God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (37 page)

Much of the invective spewed out after the death, in 1594, of William Allen, who had commanded respect from all sides and somehow managed to prevent the principal factions from behaving too abominably. Troubles at the English College in Rome and at Wisbech Castle,
near Ely, where many priests were detained, were followed in 1598 by Rome’s appointment of an archpriest to assume authority over the secular clergy in England. The Jesuits readily accepted archpriest George Blackwell, unsurprisingly, since the Pope required him to consult Garnet on major issues. A group of secular priests who saw Blackwell as a Jesuit puppet refused to accept ‘the foisting of that poor simple fellow Master Blackwell into an office and authority about whose meaning he knew little’.
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They appealed to Rome for a bishop free of Jesuit influence. Thomas Lister, S.J., labelled them schismatic. William Watson, prominent among the ‘appellants’, called the Jesuit faction a ‘lewd brood’ – and so the controversy rumbled on to the amusement of the government and the edification of none.
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Although legitimate concerns were aired, not least about the government of priests in England and the relationship between Catholics and the state, much ink was spilt on unseemly squabbles like the competition over who had the most martyrs. There were also some petty personal attacks. Watson, playing on Robert Persons’ name, accused him of being the bastard son of a country parson. (Garnet quietly investigated the charge and declared it unfounded.) Persons retaliated by calling Watson, who had a squint, ‘so wrong-shapen and of so bad and blinking aspect as he looketh nine ways at once’.
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As Jesuit superior, Garnet was naturally a target of what he called ‘the lash of a scorpion’s tail’. Students who resented the Society’s management of the English College at Rome branded him ‘a little wretch of a man, marked out to die, who day and night thinks of nothing save the rack and gibbet’.
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It transpires from Watson’s tract of 1602 that Anne Vaux and her ‘foolish virgin’ friends were apt to defend their confessors aggressively. For every critic of a Jesuit, he wrote, ‘you shall have a young Jesuitess ready to fly in his face’ and accuse him of being ‘a spy, an heretic, or at least an unsound Catholic, attainted in his good name ever after’. There was the usual misogynistic paradox here, for while Watson dismissed such ‘women tattlers’ in stereotypical fashion – ‘they know not what a faction means, but as I said before like parrots speak as they be taught’ – he also acknowledged their influence: they were ‘a stain to that sex and a dishonour to womanhood’. Likewise,
Christopher Bagshaw, in
A Sparing Discoverie of Our English Jesuits
(1601), mocked the ‘poor souls’ who had been flattered into fondness for the Society. At the same time, he divulged that some had been admitted into the Jesuits’ secret councils and likened them to ‘sirens’ with powers of enchantment and destruction.
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‘Lawsuits between Catholics for any cause whatever are scarcely ever heard of,’ an idealistic young priest had written in 1582. ‘If a controversy arises, it is left wholly to the arbitration of the priests.’
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Someone neglected to show Anne Vaux and Sir Thomas Tresham this roseate image of Catholic harmony. In Michaelmas term, 1593, Anne sued Tresham for her marriage portion.

It will be remembered that Tresham, whose sister was Anne’s stepmother, had stood trustee for the dowries of Anne and her two sisters in 1571. According to the agreement, he was to provide each girl with £500 upon her marriage in return for instalments of £100 every year for fifteen years. The eldest daughter, Eleanor, had married Edward Brooksby and received just £160 of her share. The second sister, Elizabeth, had become a nun and seems to have received £300. The youngest sister, Anne, in need of cash for rents, bribes, travel, prison costs and everything else that she contributed to the mission, decided it was high time she received her dues. Presumably she thought it not unreasonable, as an effective bride of Christ, to request the sum that her father had intended for her future; if she could not receive it, she at least wanted it returned.

Tresham refused: theoretically Anne was only entitled to the money upon her marriage or her father’s death; practically, she could not have it because Lord Vaux had failed to pay the full and regular instalments. Tresham nevertheless claimed that he would have dealt ‘bountifully’ with Anne had she not resorted to ‘her clamorous bill of complaint’.
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It is difficult to get to the bottom of the dispute because the evidence is one-sided. Only Tresham’s notes survive and, as his letters and more than twenty other lawsuits reveal, he was very good at being aggrieved. He liked to be in control of Vaux affairs and was irked by the ingratitude of the next generation, who inevitably pulled away from his ‘kinsmanliest counselling’.
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(Anne was not the only one, as we shall
see.) He also resented the intrusion of Anne’s ‘uncle judge’, Francis Beaumont, who stoutly defended the interests of his late sister’s children in this and other respects.

