God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (17 page)

On Wednesday, 11 April, Vaux and Tresham found themselves once again in court. Instead of the Star Chamber, it was a session of oyer and terminer at the Guildhall. In place of Sir William Catesby, who had been released on bond the previous month, there was Mr Tyrwhitt, who had attended the Mass in Vaux’s chamber. According to the Recorder of London, all three ‘did stoutly deny’ the offence, but after Osborne produced his ‘lively evidence’, they ‘did most humbly submit themselves unto her Majesty’. Each was fined a hundred marks and returned to his cell.
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Lord Vaux’s adherence to his faith was becoming incredibly expensive. A six-month recusancy fine (£120) dating back from the previous October came into effect at the same time as the Guildhall charge. There was also the £1,000 penalty imposed by the court of Star Chamber and the mounting costs of bed and board at the Fleet. Presumably he took responsibility for the bond when Henry Tuke was released from the Counter in July 1582 and sometime that year he also promised Jasper Heywood, the Jesuit uncle of John Donne, £100 towards his collection for the relief of Catholic prisoners.
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With four sons (Henry, George, Edward and Ambrose) and five daughters (Eleanor, Elizabeth, Anne, Katherine and Merill), it could be said that Lord Vaux was, to use a Tresham phrase, ‘clogged with children’.
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At the beginning of 1582, only Eleanor was of independent means thanks to the widow’s jointure she had received from her short-lived union with Edward Brooksby. However, her father still owed Tresham for her marriage money. According to their 1571 agreement, Tresham was supposed to give £500 for each of the dowries of Eleanor, Elizabeth and Anne in return for a fifteen-year annuity of £100. Tresham had only stumped up £160 for Eleanor, but he had seen nothing from Vaux, ‘nor any farthing thereof, nor jot of recompense’.
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In 1582, the middle sister, Elizabeth, resolved to become a bride of Christ. She was smuggled across the Channel in March and entered the closed community of the Poor Clares in Rouen. Eleanor and Anne suspected that Tresham had put pressure on their sister to take the habit and ‘under colour of religion abused her to gain her
portion to his own use’ – the entry cost of a convent being cheaper than marriage to a gentleman.
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The previous October, Lord Vaux had been confident he could keep ‘misery from my door’, even with an estate that was ‘not in all respects as of late it was’. Despite his daughters’ assertions, it was in no small part thanks to Tresham that it continued that way after the two trials. Tresham may have wailed in February 1582 that he would soon have to ‘beg at the box’, but he was a ruthless estate manager who strived to keep on top of his finances.
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Vaux, by contrast, was careless with money and constantly in debt. Before the end of March 1582, under Tresham’s guidance, he conveyed property to his eldest son, Henry. When the Sheriff of Northamptonshire attempted to levy the fines ‘imposed upon my Lord Vaux’, he found he could not ‘by reason of estates and conveyances made by the Lord Vaux of his lands and goods to his son’. Lord Burghley ordered an enquiry, but no action seems to have been taken.
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According to the 1581 Act of Persuasions, it was illegal to convey property for the ‘covinous purpose’ of fine evasion, but it was not easy to establish motive. Long-term loans were hard to come by and mortgages were unpopular, so property transactions were fairly common and could be incredibly complex. In the National Archives and at the Northamptonshire Record Office, there is a seemingly endless catalogue of deeds, covenants, licences and trusts that spun the Vaux patrimony into a fairly impenetrable cocoon. The twenty-one-year lease of a farm in Isham, for example, which yielded an annual rent of three pounds, six shillings and four hens, passed through the hands of at least nine men between 1580 and 1594. The names read like a roll call of the Vaux/Tresham affinity – Richard Allen of Hoxton and Rothwell (Tresham’s servant), George Robinson of Hackney (where Vaux would soon reside), Thomas Bawde (Tresham’s cousin and lawyer), John Lee (yeoman of Harrowden), Francis Pettit (executor of Lady Vaux’s will and witness of Lord Vaux’s codicil) and so on.
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Such arrangements could lead to complications, but they also helped deflect the levies.

