God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (51 page)

John Gerard and another priest, Singleton, had also supped at Harrowden on 5 November and two days later, Strange, Singleton, Huddlestone, his servant William Thornbury, a Lancashire recusant called Matthew Batty and two other servants left Harrowden for Warwickshire. According to Gerard, both Strange and Singleton ‘wanted to go and stay with Father Garnet’. Sir Richard Verney, the Sheriff of Warwickshire, who picked them up at Kenilworth, suspected them ‘for the late conspiracy and insurrection’.
²⁴

In the small world of the shires, Verney happened to be an affiliate of Eliza Vaux. His nephew, Sir George Simeon, had recently married Eliza’s daughter Mary. He was the kind of contact that Eliza used to good effect. Though a Protestant, he was no hard-liner, having once employed the Catholic musician John Bolt and recently, so Eliza heard, let one of Lady Digby’s men go free. ‘As you have often wished some fit occasion to show your good will unto me,’ Eliza reminded Verney on 12 November, ‘so now, if it please you, there is that to be done which may exceedingly pleasure me.’

Eliza was concerned about two gentlemen and a servant in Verney’s custody. ‘The younger gentleman,’ she wrote of Father Strange, ‘your niece Mary will rather give you her portion than have him come in question.’ He was wealthy too, or at least his family was, ‘and the very report that he were stayed in this fashion would kill his mother, whose only child he is’. This was a none-too-subtle bribe, but it also reminded Verney that his prisoner was valued as a person as well as a priest.
^fn1
And there could be little doubt that the two ‘gentlemen’
were
priests.
Eliza’s pretence was flimsy. ‘I will not now name them,’ she wrote ‘because I hear they go but as serving men & under that name you may please to let them have your pass home into Lancashire.’ She dropped a few more bribes and a vow of requited kindness and then, just to make sure that Verney had the right men, she described them: ‘The one which I chiefly respect’ – Father Strange – was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He had ‘a clear complexion’, brown hair ‘and cut somewhat near, not much hair of his face’. The other – Father Singleton – was a redhead with ‘a much redder beard’ and ‘much hair on both’. Their man – Matthew Batty – was about forty and ‘very tall’, with brown hair and beard. ‘What names they give themselves I know not,’ she continued, ‘and therefore do not name them, but I assure myself this description is enough, & that you will deal worthily.’
²⁵

Whether it was panic, naïvety, or the confidence born of past favours, Eliza had totally misread the situation. ‘A word to a true friend is enough,’ she concluded, but it simply wasn’t, not in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. According to Gerard’s harsh assessment, Verney behaved ‘more like a Puritan as he is than a kinsman as he should be’, but it was as Sheriff of Warwickshire that Verney hurriedly forwarded Eliza’s letter to London at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, 13 November.
^fn2
The Earl of Salisbury perused its contents and jotted down some thoughts:

L. Vaux at Mrs.

Grants

14 horses by
Singleton

Gerret

Ogle.
²⁶

Dorothy Grant (wife and sister of plotters) lived at Norbrook, Warwickshire, where the rebels had gone to collect arms on 6 November. The St Winifred pilgrims had stayed there on their way to and from the
well in September, but no one would testify that Eliza or her son, Lord Vaux, were in the party. The note ‘14 horses’ might suggest a suspected contribution to the rebellion. ‘Gerret’ is surely John Gerard whose name was often spelled that way. ‘Ogle’ is a mystery to me, not helped by the fact that it was a name sometimes written as Oakley. Witness, in 1595: ‘at Little Ogle, 8 miles distance from Rowell in Northamptonshire, lieth Mr Bentley, who hath a priest in his house continually and commonly a seminary priest, whom his wife calleth her chicken.’
²⁷
The Bentleys of Little Oakley were kinsmen of the Vauxes. In the November round-up of Midlands rebels were the brothers Thomas and Edward Okeley, both servants of the plotter Robert Wintour. The Earl of Northumberland, who was sent to the Tower for complicity in the plot, had a man called Ogle.
²⁸
These are just some possibilities.

