God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (23 page)

‘In the midst of our calamities,’ William Weston recalled, ‘the bells were rung throughout the city, sermons and festivals [were] held, fireworks set off, bonfires lit in the public street – a customary and unmistakable manner of manifesting public joy – and with one cry the whole people exulted and clapped their hands over the wretchedness of the papist traitors.’
⁷

It was an uncomfortable time for the Vauxes, whose links to Babington appeared suspicious. On 9 August 1586, ‘the Lord Vaux his son’ was noted in a list, now in the British Library, of ‘persons to be sought after’. His name appeared alongside several plotters, including Robert Barnwell, whose servant had fingered ‘the L. Vaux’s son’ as a member of ‘the company which Mr Babington did usually or otherwise frequent’. Of those identified in the manuscript as ‘familiarly acquainted with Barnwell’, two names – ‘French, gent.’ and ‘Humfrey Wheeler of the Inner Temple’ – recall an undated informer’s report in the State Papers:

There is one Mr Wheeler that dwelleth behind St Clement’s Church towards the fields that hath resort unto him the Lord Vaux and his son and divers other papists very often and, as it is thought, they have Mass said there, or some lewd practices. The accuser: Mr French, Gentleman of the Temple.
⁸

Anthony Babington had helped bail out George Vaux on 24 May 1585. A couple of days later he had spent three hours with Lord Vaux at Hackney negotiating a property sale. We only know about the meeting because Vaux’s servant, Walter Wolsley, subsequently got into trouble for some loose words uttered in praise of the imprisoned Earl of Northumberland, a prominent supporter of Mary Stuart. He also championed another Catholic, John Talbot of Grafton, whom Ballard would attempt, without success, to draw into the plot. Wolsley was reported by the goldsmith’s apprentice who had accompanied Babington to Hackney.
^fn1
Upon examination, he protested that he had
‘meant no evil at all’, but his indiscretion earned him a spell in the Counter prison in Wood Street. In 1592 Sir Thomas Tresham would describe him as Lord Vaux’s ‘chief servant’.
⁹

Although Vaux’s business with Babington had commenced a full year before the conspirator claimed to have been recruited by Ballard, it nevertheless brought him unwelcome attention. There is an intriguing document in the records of the Exchequer entitled:

Interrogatories to be ministered to Edward Smythe of Loughborough in the county of Leicester for the finding of John Smyth of London, grocer, to which John and one John Palmer, Anthony Babington, attainted of treason, caused lands to be conveyed upon trust to his own use by the Lord Vaux.
¹⁰

Trusts were a common recourse for landowners in danger of fine or forfeiture and were particularly popular with Catholics. Smythe and Palmer were known recusants and were listed, along with ‘the Lord Vaux his son’, in the British Library manuscript detailing persons of interest in the Babington investigation. Both are described there as ‘very inward with Babington’, with Smythe ‘said to be gone into Derbyshire with the sisters of Babington’. Smythe had earlier accompanied Babington to Hackney. He is sometimes described as a grocer, sometimes an apothecary (useful professions for someone wanting people and packages to come and go without suspicion). When Babington had travelled to France, he had put Smythe in charge of ‘all that he had’.
¹¹
The other trustee in the Babington–Vaux transaction, John Palmer, was arrested in Loughborough in his home county of Leicestershire a few days before Babington’s execution. His chambers were searched, but no ‘writing or letters concerning her Majesty or the Estate’ were found.
¹²
Lord Vaux, it seems, was untouched, though it wasn’t just Babington with whom he had links.

