God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (5 page)

Parishioners were nothing if not resourceful. When, in 1551, the government sent commissioners into the shires to seize superfluous church property, much was sold off or adapted to secular use. At the Northamptonshire parish of Moulton, a chalice was sold ‘by the common assent of the parish’ and the proceeds were ‘employed towards the furnishing of one soldier for all things belonging unto him’. Another memorandum revealed that two Moulton men had bought one of the church bells and, ‘by the consent of the whole parish’, converted it into the ‘clock-bell’. It was to be rung ‘when any casualty shall chance and for the gathering together of the inhabitants of the said town … and not given to the said church’.
²⁶

One gets a sense here of the spirit of the English parish – pragmatic, resilient, protective of its community and its materials, adaptable and perhaps also a little bloody-minded. Many of the objects that the commissioners hoped to confiscate were bequests from parishioners’ ancestors. If their local church could no longer have them, they made sure that the government could not take them. The people of Moulton naturally obeyed the law, but in as much as it was possible, they strived to do so on their own terms. Parochialism usually trumped patriotism. It was this attitude that enabled the people of Moulton to carry on and to thrive during the early phases of the English Reformation. Perhaps, too, it was the kind of mindset that lay behind the ‘stolid conformity’ of the vast majority of subsequent generations of English men and women.
²⁷

Before the Reformation could take firm root in England, there was the reign of Mary I. She was so resolutely Catholic that it was inevitable that her reign would be assessed for a long time afterwards on confessional lines. For Protestant polemicists, she was the ugly sister of the Tudor dynasty, a throwback to a time when England was shrouded in darkness and superstition. Mary may have been Great Harry’s child, but reformers loathed her as the daughter of Aragon, the bride of Spain and the creature of Rome. At the end of her reign, she surrendered Calais to the French, further evidence, if any were needed, that she was no patriot.

For Catholics like the Vauxes, however, Mary was the answer to their prayers, a genuine Defender of the Faith, who would guide them back to the truth. The Queen tried valiantly and imaginatively to
revitalise Catholicism in her land. The papal supremacy was restored with the sensible proviso that redistributed monastic wealth could remain in lay hands. The Mass and traditional ceremonies returned, and the parish church was reinvested with altars, vestments, roods, bells and images. Protestant Bibles were removed from the churches, but a new, acceptably Catholic translation was conceived. Mary’s cousin and Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, led a concerted drive to re-educate the clergy and raise their moral standards. He planned a ‘seed-bed’ (
seminarium
) for the training of priests in every diocese. Preaching was encouraged and new catechisms and collections of homilies were printed and distributed. Recruitment to the clergy began to rise for the first time in a decade.
²⁸

It is remarkable how much was achieved in the five years from 1553 to 1558 that Mary ruled England, especially in light of the harvest failures and epidemics that blighted her reign. But it would have taken decades fully to undo the work of her father and brother. Mary’s early demise and the subsequent longevity of her Protestant sister’s reign ensured that any changes were short-lived. It also meant that Mary would be associated less with renewal than repression.
^fn5
She was the queen who put the torch to the human bonfires. More than 280 men and women were roasted alive for refusing to accept her version of Christianity. Toleration was not a word that had any currency with sixteenth-century rulers. Within their kingdom, there was one truth faith – their own. All else was error and it was the duty of the godly magistrate to provide correction. Nevertheless, the scale and intensity of the Marian burnings between February 1555 and November 1558 were unprecedented and shocked even those who were familiar with the Spanish Inquisition. The sight of ‘fat, water and blood’ dripping from roasting bodies, or lips moving in prayer till ‘shrunk to the gums’, lived long in the memory.
²⁹

The burnings were horrific and contemporaries thought so at the time, but they were also deemed by many to be an appropriate punishment for heresy. If, as Christians fervently believed, unrepentant heretics would burn in the flames of hell for eternity, then death by fire was a fitting appetiser to the torment to which they had condemned
themselves. The Protestant preacher John Rogers argued as much under Edward VI when he supported the burning of Joan Butcher in 1550. Her sentence, he urged, was ‘sufficiently mild’ for an Anabaptist.
³⁰
It is doubtful that he found it so mild when, on 4 February 1555, he was himself tied to the stake at Smithfield, but he refused to recant:

He was the first protomartyr of all that blessed company that suffered in Queen Mary’s time, that gave the first adventure upon the fire. His wife and children, being eleven in number, ten able to go, and one sucking on her breast, met him by the way as he went towards Smithfield. This sorrowful sight of his own flesh and blood could nothing move him, but that he constantly and cheerfully took his death with wonderful patience in the defence and quarrel of Christ’s Gospel.
³¹

The words come from John Foxe’s
Actes and Monuments
, a work first published in English in 1563 and popularly known as the ‘Book of Martyrs’. Celebrating Mary’s Protestant victims as the true heirs of the Apostles, the emotive text and accompanying woodcuts catalogued each stake-side speech and every detail of death. It sought to destroy the religious credibility of Roman Catholicism, but even more damaging to English Catholics in the long run was the undermining of their patriotic credentials. Ministers were urged to place the ‘Book of Martyrs’ alongside the Bible in their churches. Sir Francis Drake sailed with a copy and read extracts to his crew. Protestantism – an import from the free towns of Germany and Switzerland – increasingly came to be seen as the ‘true religion’ of England. Catholicism, by contrast, was regarded as an alien faith characterised by obscurantism, persecution and tyranny. People began to question if it was even possible for an English Catholic to be a true patriot.

There was one recorded burning in Northamptonshire: John Kurde, a shoemaker from Syresham, perished ‘in the stonepits’ just outside the north gate of Northampton on 20 September 1557.
³²
It is not known if William, who had become the third Lord Vaux upon the death of his father the previous year, attended. William had recently married Elizabeth Beaumont, the daughter of the lawyer Sir John Beaumont of Grace
Dieu in Leicestershire.
^fn6
She brought to her marriage four hundred pounds and a ‘holiness of life’. According to Edmund Campion, she was noted for her ‘natural ability’ and ‘admirable shrewdness’, qualities that may have reminded William Vaux of his recently deceased mother.
³³

Elizabeth bore William four children in four years – Henry, Eleanor, Elizabeth and Anne. The birth of the last may have claimed her life. The register for the Northamptonshire parish of Irthlingborough, where the Vauxes had a manor house, reveals that on 12 August 1562, twenty-four days after Anne’s baptism, ‘Elizabeth, wife of the Lord Vaux’, was buried.
³⁴
That same month, William turned twenty-seven.

He seems to have coped with Elizabeth’s death in the conventional way: after a period of mourning, he went in search of a second wife. He did not have to look far. Mary Tresham was a Northamptonshire gentlewoman of good Catholic stock. Her grandfather, Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton Hall, had given the order for John Kurde’s burning in Northampton’s stonepits. Her brother Thomas would become a prominent recusant in the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign. There was a long history of friendship between the two families, who were already kin due to an inter-marriage in the fifteenth century. Vauxes and Treshams had witnessed each other’s wills, exchanged land, worked together on the county bench and been brothers in arms during the Wars of the Roses.

Marriage to the third Lord Vaux must have been an attractive proposition for Mary Tresham. Here was a young, good-looking baron with a rich estate and one great mansion, Harrowden Hall. With a male heir and three daughters, he had a good record in procreation. He was convivial and enjoyed music and theatre. Lord Vaux’s players toured the country and his ‘bearward’ was recorded baiting his animals in Bristol, Ipswich and once at Chesterton near Cambridge, where he got into trouble for diverting ‘a great multitude of young scholars’ from the afternoon sermon.
³⁵

William’s piety did not prevent him from revelling in the noble pursuits of the country. He was particularly fond of his hawks. He liked to spend money – ‘thrift,’ his brother-in-law wrote, ‘is with him
against the stream.’
³⁶
If, like his father, William had no head for business, it seemed to matter little with such a vast estate and sufficient funds to employ those who did. And if, also like his father, he was easily led, then Mary Tresham, who was every bit as shrewd as William’s mother and first wife had been, would just have to keep his inconstancy in check. Marriage was a solemn undertaking for any bride, but seldom would the vows be more straitly tested than those taken by Mary Tresham.

