God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (22 page)

It may be no coincidence that Sara’s married name, Cheney, belonged to ‘a house of great worship in Northamptonshire’ that was intimately associated with the Vauxes. Lord Vaux’s mother had been a Cheney and there are several relatives – Mary, Giles, Lawrence, Thomas, Ursula and John Cheney – cited in the wills of the baron and his wife. John Cheney was Lord Vaux’s solicitor and knew his secrets; Lawrence was listed as a Catholic prisoner at the Counter in Wood Street for a brief summer spell in 1586; Giles, ‘gent. of Irthlingborough, Northants’, was convicted of a year’s recusancy from May 1586. Another Cheney, William, ‘yeoman … of Hackney’, was indicted ‘for not going to any usual place of Common Prayer’ in 1585 alongside his master, Lord Vaux.
²³
If Sara was ever married to one of these Cheneys, or another from the family, it would be interesting to discover if it was to secure her protection or her silence, or was simply a matter of love.

In the course of her semi-conscious ravings, Sara had vented her
frustration at the intense piety, oppressive secrecy and uncompromising tenets that governed the lives of the Vauxes and their servants. Her taunting of the priests and threat to raise a hue and cry against them gave expression to latent hostilities and a siege-like mentality within the household. Her ventriloquised expletives – ‘God’s wounds!’, ‘A pox on you!’ – and the references to her as a ‘poor wench’ give us a flavour of the language of the time.
^fn7
She even provides a snapshot of a Hackney Christmas: one vision she had of the devil coming in ‘with a drum and seven motley vizards, dancing about the chamber’ was directly influenced by the ‘gaming and mumming at the Lord Vaux his house’.
²⁴

When Vaux had first been cited as a recusant in May 1581, he had defended himself by claiming that his home was ‘a parish by itself’. As the years went by and the laws against nonconformity grew in number and severity, Elizabethan recusants increasingly closed ranks. They continued to engage with institutions and people beyond their immediate community, but, as much for the sake of their Protestant neighbours (most of whom had no desire to inform on their friends) as themselves, the inner sanctum of the recusant household became harder to penetrate. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the exorcism of Sara Williams, whatever the truths, half-truths and untruths, it affords a fleeting glimpse into that shuttered world and the hopes, fears, mores and mentality of those who lived and served within it. Sara’s voice was hijacked by demons, Catholic propagandists, Establishment churchmen and playwrights. It is manifestly artificial and, paradoxically, a deeply authentic expression of its time.

Before we leave Sara drugged by ‘sliber-sauces’ with a face ‘blacker than ever I saw a chimney sweeper’s’, there is one final aspect of this strange series of events to be noted. Nicholas Marwood, the subject of ‘the prime grand miracle’ at Hackney, was the servant of Anthony Babington, a young gentleman from Derbyshire. Babington had attended the exorcisms ‘oftentimes’ with ‘divers of his company’.
²⁵
The previous spring he had stood surety for George Vaux, who was
bound to keep the peace after an unspecified incident in London. This was no small matter as it meant forfeiting twenty pounds if George defaulted on his bond.
²⁶
Two days later, on 26 May 1585, Babington had called at Hackney and presented Lady Vaux with a silver and gilt basin and ewer ‘for her friendship’. He and Lord Vaux had talked for ‘about three hours’. According to the goldsmith’s apprentice who accompanied Babington, their discussion concerned ‘the sale of a lordship which the said Babington was in hand to purchase of the said Lord’.
²⁷

The Hackney exorcist and Jesuit superior, William Weston, who claimed to have talked ‘intimately’ and ‘very frequently’ with Babington, described him as young, not yet thirty, good-looking, charismatic and witty. Babington was well travelled, well mannered and well read. ‘When in London, he drew to himself by the force of his exceptional charm and personality many young Catholic gentlemen of his own standing.’ These men were ‘gallant, adventurous and daring in defence of the Catholic faith’. They were ‘ready,’ wrote Weston, ‘for any arduous enterprise whatsoever that might advance the common Catholic cause.’
²⁸

According to the servant of a friend of Babington, ‘the Lord Vaux’s son’ was one of a dozen men whose company ‘Mr Babington did usually or otherwise frequent’.
²⁹
On the face of it, therefore, Anthony Babington was a man whom the Vauxes liked and trusted. On 14 August 1586, he was arrested for conspiring to kill the Queen.