The priest John Ballard
alias
Fortescue, upon whom Babington would lay ‘all the blame … for bringing him to his destruction’, had liaised with Hugh Yates, ‘sometimes servant to the Lord Vaux his son’, at the White Hart Inn, Holborn, in 1584. He was frequently attended by ‘a man and a boy’ and liked to dress ‘in a grey cloak laid on with
gold lace, in velvet hose, a cut satin doublet, a fair hat of the newest fashion, the band being set with silver buttons’. On 26 May 1586 he was identified as one of a handful of priests ‘lodged in common inns about London’, who received ‘their relief of Edmunds the Jesuit [William Weston], who receives the same of Mr Henry [Vaux], that daily collecteth money for the same purpose’.
¹³
Unwittingly or not, therefore, Henry Vaux had helped to fund a priest who had been planning an act of terror. Whether this made him an accessory to the plot or simply a naïve idealist who wanted to do his bit for the mission, it certainly explains why the authorities wanted to talk to him.

Ballard was also named as one of the exorcist-priests who had practised their ‘devil work’ at various Catholic homes throughout the autumn, winter and spring of 1585–6. Samuel Harsnett later tried to claim that the exorcisms, which he wanted everyone to think were fraudulent, were part of the Babington Plot. According to the dubious testimony of Anthony Tyrrell, an exorcist who quickly turned informant after his arrest in July 1586, the dispossessions ‘procured unto ourselves very great favour, credit and reputation, so as it was no marvel if some young gentlemen, as Master Babington and the rest, were allured to those strange attempts which they took in hand by Master Ballard, who was an agent amongst us’. Tyrrell, who recanted his faith on several occasions, claimed that the exorcisms were part of the battle for ‘the hearts and minds of Catholics’, so that ‘when such forces as were intended should have come into England, they might have been more readily drawn … to have joined their forces with them’.
¹⁴

Sara and Friswood Williams were less keen on making a direct connection between the exorcisms and the plot, noting only that Babington and ‘most of the rest that were executed’ had sometimes watched. It is hardly surprising that in the small world of Catholic recusancy, Babington and his crew had heard about, and been attracted to, an aggressive counter-reforming initiative. It may even be the case that the spectacular scenes they witnessed contributed to the reckless optimism that would draw them into the plot some months later. This cannot be proven and even if it could, it would by no means follow that the Vauxes, as hosts to several exorcisms including that of Babington’s servant Marwood, were party to the plot.
¹⁵

Try as it might, the government could find no formal connection between the exorcisms and the Babington Plot. ‘In all their most
detailed examinations of the prisoners,’ William Weston recalled, ‘there was nothing they could find against me.’
¹⁶
Another Hackney exorcist, Thomas Stamp, whose ‘flearing countenance’ Sara would never forget, was, upon his arrest in September 1586, ‘specially to be dealt withal and touched for this last conspiracy’. It was noted that he ‘did much harm in the Lord Vaux his house’, but he could not be implicated in the conspiracy and was soon carted off to Wisbech Castle in Cambridgeshire, where he joined several of his fellow exorcists, none of whom was brought to trial for involvement in the Babington Plot.
¹⁷

If there was any hard evidence to substantiate Tyrrell’s claim that the exorcisms at Hackney and elsewhere were deliberately staged to win ‘hearts and minds’ in advance of invasion; if it could be proven that Lord Vaux and Anthony Babington had ever discussed treason during their property negotiations; if it could be stated with any kind of certainty that Henry Vaux had known about Ballard’s plans when he had given him (via Weston) some of the mission’s funds, then a case linking the Vauxes to the Babington Plot might be more substantial. As it stands, all is suspicion and circumstance. It is little wonder that Babington, Ballard and several of their accomplices had crossed paths with members of the Vaux family. George and Ambrose had mingled with exile communities on their travels abroad and Henry had worked alongside several conspirators in the early days of the Jesuit mission. Indeed, Lord Vaux’s eldest son was such a crucial cog in the machinery of the Catholic underground that the real shock would have come from finding no link. One can hardly be deemed guilty of plotting for knowing a conspirator, still less for knowing the associates of a conspirator. While the Vauxes clearly hung from the fringes of the Babington Plot, they cannot, or at least not now unless new evidence comes to light, be woven convincingly into its fabric.

Nevertheless, the assumption certainly existed in some exile circles that Lord Vaux could be relied upon ‘if any foreign power should come to invade this realm’.
¹⁸
His brother-in-law, Tresham, was also claimed as a potential insurgent. In August 1586 Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, who had liaised with the plotters earlier in the year, reported to Philip II that Vaux, Tresham and three other recusant gentlemen, ‘have not been informed of the
business, as they are declared Catholics and are consequently held prisoners by the Queen and under very heavy money penalties, but it is confidently assumed that, as others far less interested are joining the design, they certainly will do so’.
¹⁹

Mendoza was misinformed. Ballard had attempted to recruit Tresham the previous month and not only had Tresham refused to hear him, but he had also ‘threatened to discover him’.
²⁰
Perhaps Tresham really was the loyal Elizabethan that he always claimed to be, or perhaps he had suspected ‘
latet anguis in herba
[a snake in the grass]’. If not at the time, then certainly seventeen years later, he was of the opinion that ‘atheistical Anthony Babington’s complotment’ was a ‘cursed Machiavellian project’ of the government’s making.
²¹
Whatever Tresham’s motives, he was wise to stay out of the conspiracy and so, it seems, were his Vaux relations. ‘Of all the plots they have hatched these many years past,’ Mendoza informed his master in August, ‘none have been apparently so serious as this.’ Let God ‘dispose as He will,’ he continued, ‘but if for our sins He should decree that it shall not succeed, there will be much Catholic blood spilt in England.’

‘Yes,’ Philip II scribbled on the letter, ‘that is what is to be feared.’
²²

*

The day is gone and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live and now my life is done.

Thus wrote Babington’s accomplice, Chidiock Tichborne, just days before his execution. Once again, youth and talent had fallen at the feet of fanaticism. It seems a terrible waste:

The spring is past and yet it hath not sprung,

The fruit is dead and yet the leaves are green,

My youth is gone and yet I am but young,

I saw the world and yet I was not seen.

My thread is cut and yet it was not spun,

And now I live and now my life is done.
²³

^fn1
The apprentice seems to have resented Wolsley’s clumsy attempt to convert him: Wolsley had taken out an old devotional manual ‘and of purpose laid it open in the window’. The apprentice recalled that it contained advice on confession and fasting, as well as ‘divers printed pictures of the Virgin Mary, of saints and other superstitious toys, which book this examinate [the apprentice] misliking threw aside.’

8

Lambs to the Slaughter

It was a period of very great confusion for us all. Every road, cross-way and port was watched night and day, and sealed off so effectively that no person could pass without the most rigorous examination. Lodging-houses, private homes, rooms were searched and examined with minute thoroughness; neither friend nor acquaintance could escape without being forced to give an account of himself. In this way many priests were captured, and Catholics filled the prisons throughout the country.

William Weston, S.J.,
Autobiography

Just before sunrise on 7 July 1586, a Kentish shepherd stood on a bluff and looked out to sea. His eye fixed on a small boat sailing smoothly towards the shore. It was a strange place to land, so far from the harbour. At length, one of the sailors alighted and, taking a passenger upon his back, waded ashore. He set him down, returned to his vessel, conveyed a second man over the water, then struck sail. The shepherd continued to stand and stare. ‘He was scrutinising us carefully,’ one of the travellers recalled, ‘and was obviously asking himself who were these people who landed at this unusual place.’
¹

They were Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell, Jesuit emissaries from Rome. By putting priestly foot to English sand, they were committing high treason. Derbyshire-born Garnet was in his early thirties and possessed of a fair complexion, a ‘comely’ gait and a hairline that might already have begun to recede. He was the son of a schoolmaster and had been a scholar at Winchester and an employee at Richard Tottel’s famous printworks
^fn1
before going abroad to study
for the priesthood. At Rome, where he became a Jesuit priest, he was known as the ‘poor sheep’ on account of his shyness.
²
It had been eleven years since he had seen his homeland.