God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (45 page)

On the night of St James’s Day, 1613, during the hot, Hispanic summer, William killed an English merchant called Copland ‘in the street’. The English ambassador was so appalled by the ‘odiousness’ of the crime that he only gave William sanctuary for a day.
³³
Writing from London a month later, Luisa, who was not a mother, blamed Eliza:

Here everyone praises her for being a very wise woman, yet if she is indeed wise, I am astonished that she so deceived herself and brought dishonour on herself by sending that particular son to Spain; for the older one is a young man of considerable sense and good character.
³⁴

‘The older one’ would fare better. Indeed, it would seem for a short while in 1605 as though Edward, fourth Lord Vaux of Harrowden, might escape the recusancy rut, save the barony and marry the girl of his dreams. He was only sixteen then. Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the first Earl of Suffolk and Lord Chamberlain of the Household, was eighteen. Certainly later, and perhaps already, their love was deep and mutual. Eliza promoted the match with characteristic vigour, securing the services of her ‘great and tried friend’, Sir Everard Digby, as well as the ‘good will and gladness’ of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, whose son was betrothed to another of Suffolk’s daughters and whose intimacy with the pro-Catholic Countess of Suffolk was an open secret.
³⁵

Around Easter, 1605, Eliza sent her pregnant friend and kinswoman, Agnes, Lady Wenman, an update on her progress. Although ‘chiefly concerning her son’s marriage to my Lord of Suffolk’s daughter’, Eliza’s
letter also complained of Agnes’s husband, Sir Richard Wenman, who had recently snubbed her in London. According to Gerard’s searing pen, Sir Richard was ‘a knight with a large estate, who hoped one day to become a baron, and is still hoping’.
³⁶
He did not approve of Eliza, whom he accused, with some justification, of having ‘corrupted his wife in religion’. In her letter Eliza acknowledged the ‘disgrace’ associated with Catholicism in her country. ‘Notwithstanding, pray,’ she urged Agnes, ‘for Tottenham may turn French.’ Or words to that effect. Agnes could not quite remember. Her husband, who also read the letter before his wife conveniently lost it, recalled that it ‘concluded in this manner, or to the same effect: that she should pray, for that she did hope or look that shortly Tottenham would turn French.’
³⁷

The phrase, which may have had its roots in the heavy migration of French workers to Tottenham in the reign of Henry VIII, referred to a dramatic, but incredibly unlikely, change of circumstance and was usually used in the context of something unexpected or absurd. Witness the third Duke of Norfolk’s reaction to a nasty rumour in 1536 that he should be in the Tower of London: ‘When I shall deserve to be there, Tottenham shall turn French.’
³⁸
Or the poet John Heywood’s description of the end of the honeymoon period:

The flowers so faded that, in fifteen weeks

A man might espy the change in the cheeks,

Both of this poor wretch, and his wife, this poor wench.

Their faces told toys,
^fn6
that Tott’n’am was turned French.

And all their light laughing turn’d and translated

Into sad sighing, all mirth was amated.
³⁹

On 14 July 1605, Edward, ‘having lost the hope of my greater suit in another place’, was granted a licence to travel abroad for three years.
⁴⁰
It is not clear what had happened, but Eliza’s father blamed her ‘for refusing the match & offer of my La: of Suffolk’. A royal progress through Northamptonshire the following month, with the King bedding down at Harrowden Hall on 12 August, presented Eliza with the perfect opportunity to revive the suit. After bending the ear of the crypto-Catholic Earl of Northampton (Suffolk’s influential
uncle),
^fn7
she was confident ‘of the certainty of that match’.
⁴¹
Then months passed without word. In early November she decided to send Edward to London ‘to make an end thereof one way or other’.

