ‘always welcome’ at Boughton, the home of Edward Montagu, a six-mile ride from Harrowden, and he was on good terms with Lord Burghley, who had acted as his proxy in the Parliament of 1576. The Lord Treasurer may even have had his Harrowden neighbour in mind when he wrote in
The Execution of Justice
about ‘men of good credit in their countries, manifestly of late time seduced to hold contrary opinions in religion for the Pope’s authority’.
²

‘Good credit’ was important to Lord Vaux. Writing to Lady Montagu late in 1581, he announced that ‘the preservation of my good name, and especially among my kinsmen, neighbours, and friends’, mattered more than ‘any worldly treasure’.
³
His apprehension and interrogation
by his neighbour, Sir Walter Mildmay of Apethorpe, with whom only two years previously he had been working on cases of gaol delivery, was therefore acutely embarrassing.
⁴
The Chancellor of the Exchequer had his hands full that August, for he also received instructions to examine Vaux’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Tresham, his kinsman Sir William Catesby
^fn1
and another neighbour, Mr Griffin. He did not waste time querying Vaux’s beliefs. He wanted details: times, places, names.

How many or what priests do you know or have heard to report to any house, and what be their names?

How do you know them or have heard them to be priests?

What Masses have you heard since the beginning of the reign of the Queen, and where?

Above all, Mildmay wanted to know about Vaux’s involvement with Campion and Persons. Had he ever known them? By what occasion and for how long? Had he ever given them or the seminaries any money or relief?

Whether were they, or any such, or any seminary men or priests at your house, and at what time, & how often?

Whence came they & who came with them & who were with you at that time?
⁵

Lord Vaux batted back every question with a denial. No details are provided, but some of Sir Thomas Tresham’s responses to the same questions were subsequently written down in a Catholic commonplace-book that was probably kept – and added to – by his daughter. The book was a recusant memorial, an alternative, secret (and selective) history of the time, written and compiled by Catholics for Catholics. Protestants – ‘the very sons of Satan & forerunners of Antichrist’ – are painted in an unrelentingly harsh light.
⁶
Had Tresham floundered in his interview with Mildmay, it is unlikely that his words would have made it onto the page. But they did, and
although they may have gained something in the retelling, in tone and style they ring true.

Lord Vaux’s brother-in-law, who claimed a friendship with him ‘even from my cradle’, and who wielded an overwhelming influence over the mild-mannered peer, was an extraordinary character. Quick-witted and charismatic, he could be wonderfully entertaining, but also fearfully intimidating. A priest would later describe Tresham as ‘a wall of brass against the forces of hostile domination’, and compare him to Moses: ‘if thou hadst not stood in the breach against the violators of the Catholic faith, many … would not have battled so stoutly in the Lord.’
⁷
Depending on one’s confessional bent that was either a very good or a very bad thing.

Tresham was well prepared for his interview – perhaps Vaux had managed to brief him – and he offered a string of facetious responses. To the question of whether he had heard any Masses in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, he admitted that he had, ‘for he was married at a Mass … but it was in the first year of her Majesty’s reign when the law did not forbid it’. Yes, he conceded, he knew some priests, ‘for many were in prisons whom he knew [had been] priests in Queen Mary’s time’. When asked if he had ever given alms to the mission, ‘he thought if his estate were sufficiently known to them’, they would have realised that ‘he was not likely to give much’.

Mildmay had met his match. Even when Tresham was told by ‘one Mr Flower dwelling in Northamptonshire’ that Campion ‘the caitiff wretch’ had, ‘for fear of the rack & torment’, betrayed his hosts and ‘specially named’ Tresham, he refused to buckle. Priests were not in the habit of reporting lies, he said, much less of inventing them:

And if Mr Campion or his like should say it, as by reason of the untruth of the thing I will never believe it, yet am I to answer for the deeds of Sir Thomas Tresham & not for the words of Mr Campion, & therefore in this behalf I make no account what he or any other shall say of me, no not the least hair of my head: for he that pisseth clear needeth not the physician’s help.
⁸

After their examinations at Apethorpe, the prisoners were transferred to the homes of gentlemen ‘well affected in religion in that shire’. Lord Vaux was sent a few miles south to Boughton House, the
home of Sir Edward Montagu. Staunch Protestant though he was, Vaux’s new keeper was also a friend and erstwhile colleague on the county bench. Indeed in 1579 the two had been allies in a quarrel over two poachers they had seen fit to bail without commission.
⁹
Lord Vaux’s confinement at Boughton cannot have lasted more than ten days, but it was an awkward time for all concerned. Montagu was not required to examine his noble charge, but he had to keep him close enough to prevent ‘conference with any others’. Under the circumstances, keeper and prisoner muddled along fairly well. Vaux praised Montagu’s reputation for ‘discretion and judgement’ in knowing ‘how to use one of my calling committed to his custody’. He referred to his ‘good entertainment’ at Boughton, though he did add somewhat archly that it was ‘fit for a prisoner’.