God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (30 page)

A piece of a hair shirt of St Thomas of Canterbury set in gold.

A thumb of Mr Robert Sutton
^fn4
set in gold.

A gold cross full of relics that was Mrs Anne’s grandmother’s.

A gold crucifix bigger than that full of relics.

A cross of gold without a crucifix that hath little crystals.

A reliquary of silver, of silver and gilt.

For church stuff: A vestment of cloth of silver and embroidered cross of gold upon it, stole and maniple of the same.
^fn5

A vestment of cloth of gold, stole and maniple.

A cope of the same.

Two tunicles of purple.

A taffeta vestment with an embroidered Jesus.

An altarcloth to that with letters about: these two things were Mr Page’s the martyr.
^fn6

A great reliquary of silver and gilt without relics with Mr Blu[nt].
^fn7

A great deal of brass and pewter that were Mrs Brooksby’s and Mrs Anne’s.

There should be 12 feather beds with their furniture.

A tawny rouge mantle that was Anne’s grandmother’s, which she must have.

A great brass pot to boil beef for a college.
¹²

This was quite an arsenal. As monuments to martyrs and repositories of numinous power, relics were a crucial aspect of traditional
Christianity. Formed at the juncture of heaven and earth, they were the conduits of God’s wonders and were believed to emit ‘a kind of holy radioactivity’, charging anyone or anything that touched them.
¹³
Prayers said in their vicinity were more likely to be answered, fires might be quenched, the sick healed. Relics could not bestow sacramental grace like a priest, but set into an altar or pressed against the flesh of a demoniac, they might assist him in his work. At times of clerical scarcity, moreover, their function and value might rise to a quasi-sacerdotal level. Just as books and manuscripts became, for want of regular pastoral direction, the recusant community’s ‘domme preachers’,
¹⁴
and ‘sacramentals’ (rosary beads, medals, crucifixes, holy water and the like) could offer penitents temporary relief until they received formal absolution, so relics came to be regarded, to some extent, as supernatural stand-ins, affording a household a measure of protection until normal priestly service could be resumed.

As memorials to the suffering of Christ and his followers, they also reminded those labouring under the cross that they were not alone. When they appeared efficacious, like during the exorcisms of the mid-1580s, they validated faith and encouraged constancy. Sometimes the relic itself was the miracle. Robert Sutton’s right index finger and thumb (named in our inventory) were the only parts of his quartered body ‘preserved from decay’ after a year ‘pinned up to be eaten by birds’. These were the two digits ‘anointed with sacred oil at ordination’ and ‘sanctified by the touch of the Blessed Sacrament’ – so wrote the Jesuit John Gerard, who was later housed by the Vauxes.
^fn8
15

To the dismay of their superiors in Rome, who favoured strict, centralised regulation, the Jesuit missionaries did little to discourage,
and much to foster, English lay enthusiasm for the ‘fresh green new relics’ of the recently departed. In part, this was a simple matter of supply and demand. No official shrines and fewer priests meant a greater recourse to portable relics at the very time when their supply was dwindling through confiscation and export. The shortage in clerical manpower must surely also have enhanced the perceived charisma of the few priests that were left, so that when one was captured and eviscerated, his remains were pounced upon as the precious remnants of a heroic martyr. Then the hagiographers set to work. Knowing that they could not hope to control the wave of popular saint-making (had they even been so inclined), the missionaries chose to ride it for all its didactic and proselytising potential, stressing in particular the righteousness of recusancy and the sacred powers of the priestly caste. Conversely, God’s fury at conformists and persecutors was allegedly manifested in slow death and swift decay. In stark contrast to Robert Sutton’s miraculous thumb, for example, the rotting corpse of Francis Walsingham (d. 1590) allegedly emitted such a ‘noisome smell’ that it gassed one of the pall-bearers.
¹⁶

Relics were not always gathered with the dignity in which they were subsequently held. Thomas Garnet (Henry Garnet’s nephew and fellow Jesuit) complained of being fleeced of his possessions while awaiting execution in prison in 1608.
¹⁷
A gun battle nearly broke out between rival camps of body-snatchers after the execution of John Almond at Tyburn in December 1612. On that occasion, a Spanish noblewoman called Luisa de Carvajal claimed the spoils. ‘There are two instances,’ she informed Don Rodrigo Calderón that month, ‘in which I always find England to be very sweet, and forget about it being a sea of bile.’ One was when she triumphed against Protestants in debate. The other

is when I receive these joyous corpses and spend the whole night exhausted from dressing them with aromatic spices, having first cleaned them of mud and caught the blood that still springs from some of the veins. I kiss their hands and feet many times, binding the severed limbs in new white holland,
^fn9
keeping vigil over them and putting them in their sepulchre of lead, so that they might be preserved should Our Sovereign Lord so choose.
¹⁸

It is not known if Anne and Eleanor ever became quite so involved, but relic traffic certainly passed through their house and, looking ahead to 1606, Anne would help propagate the most notorious miracle tale of all, that of ‘Garnet’s Straw’.

Another prominent item in the aforementioned inventory is the vestment, the ritual apparel of the Catholic clergy. The most significant and symbolic were the Eucharistic vestments, those worn by the priest at Mass. They could be works of art: sumptuous textiles, exquisitely embroidered and sometimes (like the Vaux set at Harrowden Hall) embellished with gold and pearls. They helped the priest represent Christ at the Sacrifice of the Altar and they presented the laity with a ‘living picture’ of the Passion. A priest celebrating Mass without the right vestments – that is, the alb, amice, stole, maniple and chasuble – was committing a mortal sin, even in England, it was ruled, despite the high risk of detection.
¹⁹

Recusants became adept at replacing confiscated vestments. One gentleman, a Knight of the Bath, offered up his investiture robes to be ‘turned to use at the altar’. Others converted dresses, gowns, blankets, even cushions (permissible as long as they were blessed afterwards). Some vestments were designed to be reversible, others were disguised as ordinary domestic items. Unfurled in all its glory, a dalmatic at All Saints Chapel, Wardour, displays a cross; folded up with the linen, it could have passed for a patchwork quilt.
²⁰
In households like Anne and Eleanor’s, pious ladies were supposed to work the needle in sober, straight-backed devotion. It was a commendable pastime ‘in which the mind is little or nothing at all busied’ and could focus on edifying thoughts. And as they sat and sewed and meditated, these ladies also produced altar-cloths and chalice veils, silk panels, appliqué hangings, monogrammed handkerchiefs and even – in one house in Samlesbury, Lancashire – a ‘gown without a pocket and yet devices secretly to keep letters in’.
²¹
It is a testament to their industry that John Gerard, S.J., only had to carry around his own Mass equipment for a few years after his arrival in England in 1588. ‘In nearly every house I visited later I would find vestments and everything else laid out ready for me.’
²²

Only the most privileged families could afford – both in terms of cost and risk – to have much ‘church stuff’, that is: chapel plate and furnishings, altarpieces, crucifixes, candlesticks and other holy objects
and images. These were encouraged, but not required, for the legitimate celebration of the Mass. A priest would need his missal, however, even if he could remember all the words, and consecrated vessels for the bread and wine. Chalices were sometimes made to a small scale and unscrewed at the stem for portability and concealment. Traditionally, they were cast in precious metals, but hard times called for hard measures. To the question,
May a tin chalice be used for saying Mass in England at the moment?
, came the sensible resolution:

There is no difficulty at all for we have the express decision of a canon, where it is laid down that the chalice of the Lord and the paten should be made of gold, or, if that is not possible, of silver. In cases of great poverty, a chalice should at least be made of tin. But chalices should not be made of bronze or brass because they react with the wine to form a mould, which can cause vomiting. No one has dared to sing Mass with a wooden or glass chalice. Lo, there you have every material of which a chalice may or may not be made, and it may be made from tin, especially in England where the most perfect tin is to be found.
²³

The casuist texts that pronounced such rulings were written by senior clerics in exile to help seminarians adapt the inflexible institutional mandates of Rome to the conditions on the ground in England. In certain circumstances, rules could be relaxed for the greater good of the mission. Thus, on a fast day, a recusant might serve meat to an Elizabethan magistrate or even break the fast herself to avoid detection on the road. ‘Gambling games’ were acceptable and even preferable to excessive abstinence, which could be ‘more dangerous than useful’. Church property could be rented from Protestant landowners and ‘a blind eye’ might be turned to servants who attended divine service.
²⁴

But the casuists could only bend so far. When it came to the Mass, the central observance of their faith, there was a basic minimum requirement. Hence the need for vestments, vessels and, above all, an altar for the sacrifice. A vast stone edifice of the kind used before the Reformation was clearly impractical, so a portable altar (or ‘superaltar’, or altar-stone) was used. This was a slab of natural stone, about the size of a placemat, into which a relic was usually set. In theory, it had to be consecrated, but in cases of extreme necessity the stipulation
might be waived.
^fn10
One altar-stone used at the time and now at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire was found in a ‘pedlar’s chest’ hidden behind the wall of a nearby house. The chest also contained a lady’s bonnet (intended to dupe the causal searcher), vestments and a chalice and paten (see
Plate 27
). This was the field kit of the missionary priest and it allowed him to bring his Church – and his God – into almost every place that he visited.

The Mass could happen anywhere, the texts ruled, ‘except at sea or on a river’. It could be said outside, within a gentleman’s wardrobe, behind bars, even in ‘a bridal chamber’. Some of the grander, more protected residences like Harrowden Hall or Battle Abbey still enjoyed the use of traditional altars in private chapels, but this was exceptional.
²⁵
For Anne and Eleanor, trying to maintain secrecy on the move or in rented accommodation, the Mass would often have been celebrated on an altar-stone slotted into a frame built into a tabletop or the surface of a sideboard or bureau. The diminutive carpenter Nicholas Owen
alias
‘Little John’ often travelled with the sisters and may have created bespoke furniture or adapted existing items for this purpose.

Security mattered more than status in the room or rooms selected for the Mass. It had to be private and quiet, and have as many stairs and lockable doors in the way as possible. Attics and withdrawing rooms were favoured. Once the sisters decided to settle somewhere, they would have established the ‘chapel’ on a more permanent, but still convertible, basis, introducing a range of vessels, vestments and images, as well, no doubt, as their grandmother’s ‘gold cross full of relics’. At Stanley Grange, a house that Anne would later run as a school in Derbyshire, a pursuivant discovered

two chapels, one opening into the other, and in either of them a table set to the upper end for an altar, and stools and cushions laid as though they had been lately at Mass. Over the altars there were crucifixes set and other pictures about it.
²⁶

Raids were often timed to catch the priest in the act of saying Mass, but households grew wise to their tactics and soon developed their own. At the signal, a well-drilled priest would throw off his vestments, snuff out the candles, strip the altar, pop his stone in his pocket and scuttle into his hide. He often benefited from the cover of darkness, especially during the dawn raids of the winter months, when waking embers and candlelight failed to lift the gloom. Even in daylight a young pursuivant born after 1558, having no memory of Catholicism as the official religion, might struggle to distinguish a dalmatic from a dressing gown. Others may not have looked that hard or may have had the ‘golden reason’ to flinch from the task.
²⁷
Not all officials enjoyed rifling through their neighbour’s goods, especially those of widows, who traditionally warranted the protection of society. One contemporary, referring to the ransacking of Eliza Vaux’s house in 1611, acknowledged ‘the disgrace that is wont to accompany this kind of service’.
²⁸
It seems plausible that some of the tales of miraculous deliverance from discovery might have owed as much to official discretion as divine intervention.