Between eight and nine o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, 6 November 1605, Agnes Wenman’s father, Sir George Fermor of Easton Neston, received a request to visit his kinsman, Lord Vaux. He covered the twenty-odd miles to Harrowden Hall at an easy pace, arriving between four and five in the afternoon. Eliza greeted him and explained that she had sent for him in order to ask him to accompany Edward to London. While he had been in the saddle, however, news had arrived of ‘some garboyl’ in the city. Eliza had changed her mind, therefore, and would delay her son’s trip ‘until things were quieted’.
⁴²

It was some time – more than a quarter of a century – before Edward could conclude his suit, for the garboyl in London turned out to be the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot and no member of the Vaux family was untouched. Tottenham had not turned French. Along with the rest of the country it had remained English and Protestant and determined to find out what, in God’s name, had been going on.

^fn1
The fate of the four Worthington brothers became a cause célèbre in Catholic circles. The boys, aged between twelve and sixteen, were subjected to various attempts to make them apostatise. They refused and were flogged, separated and pronounced guilty of treason. All four eventually managed to escape overseas and become priests. Two of them returned on the English mission. (Beales,
Education under Penalty
, pp. 57–64)

^fn2
This was the opinion of Gerard’s predecessor, Richard Cowling, in a letter of 23 June [1599?] to Guilio Piccioli in Venice. The chief purpose of his letter was to entreat Piccioli for ‘favour & friendship for my cousin germane Mr Guydo Fawkes’, who was living on the Continent ‘in great want’. (PRO SP 12/271, f. 56r)

^fn3
This may be the present north wing, where a hiding hole remains. In 1694 Harrowden Hall was sold by Charles Knollys, the son of the fourth Lord Vaux’s illegitimate son, to Thomas Watson, son of Lord Rockingham. It was substantially rebuilt in the Queen Anne style. The Gothic private chapel was erected by the seventh Lord Vaux, who returned the Hall to the family in 1895. It now houses Wellingborough Golf Club.

^fn4
The elevation occurred at the sacring, the consecration of the Eucharistic elements. The priest held the host up for worshippers to see and adore. Extra candles were lit and the bell was rung to highlight the elements and call the attention of the faithful. The cruets held wine and the water that was used, along with the lavabo bowl, for washing the celebrant’s hands. Incense was burned and distributed by means of the thurible.

^fn5
‘I should explain that whenever I was with Catholics and we had to stage a game in circumstances like these, we had an understanding that everybody got his money back at the end and that the loser said an Ave Maria for every counter returned. In this way I often played with brother Digby and others when there was occasion to act a part and make bystanders think that we were playing for money in good earnest.’ (Gerard,
Autobiography
, p. 170)

^fn6
toys
: whims, fancies, jests.

^fn7
Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, was the second son of the poet Earl of Surrey (ex. 1547) and the brother of the fourth Duke of Norfolk (Suffolk’s father), who was beheaded in 1572. Writing in the reign of Elizabeth, the Spanish ambassador noted that he ‘completely rules his nephews and constantly keeps before them the need for resenting the death of their father, and following the party of the Queen of Scots, by whose means alone can they hope for vengeance’ (Peck,
Northampton
, p. 11). Queen Elizabeth never trusted Howard, but James I made him a privy councillor, Earl of Northampton and, in 1608, Lord Privy Seal.

PART FOUR

POWDER TREASON

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction: there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature: there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves …

King Lear
, Act 1, Scene 2
The play was performed at court on 26 December 1606

Fair is foul, and foul is fair,

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Macbeth
, Act 1, Scene 1

First performed in the months

following the Gunpowder Plot

19

This Stinking King

I perceive there is no hope at all of amendment in this stinking king of ours. An ill quarter to look for righteousness: at the hands of a miserable Scot.

Hugh Owen in exile, 1603
¹

Anne and Eleanor had a kinsman called Robert Catesby, or Robin to his friends.
²
He was about a decade younger than the sisters and ‘seldom long from us’, Garnet recalled, ‘for the great affection he bore the gentlewoman with whom I lived & unto me’.
³
The Catesby family home, Ashby St Ledgers in Northamptonshire, was just over twenty miles from Harrowden Hall and even closer to Great Ashby, Eleanor’s jointure house in Leicestershire. Catesby, whose confessor, Oswald Tesimond, S.J., was stationed with Garnet and the sisters, supported the mission and loaned them houses. Morecrofts, near Uxbridge, where John Gerard had landed after his flight from the Tower in 1597, was one. A house in Erith, ‘in a private back lane near the water’, procured by Catesby late in 1603, was another.
^fn1
The arrangement seems to have been reciprocal: Catesby and his friends ‘often resorted’ to White Webbs, the sisters’ house in Enfield Chase.
⁴

According to Tesimond, Catesby was ‘more than ordinarily well-proportioned, some six feet tall, of good carriage and handsome countenance’. Like Gerard, whom he knew, he was eloquent, charming and possessed of a mesmeric quality that inspired adoration and loyalty. Like Gerard too, he seems to have had the gift of making people feel good and important. To his kinsman Lord Monteagle (who was married to his cousin), he was ‘the dear Robin whose conversation gave us such warmth’ and ‘the only sun that must ripen our harvest’. While Ambrose Rookwood ‘loved’ Catesby ‘more than his own soul’, Thomas Wintour vowed to follow him to the death.
⁵

Of course, magnets also repel and the other side of Catesby was ugly, devoid of empathy and full of hatred. He had been ‘very wild’ in his youth according to Gerard, until he had properly committed to his faith, forsaken ‘his swearing and excess of play and apparel’ and taken up daily devotions. Thereafter a powerful zeal infused that extraordinary charisma and fired the restless spirit. ‘He was beside himself with mindless fanaticism,’ Tesimond later wrote, and he thought ‘he was wasting time when he was not doing something to bring about the conversion of the country’.
⁶

He realised too late that the botched political rising of the Earl of Essex was not the way. Along with his friends John and Christopher Wright, his kinsman Lord Monteagle and other Catholic malcontents who attached themselves to the reckless earl in February 1601, Catesby was imprisoned and heavily fined. His uncle (by marriage) Sir Thomas Tresham helped bail him out, which was generous considering Tresham also expended a year’s income on the extrication of his own son, Francis, from ‘the unfortunate action of the late Earl of Essex’.
⁷
Sir Thomas’s earlier concerns that he had ‘much more busied my brains’ on the affairs of George Vaux to the detriment of his son – ‘though otherwise Francis no less feared in those rather madding than gadding days’ – now appeared justified.
⁸
(There had, however, been uses for Francis back then: in 1591, Sir Thomas had sent him out with men and crowbars to retrieve four hundred pounds from one George Ball. They had violently seized the septuagenarian debtor and thrown his pregnant daughter down the stairs ‘to the very great danger of her life, being within one month of her time’. Ball’s claim to have ‘divers informations of very lewd matter against her Majesty and the State’ regarding Tresham’s servant,
George Fulshurst – he who later ran off with Merill Vaux – may also have contributed to his rough treatment.
⁹
)

Francis Tresham and Robin Catesby were ‘near and dear’. Their mothers were sisters and the boys ‘had been brought up from their childhoods together’.
¹⁰
They may have also bonded at the end of the century over the deaths of their first-born infant sons, though this is to speculate.
¹¹
Although Catesby’s great-grandmother had been a Vaux, it was marriages to Treshams – Catesby’s aunt to Sir Thomas Tresham; Anne and Eleanor’s father to Mary Tresham – that brought Robert so close to the Vaux sisters. There was also their shared heritage in suffering: Lord Vaux and Sir William Catesby had, along with their ‘brother’ Sir Thomas Tresham, been tried together in 1581 for supporting Edmund Campion. They had petitioned the Queen for leniency four years later and, when ignored, they had met at Hoxton to set up the missionary fund. During the Armada crisis all three had been detained. Recusants to the last, each man had shouldered a pecuniary and psychological burden that their children had been quite unable to lighten.