On 30 January 1582, Sir Henry Cobham, the English ambassador in Paris, wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham, the Principal Secretary of State:

It is given me to understand, Sir, how that Nicolson, servant to the Lord Vaux, is come over, passing at Dover, with a great packet of letters, being gone hence to Rheims, from whence, as they say, he goeth to Rome with informations of the Lord Vaux’s troubles and estate, together with new instructions of Campion’s acts and others his confederates.
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Evidently prison and pecuniary pain had done little to dent Lord Vaux’s enthusiasm for the mission. Nicolson may have gone about in London and Paris as a baron’s servant, but when he arrived at Rheims on 25 January, he was able to drop his cover. He was entered into the seminary register as ‘presbyter’, that is, a priest. After two days at William Allen’s college, he ‘set out for Paris with the intention of returning to England’. The following year, in March 1583, he visited Rome.

In addition to information on Vaux’s ‘troubles and estate’, Nicolson had also delivered, ‘from his very lips, as truly as we live and breathe’, the latest news on the missionary priests incarcerated in England. Robert Johnson (executed on 28 May 1582), who had been seized in London in 1580 during a search for Campion and Persons, was allegedly racked three times and ‘suffered the pulling asunder and dislocation of all his limbs, with excruciating agony’. Luke Kirby, who would be hanged two days after Johnson, ‘had his body twisted and was then thrown onto an iron ring, so that he endured pain beyond belief throughout his entire body’.
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Thomas Clifton, meanwhile, was in chains at ‘that most vile prison’, Newgate, ‘with his body held upright against the wall in such a way that throughout the whole of the day he has no opportunity whatever of sitting or of moving his position’.
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Nicolson’s ‘instructions’, as Cobham called them, had a didactic purpose and propaganda value. He informed his brethren at Rheims that when Clifton was sentenced to life imprisonment, ‘he went down on bended knees, raised his eyes and hands to heaven and repeated
Alleluia, Alleluia
as though he were exultantly triumphant’. Here for the missioners-in-training was an inspiring model of Christian fortitude. But the accounts were not unremittingly heroic. Fathers Johnson, Sherwin and Kirby, the Rheims registrar noted, were ‘admirable priests’, but reportedly

had such terrible punishments and such carefully contrived tortures inflicted on them that they revealed everything they knew about the soldiers sent to Ireland by our most Holy Lord, and during the actual torturing said that they had been sent by his Holiness to England to stir the English people under the seal of confession or by other means to treason and to the taking up of arms against the monarch.

According to one master at Rheims, accounts like Nicolson’s only made the students more hungry for combat: ‘Our brethren are so animated by those dangers that it is difficult to hold them back.’
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The traffic between Allen’s seminary and the English Catholic community was increasing in both directions. Despite strict laws on unlicensed travel, the student body at Rheims had swollen from 55 in May 1578 to over 120 at the beginning of 1582. According to Allen, writing on 15 January 1582, ‘gentlemen and others driven away by the persecution’ were arriving ‘every day’ from England. Not all came with the intention of taking holy orders. Some sought a Catholic education and stayed on as lay students. Others paid shorter visits, ‘to have cases of conscience solved, or for instruction or consolation’. Although money was always tight, Allen was proud of his open-door policy: ‘And to show the heretics that we have not been tired out and forced by necessity to send away students, thirty of our number prefer to live on less than a crown a month with some fragments from our table rather than leave us.’
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In April 1582, the registrar noted new arrivals:

On the 18th two noble boys came to us from Rouen, Ambrose and Edward Vaux, the sons of the most noble baron Lord Vaux, who has been imprisoned in England for his most steadfast profession of the Catholic faith. They were at once admitted to our community.