William and Mary had five children. The first was George, whose baptism was recorded in the Harrowden parish register on 27 September 1564.
³⁷
He was followed by Katherine, Edward, Merill and Ambrose. Although the children were privately raised as Catholics, the official registration of some of their baptisms shows that Lord Vaux was using the services of his parish church from time to time.

He strived to avoid the politics of religion. He had been one of the noblemen appointed to escort Queen Elizabeth from Hatfield to London upon her accession in 1558, but he stayed away from Parliament, despite having taken his seat in Mary’s reign, and gave his proxy to a Protestant.
³⁸
This meant that he missed the crucial events of 1559 when England once again broke with Rome and the Elizabethan religious ‘settlement’ was hammered out. He did not witness the uproar in the House of Lords over the bill for the Queen’s supremacy, nor the refusal of all but one of the bishops to take the compromise oath acknowledging Queen Elizabeth as ‘the only Supreme Governor’ of Church and State. Indeed, when Viscount Montague made an impassioned speech against the bill, it was Lord Vaux’s proxy, the Earl of Bedford, who sought to discredit him by asking if Montague had been offered whores by the Roman cardinals when he had delivered Mary I’s submission to the Pope.
³⁹

Lord Vaux’s surrendered vote went towards the imposition of what was, in essence, a variant of Edward VI’s Church, watered down and frozen in time.
⁴⁰
The Mass, for example, was abolished – there was to be no Latin canon, no sacrificial altar, no elevation of the host, no clerical exclusivity – but the new communion service was circumlocutory enough to hint at the possibility of Christ’s ‘real presence’ for those wishing to find it. Any attempt to shunt the Church either back or forth risked prosecution. Criticism of the prayer book or the
maintenance of any other form of liturgy incurred a fine of 100 marks for the first offence and 400 marks for the second. Forfeiture of goods and life imprisonment awaited anyone who dared offend a third time. Subjects were required to attend their parish church every Sunday and holy day upon pain of a twelve-pence fine. The royal supremacy had to be declared, on oath, by all those holding office under Church or Crown. Defence of the spiritual primacy of the Pope incurred forfeiture of goods and, if possessions were worth less than twenty pounds, prison for a year. Serial offenders ran the risk of a traitor’s death.

Subjects who failed these tests of allegiance came to be known as recusants. At this stage, Lord Vaux was not of their number. Noble privilege exempted him from the oath of supremacy and allowed him to worship in his private chapel. The official prayer book had to be used, of course, but as long as Vaux remained quiescent and discreet – and his father had taught him well – his inner sanctum was not violated. He probably hoped that the Queen, like her siblings, would not live long enough for the ‘alteration of religion’ to take hold. He had, after all, seen it all before.

For the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign the letter of the law was not rigorously enforced. Those who raised their heads above the parapet were usually shot down, but the majority of Catholics avoided confrontation and were not subjected to unnecessary scrutiny. Queen Elizabeth, in common with most of her leading ministers, had conformed during Mary’s reign, and she seemed genuine in her reluctance to intrude on private thoughts.
^fn7

The Queen was also acutely aware of her vulnerability on the international stage. According to the leaders of Catholic Europe, she was not the rightful ruler of England, but the bastard child of an invalid union that had subsequently been recognised as such by her own father. (Although Henry VIII named Elizabeth in the 1544 Act of Succession, and in his last will, he never formally repealed the Act of
1536 that had declared her illegitimate.) The 1559 treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis ensured that France and Spain were no longer at loggerheads, thus opening up the terrifying prospect, to Elizabethan eyes, of a Catholic world order.