God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (40 page)

Thus it was that Tresham became ‘close prisoner’ again, spending
the whole ‘contagious, hot and most dangerous’ summer of 1599 in ‘but one little chamber of fifteen foot long and twelve foot broad’. His wife and daughter came up from the country and were denied access. It was the last incarceration of Tresham’s ‘moth-eaten term of life’ and the one (not being for religion) that most stung.
⁴⁶
These were the circumstances under which he fired a volley of excoriating missiles at the ladies of the ‘Harrowden stable’.

‘Not unlikely,’ he wrote to an unknown correspondent,

but you will marvel whence this huge mass of malice and filth groweth. And why these 3 sisters [Anne, Eliza, Merill], reputed of others so virtuous and religious gentlewomen, should thus more like furies than fitting for a feminine sex, without due cause, sinfully and incessantly to outrage me in highest degradation … As it is said
nihil fit sine causa
, so is it likewise said that no malice [is] comparable to the malice of a woman.
⁴⁷

Tresham opined that Merill’s ‘so wicked mismatching herself shortened my said sister’s life with extreme anguish’. Lady Vaux had died at Oxford on 29 December 1597 and Eliza had promptly seized property in Irthlingborough, which, according to Lord Vaux’s contested codicil, was to be reserved for the payment of outstanding debts. Much to Tresham’s disgust, ‘fondly affected’ Ambrose had sided with Eliza (allegedly upon the promise of ‘one suit of costly apparel’) and the two had attempted to overturn Lady Vaux’s will – as well as Tresham’s powers of execution – on the grounds of ‘excommunication for recusancy’. The corpse of Ambrose’s mother – just as well it was winter – had consequently lain unburied for three weeks.
⁴⁸

The next few months saw violent assaults on a barn in Irthlingborough, which Eliza and Tresham were both determined to possess. On one occasion Ambrose and some sixty men converged on it with swords, pike-staves, pitchforks, pistols and any other weapon they could find. When night fell, they ‘made great outcries and shouts & shot of guns & pistols … to the terror of the neighbours’. Both parties sought restitution in the law and eventually came to a settlement, though Tresham had not seen ‘any pennyworth’ by the summer of 1599. The feud with Eliza had gone on for fourteen years by then,
long enough for even a prize fighter to begin to flag. Tresham’s letter from the Fleet was his parting shot to ‘that house which is most beholden to me’. As for Eliza, he wrote, ‘all the harm I wish her is, I wish she had lived in more credit before marriage, in marriage, and since marriage.’
⁴⁹

^fn1
I use the abbreviated form because this is how she signed her name and also to avoid confusion with all the Elizabeths.

^fn2
Until the mortgage was properly established in the following century, landowners found it very difficult to borrow money, especially for a long term. In this instance, Tresham fell into forfeiture for Vaux’s debt because he was ‘fast fettered to my five miles tie at Rushton’. He had the money in London, but because he failed to secure a licence to travel beyond the five-mile limit prescribed by the ‘statute of confinement’, he did not get there in time. Thus, he informed the Bishop of Lincoln on 6 May 1593, ‘my house is the cause of this my present hell; Rushton, I may say, is my ruin.’ (TP, pp. 74–5)

^fn3
‘Bield’, deriving from the Old English
byldo
, meaning variously: boldness, courage, sustenance and (in Scotland and the north of England) a place of shelter. (
OED
Online)

^fn4
‘Aptly may he say that Actaeon’s dogs he fostereth, who while he mindfully feedeth them, they monstruous mercilessly would devour him.’ According to Greek myth, the Theban hunter Actaeon was transformed by the beautiful Artemis into a stag and then torn apart by his own hounds.

16

Assy Reprobateness

One positive outcome from all the spats with Sir Thomas Tresham was a truce between Anne, Merill and Eliza. According to Tresham, the Vaux women did not get along – ‘notoriously every of them disagreed one with the other’ – until their common enmity for him engendered a ‘moody atonement’ amongst them. ‘What Christian charity could not effect in many years,’ he exclaimed, ‘sinful rancour brought to pass in a moment of time.’
¹

Tresham was, when it suited him, an eager subscriber to the ideal of ‘Christian charity’, insisting that Catholics, as ‘fellow members of self same body’ and labouring under the same cross, should suffer and heal together.
²
‘Look,’ he announced in one inscription on the Triangular Lodge, ‘I have not worked only for myself’ (
Respicite non mihi soli laboravi
). The purity of Tresham’s motives may be questioned, but not his industry, nor his value as one of the most articulate Catholic spokesmen of the time. It is, however, unsurprising that ‘sinful rancour’ sometimes got the better of ‘Christian charity’, for the same bond of suffering that brought Catholics together put strains on their relationships that could lead to some very unsympathetic behaviour.

Recusants were fined heavily, often irregularly and, from 1587, cumulatively, while some, like Lord Vaux, forfeited two-thirds of their estate to the Crown. It was hard for them to get credit, harder to keep it, difficult to travel and therefore to repay loans and honour obligations. Those imprisoned or ‘fast-fettered’ to their five-mile cordons found it difficult to exert the personal authority needed to resolve disputes and command respect. Estates became so tangled in fines and ‘uses’ and trusts, drawing in third parties, and ‘pettifogging’ solicitors, that confusion abounded and, with it, litigation, which cost more money.
³

The indirect consequences of recusancy are impossible to quantify.
Did Merill Vaux run off with Tresham’s servant because the lucrative match she had been promised for seven years did not materialise? Or did her claustrophobic, insular lifestyle (she was apparently a strict adherent to the five-mile rule
⁴
) encourage her to look below stairs for company? (If so, she was at least being true to the casuist texts that pronounced it better to marry beneath oneself than a heretic.
⁵
) Did a recusant culture emerge – secretive, nonconformist, necessarily duplicitous – and instil bad habits in Merill, making her more prone to clandestine, rebellious behaviour? Perhaps she simply fell in love. And perhaps Lord Vaux would have died in poverty, and Tresham and Eliza would have clashed, and Anne would have chased her marriage portion anyway, regardless of faith. They were their own agents and their temperaments determined their behaviour, but the state’s attempts to repress their beliefs and practices forced them down avenues that they might not otherwise have contemplated.

At least the older generation could cling to a memory. They could recall a time when priests were revered and not reviled, when the Mass was celebrated and not suppressed. They might be patient (if not passive), knowing that orthodoxies changed with the passing of monarchs, for that had been their experience. It was different for their children, who had no living memory of easier, better times. It was perhaps hardest of all for the younger sons, boys like Ambrose Vaux, who would traditionally have been destined for the Church or the law or a military career. If they refused to take the oath of supremacy, they could not graduate from university or take up arms for the Queen or work for the state. Many grew up wandering and aimless, lacking skills and a sense of purpose. Ambrose received a seminary education in northern France.
⁶
He left England as the fourth son of Lord Vaux and returned as his heir, a teenager propelled into a situation with which he was not remotely equipped to deal. He had no training in estate management and, having spent his formative years in an all-male environment, was easily bowled over by the enchanting Eliza.

It is a picaresque and cautionary tale: the youngest son, adopted as heir, signs away his inheritance, spends the rest of his life getting into scrapes, in and out of prison, never out of debt. On the night of 10 February 1591, Ambrose and his cronies stole forty loads of barley from a barn (leaving the rest out to spoil in the rain). The Privy Council noted that he was of ‘such disorderly disposition as
hardly can be brought to any good conformity’. The following year he and his brother George were cited for ordering a revenge attack on a local pursuivant who had prosecuted ‘some of their friends for recusancy’.
⁷
March 1593 saw Ambrose on the run from creditors, of whom there were many. Tresham offered him temporary refuge in London along with some stern words about his ‘loose, riotous & sinful misgovernment’. Ambrose was in danger of becoming ‘a right younger brother, having neither wit, credit, land, nor money. Yea, I think I truly may say, scant clothes to put on your back.’
⁸