Anne’s challenge was also offensive to Tresham because she was a relative and a woman and a Catholic – or at least, in a sentence loaded with spite, he wrote that she was ‘reputed a zealous and virtuous catholic maiden, in exterior show renouncing (as it were) the world, to live a Christian virgin life’.
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There are shades here of William Watson’s ‘seeming saint’ jibe at Anne and it is true that she pursued Tresham with the same ruthlessness with which she defended the Jesuits. Her resort to the Court of Chancery, a public institution of a persecuting Protestant state, was, Tresham opined, just about the most ignominious and ‘irreligious’ action that one Catholic could take against another. Worse, she had paid her lawyers with money that he had lent her and she had persisted in her suit even after he was made a close prisoner in the Fleet, ‘she joying whereat true Catholics ought to have had Christian commiseration’. This ‘too too passionate and scandalous course’, wrote Tresham, revealed Anne to be ‘senseless’, devoid of charity and cut off from the body of the Catholic community. ‘I sooner would have begged my bread,’ he protested, ‘than in such sort have my fellow’s bane.’
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While the lawyers were arguing and Tresham was stewing in his cell, Anne and Eleanor travelled up and down the country threatening and abusing him with ‘ingrate, injurious, and infamous speeches’.
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The most dangerous allegation, which was presented in court, was that Tresham had married the middle Vaux girl off ‘to a monastery instead of a man, and there relieved and maintained her in a seminary beyond the seas’. Anne’s point was that Tresham had duped her sister to gain her marriage portion, but in exposing his contempt for the Queen’s proclamation against the maintenance of children beyond the seas, she embroiled him in ‘a matter of state’. Thus, he accused her of ‘bloodily’ seeking his life.
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There was certainly no love lost between Tresham and Anne, but he believed that the ‘malignity’ stemmed primarily from Eleanor, ‘with whom she liveth and by whom she is speciallest directed’. He traced it back to the help he had given their brother Henry in resigning the patrimony to George Vaux, and not to ‘widow Brooksby’s children’.
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At the end of a letter to his wife of 23 November 1594, Tresham
scribbled some notes that reveal a different side of ‘Mrs E.B’, to the timid creature portrayed by Garnet. She had apparently calumniated Tresham ‘in intolerablest terms … in many companies and diverse countries’, including at Harrowden Hall, when Lord Vaux had been seriously ill. Among other insults of which she ‘ungorged herself’ were:

That [Tresham] was a mere Machiavellian. That he had a face of brass. That his fingers were like lime twigs, for what money he got into his clutches could not thence be gotten forth. That he had wrongfully many, and many years, withheld her sister’s marriage money from her to her infinite hindrance. That he had deceived her father of a thousand pounds by many years since receiving a thousand pounds for the preferment of his two nieces. And, notwithstanding, covinously causeth her said father to sell land to levy money again to that self same use. That her uncle J[ustice] B[eaumont] should course
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TT [
tear in manuscript
] … Lastly that TT was a scandal to the Catholic religion and to all Catholics and should also speedily be scoured up for it by them that had authority to do it, and should do it.
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The dispute reached its denouement on 2 November 1594. ‘This present weeping All Souls Day,’ Tresham reported late that night, ‘which exceedeth all the extreme wet days of this long matchless wettest season, here arrived (as my petty Hoxton common was coming for my dinner) my now kind, former unkind, cousin.’ The court had ruled for Anne, but on the condition that she go to Tresham, apologise for her behaviour and ask nicely for the money. She had tried to wriggle out of the meeting, arguing that it was ‘an unseemly action for a gentlewoman’, especially a Lord’s daughter, but the Master of the Rolls said that ‘if she was so stomachful as to refuse to do it’, she would not get her money. Her friends begged her to yield. Her own counsel apparently threatened to ditch her. Even Justice Beaumont grew weary. ‘She held out till the last hour,’ Tresham wrote, but finally pitched up at Hoxton with her entourage. Despite her fragile constitution, Anne had rejected Tresham’s offer of a more convenient venue, preferring to brave ‘the furthest and foulest journey’ in order to catch him alone
and have her submission ‘swallowed up in secret, as near neighbouring to auricular confession’ as was possible. After about four hours of ‘verbal combat’, she fulfilled her obligation and was assured of her money. Tresham was satisfied on all points, if still seething. He noted pointedly that Anne had kept him from his dinner just as his malicious keeper at the Fleet had used to do.
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It does not seem to have occurred to him that she might also have been hungry.

Quite apart from what the case might reveal about the sisters’ characters, it confirms a few truisms: that co-religionists do not necessarily get on (even, or perhaps especially, during oppressive times), that Christians are more than capable of unchristian conduct and that a professed virgin need not be a saint.

‘The extreme wet days of this long matchless wettest season’ continued beyond the winter, seeping into the spring and summer months. The harvest failed that year, and the next, and the next. Prices rose, plague struck and, in 1596–7, there was famine. The 1590s were hard years of war, dearth and death, especially in the north and west, where there was little poor relief. For once English Catholics could agree with the future Archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot: ‘He is blind who now beholdeth not that God is angry with us.’
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No priest was executed in London for four years after Southwell’s death in February 1595, though bodies continued to swing in the regions. Between 1590 and 1603, fifty-three priests and thirty-five laypeople were executed. Compared to the seventy-eight priests and twenty-five laypeople between 1581 and 1590, this was an improvement.
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Some captive priests were not executed. John Gerard was one. William Weston, Garnet’s predecessor, was another. An informal alliance with France between 1595 and 1598 strengthened England’s hand for a time, but there was always ‘noise from Spain’
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and concomitant chatter about Philip II’s (after September 1598, Philip III’s) sleeping allies in England.

With hindsight Queen Elizabeth’s last decade (1593–1603) appears more settled in terms of religion than previous years, but Anne and Eleanor are unlikely to have seen it that way.
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They were still harbouring the Jesuit superior and his brethren, still on the run, still jumping at shadows. We glimpse them only occasionally – visiting their sick father at Harrowden Hall in the summer of 1594; bailing
William Baldwin, S.J., out of prison in 1595; bumping into a surprisingly upbeat Countess of Arundel in London in 1598 a day or two after her teenage daughter had succumbed to tuberculosis: ‘Ah cousin,’ she said to Anne, ‘my Bess is gone to heaven and if it were God Almighty’s will, I wish the other were as well gone after her.’
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In March 1598, Oswald Tesimond, a slender, rubicund Jesuit from York, found Garnet and his family at a house called Morecrofts, ‘about twelve or thirteen miles from London near a village called Uxbridge’. He had walked there from the capital and arrived just before sunset, receiving ‘the warmest welcome and the greatest imaginable charity’. A couple of evenings later, a messenger galloped in from London with news that the house, which belonged to Anne and Eleanor’s cousin Robert Catesby, was to be searched that night. Tesimond was astonished by Garnet’s equanimity, though he would soon witness it ‘on some ten other occasions’ of greater danger. ‘In truth,’ he wrote, the Jesuit superior ‘proved himself to be an old soldier and experienced captain, accustomed to such assaults’.
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Garnet and his hosts were indeed veterans now, not only at running away, but also at covering their tracks and managing their next steps. Wherever they stayed, they had to keep in mind the planned itinerary as well as multiple alternatives for themselves and their guests. ‘We are constrained to shift often dwelling,’ Garnet explained a month after their flight from Morecrofts, ‘and to have diverse houses at once and also to keep diverse houses at those times when we run away.’
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Tesimond was directed towards a halfway house at Brentford, where Garnet caught up with him and took him, by boat, to a place that the sisters kept just outside the city in Spitalfields. The following year
that house was discovered, but again the tip-off arrived just in time, courtesy of John Lillie, Garnet’s imprisoned lay assistant, who managed to smuggle out a message that the Lieutenant of the Tower knew all about the house ‘of Mrs Anne Vaux and her sister Mrs Brooksby’ and was planning a raid.
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