God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (29 page)

^fn1
Only about half the Armada would straggle back to Spain. The supplies had perished, the ships were leaking, the survivors were wounded, sick and starving. (The horses had long gone, thrown overboard to save on water.) Many of those forced ashore in their flight round Ireland were summarily executed. Perhaps as many as fifteen thousand men succumbed in the end.

11

Mrs Brooksby’s Household

Why was Sheriff Cave so agitated? How could a widow’s household constituting six servants ‘of small ability’ and three children be considered a threat to state security? We know, of course, as Sheriff Cave must also have done, that Anne and Eleanor were priest-harbourers. More often than not, one of those priests was the superior of the Society of Jesus in England. ‘Since the coming of the Spanish fleet into these waters,’ Garnet would write, ‘far more than any other priest in the country I am suspect of stirring sedition and raising the Catholics to support the King of Spain.’
¹
His presence in Eleanor’s house would have been reason enough for Sheriff Cave to sense danger, but what seems to have troubled him more was the ‘evil instruction’ of the children there, something for which the ‘recusant mistress’ was as responsible as the holy men under her roof.

Great Ashby lies in the south of Leicestershire, conveniently close to the borders of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. The sisters knew the area well and probably escaped Cave’s jurisdiction with ease. Northamptonshire was the seat of the Vaux barony, but it was Warwickshire, ‘Forest of Arden’ country, where they settled, taking a house that would be Garnet’s ‘ordinary abode’ for the next three years. The new place was large enough to accommodate upwards of a dozen visitors. It was near a copse and had stables, a courtyard and some ‘very safe and close’ hiding places, including a damp but ‘very cleverly built sort of cave’.
²

It may well have been Baddesley Clinton with its sewer-turned-priest-hole in the west range
^fn1
and an owner, Henry Ferrers, who shared the Vauxes’ religion as well, it seems, as some of their business
contacts. (Two names in a 1601 Baddesley Clinton conveyance crop up as witnesses in three Vaux-related leases of 1599; in February 1596, the manor would be conveyed to George Shirley of Staunton Harold, Leicestershire, a fellow recusant, kinsman and trustee of Eleanor Brooksby.) Or it could have been neighbouring Rowington Hall, another moated manor and the home of the Skinner family, who were suspected priest-harbourers and also had links with Vaux associates (one of Anne’s most trusted servants, John Grissold of Rowington, would be hired on Robert Skinner’s recommendation; William Skinner of Rowington Hall later acquired a manuscript copy of Southwell’s
A Short Rule of Good Life
).
³
Or the sisters may have chosen somewhere else in the region. They covered their tracks well and no direct documentary evidence pins them down for the 1588–91 period. What matters more than its site is what actually happened in Mrs Brooksby’s house and why it was thought to have such a pernicious effect on the commonwealth.

It was, by all accounts, deeply pious. The informer George Snape mentioned that there was ‘commonly a priest or two’ resident, frequently more. One of them, Oswald Tesimond, wrote that ‘sometimes there might be more than twenty or thirty priests in her house at one time’, though this was extraordinary. Henry Garnet thought the house ‘
angelica
’ on account of the ‘many holy women consecrated to God’ there.
⁴
The sisters were clearly not cloistered. They moved about more than most women, but inasmuch as circumstances allowed, they strived towards ‘the highest & most perfect’ manner of living: that of a convent. In 1621 the priest and Staffordshire man John Wilson would dedicate his translation of
The Treasure of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons
to ‘the honourable and right virtuous gentlewoman, Mrs Anne Vaux’ in recognition of ‘the constant report of your virtuous life in the state whereof this little book entreateth’. To this Jesuit-authored work, Wilson appended another,
The Widow’s Glass
, in which he paid tribute to Eleanor’s ‘long, constant & most exemplar profession of that noble and worthy state of chaste widowhood’.
⁵

Such women, striving to live ‘in the world’ until the coming of their ‘heavenly spouse’, were expected to exist wholly for God, ‘contemplating him and meditating on him day and night’. The books prescribed daily fasting, prayer, spiritual reading and ‘handiwork’. The women
were to wear ‘decent and grave’ clothes, ‘without any kind of vanity or curiosity, without pride also, or any secular ornaments’. They were not to squander their money on frivolities, but invest it in ‘the succour & relief of the poor, and of such as are servants of God’. Their companions must be ‘modest and devout women’, ideally widows and virgins, and they should shun ‘the conversation of secular persons (as much as they may)’. Leonard Lessius, the author of
The Treasure of Vowed Chastity
, did not even attempt to disguise his revulsion of family life. ‘The irksome slavery of marriage’ bound women to violent unfaithful drunks, and husbands to vain jealous shrews whose birthday ‘must be made a holy day’. Sex was ‘unclean, as a thing wherein we differ not from a beast’, and ‘the sluttishness [filthiness], the ill savour, the weeping, crying & brawling’ of babies was quite beyond the pale:

How many times a day must it be made clean, fed, made up, apparelled, laid to sleep, rocked in the cradle, taken out again to give it suck and be held out? How many times must it be flattered and entreated with fair speeches & with a thousand pretty hypocrisies and flatterings to make it leave crying, or to sleep?

These are the continual exercises of such as be mothers and in such they are employed, not only all day long, but also most part of the night, so that they can scarce take any rest but with often interruption.

Chastity, by contrast, produced innumerable profits to which Anne Vaux had shown ‘good proof these many years’. There was some sacrifice: anyone seeking to emulate Anne ‘must first kill all carnal affections in herself’ and thereafter dwell ‘as it were mentally and spiritually with the Blessed, in community of heavenly things’.
⁶

Quite how a woman of the world could achieve this on a day-to-day basis was the subject of Robert Southwell’s
A Short Rule of Good Life
, which he wrote for Anne’s friend the Countess of Arundel. It described best practice for a heavenly life on earth and offered guidelines, ‘which may be, as it were, a lantern unto thy feet & a continual light unto thy steps’, as the writer of the ‘Preface to the Reader’ (probably Garnet) put it.
⁷
An exemplary day for the recusant householder went something like this:

5 a.m.
– Rise. Short silent prayer and meditation.

‘I must procure to go neatly & handsome in my attire agreeably
to my calling & to avoid all kind of undecency, which breedeth dislike and contempt and doth rather offend than please God.’

Morning Prayer.

‘After prayer on working days I must go presently about some work or exercise that may be of some profit, and of all other things take heed of idleness, the mother of all vices.’

Towards 11 a.m.
– Rosary.

‘If company and other more weighty causes will permit, I may say my beads and call to mind how I have spent the morning, asking God grace to spend the afternoon better.’

11 a.m.
on a flesh day (12 p.m. on a fasting day) – Dinner.

‘I must learn my little children (if I have any) to say some short grace or at the least I must say grace to myself … At meals I must neither be too curious or doubtful of what I eat, neither too precise in the quantity, fineness or coarseness of the meat, but of that which God hath sent take a competent meal measureable to my need and not hurtful to my health.’

Give thanks to God and leftovers to the poor.

Keep obligations and appointments.

3 p.m.
– Evensong: ‘use the same order of my morning prayer’.

Household chores.

‘It is good for me sometimes to go about the rooms of the house and to see that they be kept clean and handsome, thinking that God is delighted in cleanness both bodily and ghostly, and detesteth sluttishness as a thing which he permitteth as a punishment of sin and one of the scourges of hell.’

Read ‘some part of some good book’.

6 p.m.
– Supper (or if a fasting day, a drink at 7 p.m.).

‘After supper I may talk as occasion shall serve, or walk for my health, or read some pleasant yet profitable book as Catholic histories or suchlike.’

Examination of the conscience ‘touching the thoughts, words and deeds of that day’.

Bedtime prayers.

9 p.m.
– Bed.

‘When I lie down to rest, my intention must not be so much for sloth and contentment of the body as for necessity of keeping my health & that I may rise fitter to serve God. Also, when I lie down I
may imagine to lie by the pillar, cross, manger or some such place where Christ was present, that when I wake in the morning he may be the first that shall come into my mind.’

Sundays and feast days required earlier starts and ‘greater devotion’, with preparation for communion (beginning with confession the previous evening) and meditation after it. Although Southwell acknowledged that the householder was more likely to be ‘troubled with company’ on these days, he expected ‘godly exercises’ to take priority.
⁸
In the absence of processions, shrines and the great spectacles of the medieval parish, Catholics were encouraged to look inwards and use their homes as commemorative and devotional aids. Thus:

I must in every room of the house where I dwell imagine in some decent place thereof a throne or chair of estate and dedicate the same & the whole room to some saint, that whensoever I enter into it, I enter as it were into a chapel or church that is devoted to such a saint and therefore in mind do that reverence that is due to them.

In big houses with many rooms, that meant a lot of saints, but Southwell had a solution for the forgetful householder, suggesting that the room and the saint could be matched according to function. So, ‘saints of spare and regular diet, of sober and virtuous conversation’, could go in the dining room or parlour, while those saints ‘given to short sleep and watchfulness’ might be better suited to the bedchamber. Certain spots in the garden or orchard could also be linked to particular saints, so that walks could become, ‘as it were, short pilgrimages’. The technique could be deployed throughout the meditative exercises, a visit to the dining chamber, for example, prompting thoughts of the last supper.
⁹

Frequent confession and communion were recommended. Many recusant women, including Anne Vaux, took private vows of obedience to their spiritual fathers, ‘taking his words when he counselleth, commandeth or forbiddeth me any thing, as the words of Christ’. Some women wore a hair shirt; others preferred fasting and flagellation. Southwell approved of all three, but counselled moderation.
¹⁰
The point was to subdue one’s own passions in order to focus on Christ’s Passion, to confront the devil, the world and the flesh with a heart surrendered to God.

An occasional ‘exercise’ recommended by Southwell and based on his training as a Jesuit highlights the centrality of the Passion in Counter-Reformation thought:

I may take occasion of other creatures to remember God’s mercies: as by money the selling of Christ, by meat his last supper, by water the water of his eyes & side and washing of his disciples’ feet, by drinking his easel and gall,
^fn2
by wood his Cross and thorns, by stone, his grave.

None of Southwell’s ‘rules’ were meant to be easy. ‘He that entereth into the way of life,’ he wrote, ‘must remember that he is not come to a play, pastime or pleasure, but to a continual rough battle & fight against most unplacable & spiteful enemies.’ He was following in the footsteps of Christ:

who from his birth to his death, was in a restless battle, persecuted in his swaddling clouts by Herod, annoyed the rest of his infancy by banishment, wandering and need; in the flower of his age slandered, hated, pursued, whipped, crucified and most barbarously misused.
¹¹

These were images with which England’s recusants could identify, but if they were to become soldiers of Christ, they required rigorous training; they had to learn about discipline, obedience, self-control and self-sacrifice; they needed
ascesis
.

The Vaux sisters were ready for the fight, mentally and physically primed by exemplary, near-monastic living, and armed by the contents of their household. It is known from various accounts that they possessed books, pictures, crosses, rosaries, plate, vessels, vestments and massing equipment. An inventory, taken early the next century, lends a thicker description to the materials kept in the house:

Two gold reliquaries of two of the thorns.

A great relic of gold with leaves to open.

Father Ignatius
^fn3
picture of gold.

St Stephen’s jawbone in gold and crystal.

A bone of St Modwen of Burton set in gold.