God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (59 page)

However ‘imposterous’, ‘feigned’ or ‘ridiculous’ the straw appeared to the English ambassadors in Brussels and Madrid, it had to be confronted as reproductions were flooding the European markets. The Protestants put out their own versions, one with two faces as befitted the arch-equivocator. If it was true, John Gee later wrote, that the very sight of the straw had made five hundred converts, ‘every thresher in England should become a Romanist because they deal with straws, which have as perfect an effigy of F. Garnet as any other straw without equivocation ever yet had’. Robert Pricket, who wrote a verse pamphlet lampooning ‘the Jesuits’ miracles’, made the easy gag that ‘such patched-up wonders’ were ‘not worth a straw’.

Arguably Anne and her friends had done their job. Whether the straw appalled, amused, edified, or even evangelised, it got people talking, just as the exorcisms of the mid-1580s had done. On the Continent, the
Spica Jesuitica
became a symbol of Counter-Reformation piety and English Catholic fortitude. The canonisation of Anne’s confessor was not, however, forthcoming and the furore did not last. By the autumn of 1607, popular interest in the straw had waned along with that in another purported wonder, a little boy who healed people by making the sign of the cross. ‘They never mention the child of the miracles now,’ Luisa reported from London on 24 September 1607, ‘nor is there any discussion of the straw. All the talk is of Spain breaking the peace and sending an armada against England.’
¹⁸
The plague was flaring up again too: ‘One hundred and seventy-seven have died this week, which is fifty more than last week. It is a strange outbreak this one, which never seems to let up.’

^fn1
‘You have heard of the patience of Job, and you have seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is merciful and compassionate (James 5:11).

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Yours forever.’

Epilogue

A man walks into a bar.

‘Are not you a Catholic?’ asks a punter.

‘Yes, marry am I,’ he replies.

‘Then y’are a knave.’

‘I am no Catholic.’

‘Why, then, y’are a scurvy, lying knave.’

The Jestbook of Sir Nicholas

le Strange (1603–1655)
¹

Anti-Catholicism remained, like the plague, a constant of English life, but the violent backlash that had been feared did not materialise and James I’s preference for accommodation over persecution eventually prevailed. The recusancy laws, while still in place, were often relaxed depending on what else was going on within and without the realm. James’s leniency was only relative, however. As the fourth Lord Vaux heard him explain to Parliament in 1624, the Catholic horse might sometimes have a slackened bridle, but the royal hands would never come off the reins.
²
Prominent recusants were not trusted, their reputations indelibly stained by the actions of those few ‘wild heads’ at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Those who refused to take a new oath of allegiance, which rejected the Pope’s ‘impious and heretical’ power to depose kings, were deemed political malcontents and liable to loss of property and life imprisonment.

Anne Vaux continued to dedicate herself to the mission. After a period of readjustment – she was apparently ‘much discontented’ at not getting Richard Holtby as her new confessor – she soon resumed her work.
³
In the summer of 1607, at a house two miles from London, she took in a Jesuit who had recently come over from Austria. William
Wright
alias
Mr German had been abroad for so long that he no longer spoke good English. On the morning of Friday, 3 July, men began to circle the house. Wright fled to friends in the city. ‘A little later, Mistress Anne arrived and, after her, the pursuivants.’ Everyone was arrested, Wright was thrown into the Tower and Anne was freed on bail. Four days later, her house was ‘minutely’ searched. Wright was questioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and denied, truthfully, that he was the new Jesuit superior. He was transferred to the plague-infested White Lion prison in Southwark. Two months later, he broke out, escaped to Leicestershire and, with the help of the Vaux sisters, sustained the Jesuit mission in the area for over thirty years.
⁴

‘Anna Vaux’ and ‘Helena Brooksby’ kept house on the Brooksby estate at Shoby. They were sporadically cited for recusancy, but undeterred. Their priority was the young, ‘the future tense of the Papists’ as Parliament had put it. They founded a secret Catholic school. One pupil was Edward Thimelby, the sixth son of Eleanor’s daughter Mary. He arrived as a baby in 1615 and left for the college of St Omer fourteen years later. He recalled his preparatory education under the tutelage of Father Wright and the continued care of his great aunt Anne after Eleanor’s death around 1625.
⁵