Avuncular advice unheeded, Ambrose continued to borrow and, it seems, speculate, with reckless abandon. He raised £320 in London in the summer – half from a haberdasher, half from dyer – which he promised to start repaying within six months of the return of a gentleman from Venice.
⁹
It does not appear that he honoured any of his obligations. In 1597, Peter Roos, from whom he had borrowed £200 in 1588, had him imprisoned. Despite ‘sundry complaints’ to the Privy Council, Ambrose remained a prisoner, though Eliza was able to enter a bond for his temporary release in the New Year. (This gave him just enough time to contest his late mother’s will, terrorise the good people of Irthlingborough and ‘return to the said prison’.)
¹⁰
On 27 March 1599, Ambrose witnessed two Northamptonshire leases and seven months later, under escort from his keeper, he visited the Fleet, where he tried in vain to extract an annuity from Uncle Tresham.
¹¹

In 1605 he cropped up in the Low Countries, in an English company fighting for Catholic Spain against the Protestant United Provinces. Military service abroad was a popular path for angry young recusants and, as far as the English were concerned, a more productive outlet for their aggression than the shires. It was presumed to be remunerative, in this world and the next, and fostered a spirit of camaraderie. Eliza’s son, Edward, who would enlist later in life, reportedly swaggered about town with his unit like the Jacobean version of a university drinking society.
^fn1
Ambrose’s comrades in 1605 included
several other younger brothers, as well as a certain ‘Mr Faukes of Yorkshire’, a much-admired soldier who would be found later in the year in a vault under the House of Lords with a slow match and eighteen hundredweight of gunpowder.
¹²

By the close of 1609, Ambrose had transformed himself into a Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. In Jerusalem he vowed ‘to defend the honour of God’ and, since he was able to show ‘sufficient proofs of noble extraction’, he was dubbed a knight by the Guardian of the Franciscan convent. (He would have had to pay for the privilege; one wonders how.) His choice of companion on the pilgrimage from Rome to Jerusalem suggests that Ambrose had not undergone a radical metamorphosis.

Anthony Copley, the son of an exiled friend of Lord Vaux and a cousin of the late Robert Southwell, S.J., was an erstwhile seminarian who had reputedly disgraced himself in Rome by appearing at the pulpit with a rose between his teeth. By the time he had linked up with Ambrose, he had fought for the Spanish in the Low Countries, turned coat, thrown a dagger at a parish clerk in Horsham church, abused the Jesuits in their dispute with the appellants, conspired against James I and then turned King’s evidence. In a poem vaunting his loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, Copley had depicted himself as an ‘Elizian outcast of Fortune’. Richard Topcliffe rather saw him as ‘the most desperate youth that liveth’. Robert Persons, S.J., thought him ‘idle-headed’ and ‘light-witted’. Copley’s trial recorder noted his ‘whining speech’.
¹³

He was banished from England in 1604 and, according to his charitable kinswomen at the convent of St Monica’s, gave himself up to ‘devotion’. In 1609, he voyaged to the Holy Land with Ambrose ‘and, coming to Jerusalem, they were both knighted at our Lord’s Sepulchre’. Devotions performed, sights seen and souls cleansed, the two blades returned home. Copley died on the journey – it is not recorded how, but the passage was dangerous – and Ambrose conveyed the news to his family. On 10 December 1610, Lionel Wake in Antwerp heard from
a contact in Marseilles that ‘Mr Ambrose Vaux is returned from Jerusalem, but in very poor estate, and was there in prison, but now escaped and upon his journey hitherward.’
¹⁴

By 1612, Ambrose had made it back to England, but only as far as the debtors’ prison, where he borrowed money from at least one inmate.
¹⁵
He was out before Easter and on ‘about the third or fourth of April’ – he could not quite remember – he married Elizabeth Wyborne, the widow of William Wyborne, a recently deceased recusant from Kent. Ambrose, then in his early forties, was under the impression that his bride was fabulously wealthy. In fact she was ‘destitute of jointure or any other means to live’, having transferred all her property to her late husband’s executors. Ambrose contested the ‘fraudulent deed’ of conveyance, claiming that it had been sealed after his marriage and backdated by the executors to 2 April. They contended that it was authentic and made of Elizabeth’s own free will for the satisfaction of her late husband’s debts. Elizabeth subsequently separated from Ambrose and lodged at ‘one Billyes house in Fleet Street’. She was a regular guest at the family home of her kinsman Dudley Norton, who was one of the executors and a former secretary of the Earl of Salisbury. Ambrose was left wifeless, penniless and seething.