^fn1
Little is known about the teenager’s death beyond its date (25 July 1585) and place (‘apud Hackney in com. Middlesex’). He was probably buried secretly.

^fn2
The Brudenells were co-religionists, friends and country neighbours of the Vauxes. In 1605, Sir Thomas Tresham’s daughter Mary would marry Thomas Brudenell, later created Earl of Cardigan.

^fn3
hollow/hollo
: yell out to attract attention. The American word ‘holler’ is a variant.

^fn4
– A maniple was a Eucharistic vestment consisting of a strip of material worn suspended from the left arm, near the wrist. The alb was a white linen vestment reaching to the feet and bound at the waist with a girdle.

^fn5
‘Mother’ was a common word for the womb. One of the male demoniacs, Richard Mainy, also claimed to have suffered from ‘the mother’, though his symptoms reveal little more than headache and trapped wind. There is a remarkable correlation between the rituals of exorcism and contemporary remedies for irregular periods. To treat amenorrhoea (cessation of menstruation), it was thought that noxious fumes at the nose might drive the blood down. For immoderate menstruation, medicines, fumigations, injections to the womb, pessaries and the inducement of vomiting were recommended. Around the time of the publication of Harsnett’s
Declaration
in 1603, the physician Edward Jorden produced
A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother
, in which he diagnosed ‘the mother’ as a hysterical condition with natural causes. Both tracts were almost certainly commissioned by Bancroft’s faction and can be seen as part of the campaign to destroy belief in spirit possession.

^fn6
The apostate priest Anthony Tyrrell, for example, claimed that ‘all was but counterfeit’ and admitted to having written up events ‘with the best skill I had to make them seem strange and wonderful’ (
DEP
, p. 394). He did, however, threaten to revoke his confession should he ever reconvert to Catholicism. Regarding the demoniacs, Richard Mainy confessed to having feigned his visions and it is likely that Sara’s sister, Friswood, ‘one of nature’s fablers’ according to Harsnett’s editor (Brownlow, p. 77), lied in her deposition against the priests.

^fn7
Alongside a passage containing one of Sara’s blasphemous outbursts, the Catholic narrator has written in the margin of the Brudenell Manuscript (p. 485): ‘The devil sweareth & speaketh as Protestants use to do.’

7

Atheistical Anthony Babington’s Complotment

Madam, I stand charged by you to have practised something against you. I call God and all the world to witness I have not done anything as a private man unworthy of an honest man, nor as a public man unworthy of my calling. I protest before God that as a man careful of my mistress’s safety, I have been curious.

Sir Francis Walsingham to Mary Queen of Scots at her trial,
Fotheringhay, 14 October 1586

The Babington Plot was a conspiracy to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. Like its predecessors, it relied for success on papal sanction, foreign aid, internal Catholic support and government incompetence. Like its predecessors, it failed. Indeed, the plot was probably most welcome to Burghley and Walsingham, who had been patiently waiting for a foolish young firebrand to come along and put the 1585 Act for the Queen’s Surety to the test.

The Babington Plot is the most notorious of the schemes to overthrow the English Queen because it precipitated the destruction of her Scottish cousin. Rocked by the ‘enormous ingratitude’ of her son James, who had decided that the defence of his mother’s dynastic interests was not necessarily compatible with his own, Mary Stuart had grown desperate and reckless. She had been a prisoner in England for eighteen years, latterly at Chartley Manor in Staffordshire under the beady eye of Sir Amyas Paulet, who crowed that nothing and no one could be conveyed to her without his knowledge. He was quite right. When a local young Catholic called Gilbert Gifford turned up
with a warm recommendation from Mary’s Paris agent and an offer to serve as her secret postman, Paulet knew all about it. As did Walsingham, for Gifford was in the spymaster’s pay, a double agent primed to win Mary’s confidence and secure her destruction.