Ambrose and Edward, around twelve and thirteen respectively, stayed for just under a fortnight. The registrar recorded their departure on the last day of April (New Style): ‘The two Vaux boys left, whom I said above had flown to this city on the 18th of this month.’
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They had flown (
advolasse
) from Rouen, the historic capital of Normandy, about 130 miles west of the seminary. The verb suggests some urgency. Rouen was the location of Elizabeth Vaux’s convent.
Since she had left England the previous month, it is possible that her two half-brothers had provided an escort and then sped on to visit Allen’s famous seminary. Perhaps they were on a tight schedule. But Rouen had also become a byword for Catholic intrigue. It harboured a sizeable community of disgruntled expatriates and was the current refuge of Robert Persons and his printing press. When William Tresham had fled there earlier in the year, it was made known to his brother that the Queen ‘doth greatly dislike’ the place and ‘feared that he cannot long continue there a good subject’.
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Persons was secretly housed in the city by its archdeacon, who was a future regional chief of the Catholic League, a militant confederation of zealots first formed in 1576 and reconstituted by the Duke of Guise in 1584. Persons’ association with the Leaguers drew him into Guise’s plans for the deposition of Queen Elizabeth. The latest scheme, over which the Spanish ambassador in London had liaised with the Treshams, was the invasion of England through Scotland. It would be abandoned upon the fall of the Duke of Lennox, but in May 1582, a month after Ambrose and Edward’s speedy journey from Rouen to Rheims, Persons set off for Paris to discuss the proposal with Allen, Guise and others.
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Ambrose and Edward were almost certainly too young to know about any of this – even if they might perhaps have been asked to carry messages – but two days after their arrival at the seminary, Ambassador Cobham reported from Paris: ‘The Lord Vaux sent hither a man with letters to Morgan, Copley and Doctor Allen who returneth with letters from the papists.’
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A suspicious mind would have no trouble casting a sinister light on this report. Doctor William Allen, as we know, was not only the seminary founder, but also the effective leader of the English Catholics in exile. He, like Persons, was up to his neck in plots against Queen Elizabeth, though he tried to keep his intriguing separate from seminary business and claimed to have banned any discussion at Rheims of the papal bull of deposition.
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Thomas Copley was another prominent Englishman in exile. He had converted to Catholicism early in Elizabeth’s reign and left the country in 1570. In May 1582, he would settle in Rouen. He consistently protested his temporal loyalty to Queen Elizabeth and begged to be restored to her favour, but he received a knighthood from the King of France and
a pension from the King of Spain. In December 1582, the Jesuits paid him four hundred crowns ‘towards his maintenance’.
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26

The other recipient of a Vaux letter – ‘Morgan’ – is harder to identify. It is a common name and there could plausibly have been any number of Morgans who had briefly slipped unnoticed across the Channel. Two early contenders – the priest Polidore Morgan, who would soon accompany another Vaux boy to Rheims, and a singer called Nicholas Morgan, who was a ‘gentleman sometime of the [Queen’s] Chapel’ – were both reported by a spy to have visited Copley in Rouen in the autumn of 1582, but they can be discounted here since the former was in a London prison in April 1582 and the latter, it seems, had not yet left England. Two other Morgans were living in France at this time. Roland Morgan had arrived at Rheims on 18 October 1581 and was ordained at Laon on 18 May 1583. His older brother Thomas was the Paris agent of Mary Queen of Scots and her go-to man for plots against Queen Elizabeth. According to government sources, he was one of the men ‘known to her Majesty and her Council to be notorious practisers, very inward with the Duke of Guise, and contrivers of the treasons and devices for the invasion intended’. If Thomas Morgan was Vaux’s correspondent – or even if Vaux was simply the middleman who provided a courier – it seems more than possible that our baron was on the fringes of something shady. However, this is to speculate; the contents of the letters are not known.
²⁷

This was a febrile time. England’s relations with Spain had deteriorated. Philip II, having annexed Portugal and its colonies at the start of the decade, was more threatening than ever. His representative in the Low Countries, the Duke of Parma, seemed to be gaining ground over William of Orange and the rebel provinces. But it was the forces of Catholic zeal in France that Walsingham feared most at this juncture. Suspecting ‘some great and hidden treason not yet discovered’, he placed moles in the French embassy in London.
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In the event, a plot to overthrow the Queen would be discovered, the so-called Throckmorton Plot that involved, once again, Mary Stuart and Morgan, the Duke of Guise, the King of Spain and the papacy. The
conspiracy’s linkman in England was a young gentleman called Francis Throckmorton, a kinsman of the Vauxes and the Treshams.
^fn4
He was arrested in London in November 1583, put to the rack and executed the following summer. There is no hard evidence to suggest that the Vauxes were involved in the Throckmorton Plot, or in any of the intrigues swirling round the exile communities in the early 1580s, but it was definitely not a sensible time to be communing with the Queen’s enemies.