God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (16 page)

Lord Chancellor:
My Lord, doth it become you so unreverently to presume to make answer with only bowing of your leg in so high an offence as this is that you have committed against her Majesty? No, it little beseemeth you & greatly is to be disliked.

Lord Vaux:
My Lords all, if I have failed in any part of my duty, I humbly pray pardon, for I had intention not to offend therein (God is my judge). And the rather I hope you will pardon it in me, who through ignorance hath committed this error, being erst never acquainted with the answering of any like cause in this court or any other court.

All this, the record states, ‘he spake upon his knee, and so continued kneeling’ for the rest of his hearing.

Lord Chancellor:
Answer to the matter that her Majesty’s attorney hath charged you withal. Do you confess it or deny it?

Lord Vaux:
My Lords, I acknowledge all to be true that I am charged withal concerning my refusal to swear, and withal do affirm my examination taken before Sir Walter Mildmay to be true, offering now, as always heretofore I have done, to depose to any interrogatories that concern my loyalty to her Majesty or duty to the state, requiring all only to be exempted to depose in matters of conscience, which without offending of my conscience grievously, I may not consent to do. With further offer that if I be not a most true & faithful subject to her Majesty, show me no favour, but cut me off forthwith, at whose commandment my goods, my lands & my life ever hath been & ever shall be most ready in all duty to be employed. And as to the receiving of Mr Campion (albeit I confess he was schoolmaster to some of my boys), yet I deny that he was at my house. I say that he was not there to my knowledge, whereof reprove me & let me be punished with the punishment I deserve.

Lord Chancellor:
You have denied it unsworn. Why do you refuse to swear it? Nay, you were but required to say it upon your honour and withal but to your knowledge. And the favour you had also showed you, that Campion’s examination in that point was read unto you, wherein he confessed to have been at your house.

‘I had good reason for my denial,’ Vaux replied, but he would not swear to it or affirm it upon his honour – ‘which to us noblemen is [the] same that an oath is to others’ – because, he said, ‘I would not hazard the same to be impeached by untrue accusation.’

Lord Chancellor:
You see he hath said herein what he can. You may proceed with Sir Thomas Tresham.

Lord Vaux:
Thus much I humbly pray of your honours that if I have committed any offence herein, that you would not impute it to contemptuous obstinacy, but rather to fear of offending my conscience.

Tresham’s defence was also mounted upon the rock of his conscience, but it went a great deal further than Vaux’s rebuttal. He fell to his knees and began to question the prosecution’s case: ‘You have charged me generally with sundry times receiving of Mr Campion. I pray you limit the times & places [so] that my answer may be particular & direct.’ Tresham had already written to the Lords and prepared detailed notes on the harbouring charge. His defence essentially boiled down to this: he owned a large house and people came and went all the time. Sometimes he had as many as a hundred guests in his house, but he was not introduced to them all. Campion,
he was told, frequently went about in disguise and under an alias, so although Tresham had no recollection of his visit, he risked perjuring himself with an emphatic denial. ‘Mr Campion might have been in my company, might have been in my house, and also might have had conference with me, and notwithstanding pass from me unknown.’
²¹

The Lords in the Star Chamber were not at all keen to debate this point, choosing instead to focus on the contempt charge. Tresham responded with a long, sophisticated discourse on the true nature of an oath and the relative jurisdictions of the temporal and spiritual spheres. Drawing on ‘learned schoolmen & deep divines’, he put it to the court that an oath without judgement or justice was indiscreet and illicit. Every scenario open to him – confirming or denying Campion’s true confession or confirming or denying his false confession – made him liable to offend the laws of nature or of God. Even if he attested on oath to the truth of Campion’s confession, it would render him ‘an egregious liar’ according to his former denial. Moreover:

I should greatly sin uncharitably to belie him, to make him and myself both guilty by my oath, who to my knowledge are most innocent, which I am by God’s word expressly forbidden. Lastly, I should commit a grievous sin to swear against the knowledge of my own conscience.

The individual, Tresham maintained, had a duty to obey the laws of God as he understood them. He would be more than happy, just as Vaux had been, to swear loyalty to the Queen, but he could not be forced into making an invalid oath, no more than he could be coerced into committing a sin:

Some things be proper to God, others to Caesar, which we may not confound. But in this, it being no mere temporal demand but a matter in conscience & thereby concerneth my soul, I am to have such special regard hereto in this my oath before your honours, as I may be able to make my account before the majesty of Almighty God at the dreadful day of judgement.

In other words, God trumped Caesar. This was the great ideological issue of the age: dual allegiance, religion or politics, conscience set against the state. Like the Jesuits at the Synod of Southwark, Tresham
was challenging the legitimacy of state power. It had its limitations, he argued, and should be confined to the temporal sphere. In spiritual matters, the individual had the right to refuse to obey dictates that offended divine law. Tresham’s case amounted, one historian has argued, to ‘a slippery and compelling theory of resistance’, albeit impeccably couched in the language of obedience.
²²

The judges were infuriated by Tresham and realised that he had used the trial to make a broader point. Lord Hunsdon accused him of having ‘studied & premeditated his argument’ in order ‘to incense the ears of so great an assembly and thereby (as it were) to premonish all Catholics by his example how to answer and how to behave themselves in like cases’. The other defendants also claimed scruples of conscience in refusing to swear. Sir William Catesby and Tresham ‘tell both one tale,’ Hunsdon noted, so ‘they have had both one schoolmaster’. Catesby retorted that indeed they had one schoolmaster, ‘that is God, who teacheth us to speak truth’.

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 disposition
^fn1
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