It seems likely that the Vauxes of Harrowden were suspected of more than foreknowledge of the Gunpowder Plot. Writing in December, the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, thought it ‘very probable’ that Huddlestone had been sent to Harrowden on 5 November ‘to give warning as well for conveying away of letters etc. and of Gerard the priest’. Two days later, Huddlestone’s departure for Warwickshire, leaving his pregnant wife behind with Eliza, seemed to Coke to have been ‘by appointment into open rebellion’.

‘Note the number of her horses,’ Coke added, and ‘Note Gerard the priest ministered the sacrament to all the traitors etc., as well for execution as for secrecy, and Gerard had continual access to Mrs Vaux.’
²⁹

The revelation that Gerard had given communion to the original five plotters straight after their private oath of secrecy in May 1604 had come from Guy Fawkes four days after his arrest. However, he maintained, even under torture, that Gerard had not known about the conspiracy. Still, the Jesuit was a wanted man and it was not uncommon knowledge that Eliza’s house was ‘the chiefest place’ of his ‘access’. Indeed, on 5 November Lord Chief Justice Popham had informed Salisbury that it was also Garnet’s ‘and therefore like she may know somewhat’.
³⁰

On 12 November 1605, the day that Eliza petitioned Verney for the release of his prisoners, Lady Fermor of Easton Neston also wrote a letter. It was to her daughter, Agnes, in Oxfordshire and in addition
to passing on Eliza’s request for the swift return of her Tottenham missive, it related some news of the shire. Easton Neston, very near Towcester on Watling Street, was well placed to pick up news (perhaps one of the reasons why Eliza had chosen Sir George Fermor as her pretended channel of information). Lady Fermor’s letter to her daughter conveys the anxious aftermath of the plot for those recusant women of the Midlands who knew so many of the men involved. Writing ‘in haste’ thus:

I trust in God now Percy & Catesby are dead (who they say were the chief conspirators) we shall be more at quiet. Tom Hoult saw them both laid in one grave without any cloth about them. Many are still called in question. Sir Everard Digby is in Hereford jail; Mr Huddlestone in Warwick jail; Bates is in Warwick, but his wife & daughter & son are in Northampton jail. I trust in God they stand all sound at Harrowden: yet my cousin Tate is commanded to be in House with them till the Council’s pleasure be farther known, as I hear … Our Lord bless us & send us peace in Christ our Lord … pray for your father & friends.
³¹

Lady Fermor’s source was reliable. As she bid her daughter good night, some twenty miles away at Harrowden a ring of torchlight encircled the home of Eliza Vaux.

^fn1
Thomas Strange, S.J., was a convert of John Gerard. He was described by Henry Huddlestone as ‘a gentleman-like man using the tennis court and sometime having music in his lodging’. The previous year he had written a book, ‘a compendium of all the sciences’, which he dedicated to Robert Catesby, his ‘most distinguished and beloved’ friend. (BL Royal MS 12 E. X; Fraser,
The Gunpowder Plot
, p. 93; Gerard,
Autobiography
, pp. 173, 248; PRO SP 14/16, f. 55v)

^fn2
Gerard would, no doubt, have been delighted to learn that Verney did not receive his expected remuneration for the many arrests he made in November. Writing to Salisbury on 2 June 1606, he complained that his duty performed ‘in the time of this late rebellion in Warwickshire’ had been rewarded with ‘hard measure and usage’. He reminded Salisbury of his ‘extraordinary charge’ and diligence in confiscating the goods of traitors, ‘all being beforehand conveyed, either under water, or hid in the ground, or removed into far and remote places.’ (CP, 116, f. 81)

23

In the Hole

‘We had prepared,’ John Gerard wrote simply.
¹
It still must have been a shock for the seventeen-year-old Edward, Lord Vaux, to ride home around midday on Tuesday, 12 November, and find it surrounded by one hundred armed men. William Tate of Delapré had used ‘all possible expedition’ and ‘as much secrecy as could be’ to catch the inhabitants unawares. As he informed Salisbury the following day, ‘we encountered the Lord Vaux returning out of the town, with whom we presently entered, making no stay in any place until we came unto his mother whom we found retired in her chamber through some indisposition of health.’ (Eliza had been similarly ‘indisposed’ during the Irthlingborough raid of 1599.) Upon request, she immediately surrendered the keys of her closet, cabinet, trunks and coffers. Tate secured everything, rounded up the servants and, leaving some men ‘to observe Mrs Vaux’, commenced the search:

As we passed through every room, we shut up the doors fast & kept the keys, which I yet retain, not admitting anyone to use them without some servant of mine own to accompany them. And after we had thus proceeded, having left no place unsought, outward or inward, we returned to Mrs Vaux her closet, where we applied ourselves with vigilant eyes to discover some matter of moment for the service. But having perused the rejected and treasured papers we found nothing that in any point did concern this late occasion. Then I ransacked the coffers of linen, trunks of apparel, the young Lord’s lodging and his evidence house, to which he very honourably gave passage, and in all things disposed himself to expedite the service that he might stand justified from all imputation.

Tate questioned Lord Vaux informally, attempting ‘by private discourse to evince something of circumstance’ and ‘by persuasion, nobly to discover what he knew in this late intended treason’. Vaux expressed his ‘vehement detestation of the treason’ and stiffly denied any knowledge of it, as did ‘the mother’, whom Tate worked on afterwards. As raids went, it had been ‘very exact’, but fairly civilised. ‘There is neither armour nor stranger in the house,’ Tate concluded, and ‘I do keep a very sufficient watch about the house night & day so that no man can enter or issue forth without our knowledge.’
²

On Day 2, Tate ‘intermitted’ the search and concentrated on questioning the servants and those caught in his cordon. Eliza’s baker, Francis Swetnam, was interesting. He said that on the evening of 5 November he had gone to Wellingborough ‘at the entreaty’ of a man called Matthew, who bought twenty pounds of gunpowder from a local mercer. Swetnam did not know Matthew’s surname, but he had claimed to be ‘a Lancashire man’ who ‘served the Lord Monteagle’. Apart from that week, when he had stayed in town ‘four or five nights’ and resorted to Eliza ‘divers times’, Swetnam had not seen him. The man was Matthew Batty, one of the three men whom Eliza was so keen to have freed from Verney’s custody. Like Huddlestone’s servant, William Thornbury, who was arrested at the same time and had previously been implicated in the Babington Plot,
³
Batty seems to have been one of those stalwart recusant servants who could be very useful, but also quite damaging, to the English mission.

Although Batty had a story about sending the gunpowder up to Lancashire by a carrier in Kettering, he admitted to Swetnam (or so the baker claimed) that he intended to keep part of it ‘for his own use’ and part ‘to bestow amongst his friends’.
⁴
The powder purchased late on 5 November would have been too late for Westminster, but not, perhaps, for the Midlands rebellion, or so the investigators might have wondered. Batty’s version of events did not look good for Francis Swetnam:

Mathew Batty saith that he, serving the Lady Monteagle and living at Mrs Vaux’s and Sir Francis Tresham’s some few days before Allhallow-tide, did on Tuesday the vth of November buy a barrel of gunpowder, which he left with Francis, Mrs Vaux her man.
⁵

Swetnam was taken to London for further questioning, ‘but denieth that he was ever at any Mass, or that he knoweth any priest, and cannot deliver any other material thing to be set down’. He admitted that he was a recusant, ‘but will now come to the Church, for that he had rather adventure his own soul, than loosen his five children’. (At least one son was safe in the Catholic fold: John Swetnam had been ordained abroad the previous year and would eventually return as a Jesuit missionary.)
⁶

Tate’s cordon, which extended three miles from Harrowden Hall, netted its first good catch on 13 November in the person of John Laithwood, a Lancashire man in his early twenties, who was approaching from the south. ‘At his first examination,’ Tate reported, ‘he was insufferably insolent, but on the morrow he became of a better-tempered spirit.’ He said he was returning home to Lancashire, via Kettering, and that he was a Catholic who had neither gone to Church nor travelled overseas. Tate was dubious: ‘these priests & Jesuits masking under other habits, make me become jealous of any unknown to me professing themselves Catholics.’
⁷
He was right to be suspicious. Laithwood was a priest and had been staying at Harrowden Hall before the crisis. John Gerard tells his story: