God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (39 page)

We have, of course, met Sir Thomas Tresham before: furious with Anne Vaux for taking him to court (1593–4); penning protestations of loyalty to the Queen (throughout the 1580s); scheming with the Spanish ambassador (1581–2); on trial in the Star Chamber alongside Lord Vaux and Sir William Catesby (1581); implicated in the assault of a Crown informant at Kettering market (1576). We know that he owned hundreds of books, kept Latin and Spanish dictionaries in his closet and liked his servants to read to him for an hour after supper. We know that he was a workaholic, even in prison, even on Easter Day, and that he was interested in mysticism. We know that he lost fifteen pence at cards on 19 April 1586 and that his wife spent money in 1588–9 on lute strings, virginal wire, barbers, wax lights and books for herself and the children.
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We also know that he would die £11,500 in debt, that he paid almost £8,000 for his recusancy and that the marriages of his six daughters cost him at least £12,200. He increased his income to perhaps £3,500 per annum and spent less than £2,000 on his building works, largely because he could supply his own materials. We know that he loved his orchards and preferred the Windsor pear to the Norwich variety, which tended to give him colic.
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We know all these things because Tresham kept meticulous records and, by a happy accident in 1828, they were found.

Builders removing a lintel over a doorway at Rushton Hall were surprised when an old, beautifully bound book came down with the rubble. They decided to investigate and knocked through ‘a very thick partition wall in the passage leading from the Great Hall’. This exposed ‘a very large recess’, about five feet long and fifteen inches wide. Inside was ‘an enormous bundle’ of papers and books wrapped up in a large sheet.
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They had held up remarkably well to the damp. The latest recorded date in the collection is 28 November 1605, two months after Tresham’s death and sixteen days after the arrest of his son Francis for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot.
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The treachery of the son is often contrasted with the loyalty of the father, as if the one never touched on the other, but Francis was not quite the plotter he was made out to be, nor was Sir Thomas a paragon
of loyalism. His papers expose a complex situation in which resistance to the state and its policies (if not always the person of the monarch) could be articulated and effected in myriad ways. Tresham’s nephew, Ambrose Vaux, threatened, allegedly at Eliza’s instigation, to have him hanged for matters with which he could charge him, ‘yet these,’ Tresham added pointedly, ‘are accounted Catholics’.
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Spy reports reveal that when Henry Vaux was arrested at Hackney in 1586, one Henry Davies and his wife, who both gave false names, had ridden there to talk to Tresham (and Lord Vaux too according to one informant) ‘about secret causes’. Their next destination was France for a meeting with the Earl of Westmorland, the only surviving leader of the 1569 rising and one of the Queen’s key opponents in exile. While this kind of intelligence rarely provides enough detail for firm assessment, it does suggest a seaminess to any perceived loyalty/resistance divide.
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Only at the Queen’s death would Tresham’s mask slip. Before a crowd wilting at his two-hour monologue on the history of the royal forests, he expressed resentment that he had been ‘kept from the face of his country and had not been in any commission these 24 years’. He spoke of the late Queen with ‘small reverence’ (in contrast to his praise of Mary I), claiming that she was ‘but a woman and one that was spurblind’. Tresham was ostensibly referring to Elizabeth’s lack of hunting prowess, but his ‘vain discourses’ touched on wider commonwealth themes and caused much muttering. There is also a document in the Tresham Papers, probably dating from 1603, in which he stated that English Catholics had harboured ‘a settled hatred’ for Anne Boleyn and her daughter, and that Mary Stuart’s claim to the English throne had been far superior to that of the ‘bastardized’ Elizabeth.
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Eliza Vaux’s adversary was a devoted husband and a protective father and master. The Market House at Rothwell and the many books still lining the shelves of St John’s College library in Oxford testify to Tresham’s generosity and sense of civic duty. His architectural projects – most famously the unfinished cross-shaped New Bield
^fn3
at Lyveden (which honoured the Passion) and the Triangular Lodge at Rushton (celebrating the Trinity) – were monuments to
his faith, as well as a fairly monstrous ego (see
Plates 16
and
17
). Much was made by Tresham of the connection between his name (he and his wife called each other ‘Tres’) and the Trinity. The biblical inscription at the entrance to the Triangular Lodge, for example, bore the words:
Tres testimonium dant
(Three bear witness). No one viewing Tresham’s buildings could have been in any doubt as to who was the loudest, proudest Catholic in the land.
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Then there were his grievances. He claimed to be ‘inclinable to remit injuries’, but was clearly a terrific grudge-bearer. He railed at ‘pettifogging’ solicitors and ‘dosser-headed clowns’, ‘the man of Kent’ (Roper), ‘the Baron of Rye’ (Lord Morley) and John Tufton, his son’s father-in-law: potentially ‘more impious than a Jew’.
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Above all, he railed at the Vauxes, who had behaved ‘ingratefully, unconscionably, perfidiously, treacherously, perjuredly, and bloodily’ towards him. He saved his bilious best for Eliza, ‘in whom malignity more than modesty, and covetousness more than conscience reigneth’.
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In fairness to Tresham, by the time he came up with that bit of alliteration – the summer of 1599 – Eliza had given him sufficient cause for complaint. Since her ‘brainless match’, there had been the ‘godless goggling’ of Ambrose in 1589, whereby she and George had managed to persuade the new heir to revert the inheritance to George. This was achieved with the help of Roper’s lawyers and a ‘secret sinister’ fine, which Tresham, try as he might, could not undo. When the ‘foul fraud’ was discovered, the happy couple was unrepentant and flatly refused to allow any land to be sold for the relief of George’s ‘moneyless and creditless’ parents.
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In July 1590, the matter was referred to the Privy Council for arbitration and it was ‘at the Council Table in the public presence of many standers-by and suitors’ that Lord Burghley denounced Tresham as ‘very a varlet’, who had defrauded his brother-in-law Vaux. Tresham complained bitterly about the ‘venomous and viperous drifts’ of his enemies, especially Roper, who was briefing Burghley, but the damage was done, the ‘Oracle’ had spoken.
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In the end, Lord Vaux had to appeal to Parliament for permission to sell some land. It was a broken baron that turned up in London ‘raggedly suited’, his parliamentary robes at pawn. At Hoxton on the evening of 15 January 1593, Tresham saw him ‘woefully distressed … with tears trickling down his cheeks’. But the Act was passed (Private
Act, 35 Eliz. I, c. 5) and Lord and Lady Vaux were afforded some respite in their ‘hoarheaded old age’.
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Recourse to Parliament was a humiliating expedient, especially for a peer, but William, third Baron Vaux of Harrowden, had lost his pride, his credit, his home (George and Eliza had turfed him out of Harrowden Hall
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) and, perhaps also by then, his mind. Despite a brief flirtation with conformity over the autumn of 1592, he refused to surrender his faith.
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‘Farewell my golden, gilded Lord, in [
MS torn
], not in purse,’ Tresham ended a letter to his ailing brother-in-law on 22 July 1594. Vaux had become, like one of the papists in John Donne’s second satire, ‘poor, disarm’d … not worth hate’. He died at Irthlingborough on 20 August 1595 and was buried in the local parish church.
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The title passed to Eliza and George’s six-year-old son, Edward, for George, like his half-brother Henry and his younger brother Edward, had predeceased his father. He had died of a sudden illness at Harrowden on 13 July 1594 and was buried the following day.
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Eliza was ‘completely overwrought’ and, in as much as was possible with six young children, kept to her room. But she persisted in her pursuit (or protection as she would have termed it) of the Vaux patrimony and continued to snarl like a lioness whenever she sensed danger to her ‘fatherless and penniless’ cubs.
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On 1 November 1594, Tresham informed his wife about a quarrel over ‘a petty portion of winter grass’ on the Harrowden estate. Eliza, having been allowed to stay on at the Hall, was refusing to let her father-in-law graze his cattle on a small close nearby. The situation had grown ugly and her ‘saucy servants’, like ‘Actaeon’s dogs’,
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had ‘violently withstood’ the old baron and subjected him to ‘menacing & braving speeches’. This was not appropriate behaviour for a lady whose husband was ‘scant cold in his grave’, wrote Tresham. He might have been right, but there was a hint of
Schadenfreude
to the message that he now asked his wife to give Eliza:

Tell her from me that it behoveth her to have more care in managing like actions now than when her husband lived. For then what error soever was committed Mr Vaux bare the blame (though the world reputed him but her instrument therein), where now she is not to mask under such a vizard, but barefaced will appear whence it floweth.
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Always quick to accuse his fellow Catholics of lacking compassion, Tresham showed none for Eliza or ‘her sweet little ones’. He never forgave her for his estrangement from ‘pliant uxorious’ George and he was probably right in thinking that the couple harboured an inviolatable hatred against him. It was, however, presumptuous to suggest that George might have ‘died impenitent’. Eliza, he assured himself, ‘will hardly be reduced therein to any Christian terms, what profession of Catholic religion soever she to the world maketh show of.’
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This echoes Tresham’s comments on his other ‘unkind kinswoman’, Anne, by whose display of ‘unchristian turpitude’ he claimed to be equally appalled.
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In 1596, Eliza initiated a suit against Tresham in her son Edward’s name in the Court of Wards. Presenting forty pages of evidence (now lost), she accused him of ‘cozening’ the late Lord Vaux of ‘very great sums of money (in the thousands)’ and of deceiving him ‘of all, or of the greatest part, of the possessions of his barony … to the utter disinheriting of her son’. She requested that the late baron’s actions be invalidated on the grounds of ‘impotency (
non compos mentis
) of mind’. Some of Tresham’s depositions have survived, showing that he was charged, among other things, with appropriating the manor of Houghton Magna, receiving money from the sale of Vaux lands and getting the baron, in his final illness, to change his will so that property in Irthlingborough would be held by his executors – one being Tresham – ‘for certain years after the death’ of Lady Vaux.

A codicil, made just two days before Vaux’s death, confirms the change to the Irthlingborough inheritance, but Tresham protested that it had been made according to the baron’s written instruction for the payment of his debts. Tresham denied ever having received any money that was not owed to him and he vigorously fought Eliza’s ‘truthless and detestable infamous bill’. Indeed he later claimed that he had defended himself so thoroughly, in the process exposing the ‘sinister drifts’ of Eliza and her lawyers, that they ‘turned all their suit’ to having his answer struck off the record.
They may have succeeded, for half a page of his 1597 examination has been cut out and another part redacted, though his accusation that Eliza had ‘forcibly withheld’ Lord Vaux’s estate papers at Harrowden Hall remains on record, as does his tale of ‘a mischance of overthrowing an oar’, which led to a desk full of documents falling into the river.

Two years later Tresham was still livid at what he called Eliza’s ‘rabble of railing, lying inventions’. ‘Where,’ he asked,

hath the like malignity been heard of as to bring my name into public hatred, to register of record the Lord Vaux her son’s grandfather (from whom all their advancement was to grow) to be an idiot, my sister the child’s grandmother to be a monstrous conspirator against him … myself, [great-]uncle to her son, to be arrantest knave, and treacheror … And that nothing should be wanting what sinfullest malice might excogitate, she would not forbear thus to stultify the Lord Vaux when he was dead, but in his lifetime thus frontlessly to record him for a witless seely creature. A worthy work of this virtuous wise woman it will be for her son to behold when he cometh to years of judgement.
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Another year brought another scandal, this time from a wholly unexpected quarter: Merill Vaux, Tresham’s youngest niece, the only one, he had thought in 1593, who was ‘worthy the saluting’.
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Not so in 1597 when she eloped with his servant, George Fulshurst. They did not go far, only to Rushton Hall, which made Tresham appear collusive when in fact he was apoplectic. Merill’s dowry (£1,700) was a good sum, more than three times Anne and Eleanor’s portions, and Tresham claimed to have been ‘the principal means’ of getting it for her, indeed partly ‘without her parents’ privity’ – a telling admission. A lucrative and ‘worshipful’ match with one Mr Lovell (presumably a kinsman of Eliza’s sister Jane Lovell) had been lined up around 1590, but proceedings had stalled and Merill had cast herself away on Fulshurst, ‘a land-lopper, a very beggar and bankroot base fellow’. Tresham had withheld some of the marriage money, they had sued him and he had wound up in the Fleet.
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