Unsuspecting Mary was delighted to resume contact with her friends in the French embassy. She passed on spying tips: alum was unreliable as a secret ink, messages might be hidden in books or the soles of shoes. She even sent the ambassador the key to a new cipher. Walsingham and his chief intelligence officer, Thomas Phelippes, intercepted everything and when Gifford used a new way of smuggling letters in and out of Chartley – via a watertight container slipped through the bung-hole of a beer keg – these too were seized, copied, resealed and only then delivered to their intended recipients. By the time Anthony Babington emerged with a ‘desperate truculent’ plan to lay ‘violent hands upon her Majesty’s sacred person’,
¹
the trap to catch Mary was perfectly poised.

There has been much debate over the architecture of the so-called Babington Plot. The eponymous conspirator was not its chief designer, though it was Babington’s letter of 6 July 1586 that floated to Mary the plan for ‘the dispatch of the usurper’. Babington wrote that there were ‘six noble gentlemen, all my private friends’, who were willing to undertake ‘that tragical execution’. He claimed to have been approached in May by a priest called John Ballard, ‘a man of virtue and learning’, who had liaised in Paris with several English exiles and the Spanish ambassador there about the viability of an invasion to deliver England from ‘the extreme and miserable state wherein it hath too long remained’.
²
Other men, including Gifford (with Walsingham pulling his strings), were on board from an early stage.

Babington seems to have been something of a fantasist. As vain as he was charming, he was attracted to the potential glamour of the plot and the romanticism of rescuing a Catholic damsel. There were moments – when he was not penning quixotic letters or commissioning portraits of himself and his accomplices – when doubts crept in, but Ballard and Gifford were on hand with resolve-stiffening pep talks. When, in early August, Babington finally realised that the game was up, he cut his hair, smeared his face with walnut juice and made for the country in the guise of a farm labourer. He was captured in a
barn, a rather bathetic showdown for a man who liked to be seen in ‘ostentatious splendour’.
³

Babington might have been arrested much earlier. His letter was proof enough of his treason. But Walsingham wanted Mary. Her reply, drafted in French, then translated and enciphered by her secretary, was slipped into the beer keg on the morning of 18 July. The following day Phelippes deciphered the text and sent a transcript to Walsingham. Ten days later, the original was delivered to Babington, who destroyed it. A postscript had been added by Phelippes, asking for the ‘names and qualities’ of the six assassins. It was an audacious forgery, but the main substance of the letter, which commended Babington and gave advice on how to ‘ground substantially this enterprise and to bring it to good success’, was most likely genuine. Babington and Mary’s two secretaries would later attest its contents. Mary’s approbation for the assassination of Elizabeth is obvious, if not explicit:

The affairs being thus prepared and forces in readiness both without and within the realm, then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work, taking order, upon the accomplishing of their design, I may be suddenly transported out of this place, and that all your forces in the same time be on the field to meet me in tarrying for the arrival of the foreign aid, which then must be hastened with all diligence.
⁴

Phelippes sensed Mary’s death knell in these words and sketched a gallows on the outside of his transcript. The Vauxes and their friends thought Elizabeth would not dare put her cousin to death ‘for fear of afterclaps’.
⁵
They were wrong. Mary was tried not far from Harrowden, at Fotheringhay Castle, and, despite much hand-wringing by Elizabeth I, was beheaded there on the morning of Wednesday, 8 February 1587.

Anthony Babington had ascended the scaffold the previous September along with John Ballard and twelve others. He was in the first batch of executions that were undertaken ‘not without some note of cruelty’. That is to say, the hanging was kept brief so that the victims were still conscious when cut down, castrated and disembowelled. The Queen had called for an even worse form of punishment,
according to Burghley, something that would inflict ‘further extraordinary pain’, but he had assured her that ‘the manner of the death would be as terrible as any other new device could be’.
⁶