Not long afterwards, Anne transferred the school to Stanley Grange, ‘a house standing alone in Appletree Hundred’, near West Hallam in Derbyshire. It was searched in November 1625, when officials seemed more surprised by the amount of dormitories that Anne had crammed into ‘that little house’ than by the two interconnecting chapels prepared for Mass. Officials noted beds and furniture for ‘forty or fifty persons at the least’, but no action seems to have been taken and the school thrived for a decade until a former pupil gave it up. In 1635 a warrant was drawn up for the seizure of all the Jesuits, children, books, papers and ‘massing stuff’ at Stanley Grange. A tip-off ensured that no one and nothing was found. The school endured, but relocated. Anne, then in her seventies, seems to have stayed in the West Hallam area. In February 1637, she is mentioned in the local parish register as the mistress of a deceased servant, but there are no later references and her burial is not recorded.
⁶

Anne’s service to the English mission was acknowledged in two dedicatory epistles. In 1621 John Wilson, translator of
The Treasure of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons
, praised her ‘sincerity of heart and
virtuous manner of life’. (He also recognised her ‘two most worthy sisters’ Eleanor and Eliza as exemplars of ‘chaste widowhood’.) Six years earlier, Michael Walpole had presented his translation of the life of Ignatius Loyola to Anne, ‘before all others’, in recognition of her work with Loyola’s children ‘in our afflicted country’.
⁷
Perhaps the greatest tribute came during the reorganisation of the Jesuit mission in the 1620s. What had been known as the Leicester mission was turned into an official Jesuit ‘Residence’ covering Leicester, Derby, Rutland and parts of Nottingham. It was named the Residence of St Anne.
⁸

Eliza Vaux continued to promote faith and family at Harrowden Hall. She was home again by September 1606 and soon struggling to stave off the fines and forfeitures associated with her recusancy. John Percy, S.J., took over from John Gerard, S.J. Catholics came for Mass and instruction as they had in the days before the plot.
⁹
Eliza’s boys went abroad: Edward (who reached his majority in 1609) to travel in Italy, Henry to study at the English College in Rome and William first to St Omer, the Jesuit school that had been founded in 1593 and would relocate twice in the eighteenth century before finding a permanent home at Stonyhurst in Lancashire.
¹⁰
Of the girls, Mary had married Sir George Simeon in 1604, Katherine would stay at home until her marriage to Sir Henry Neville, later Lord Abergavenny, and Joyce would become a ‘galloping girl’ of Mary Ward’s controversial new order of active, unenclosed nuns.

In the earliest hours of All Saints Day, 1611, upon a false report that John Gerard was back in the country, Harrowden Hall was attacked.
¹¹
As its inhabitants slumbered, its walls were scaled and the locks were picked or otherwise smashed in. The chapel, which was prepared for the feast day, was desecrated. About one thousand pounds’ worth of plate and jewels, including some diamonds, were seized. Eliza was stoic about the destruction of the walls, floors and ceilings. It was, she said, ever thus, but she was devastated by the loss of her garden. Her plants and fruit trees were uprooted and flung across the fields ‘and they knocked down and flattened the charming shaded enclaves and summer houses which she had made there for her own enjoyment’. John Gerard had spent many happy hours in Eliza’s garden.
¹²
Perhaps this was the pursuivants’ revenge.

Although the man in charge, Gilbert Pickering of Titchmarsh (who also fancied himself as a witch-finder
¹³
), could not claim the wanted Jesuit, he bagged two others – John Percy and Nicholas Hart – as well as the mistress of the house herself. He entered London in triumph, his son John having been seriously injured by one of Eliza’s servants. According to Luisa de Carvajal, Eliza had treated the wound herself ‘with medicines that are often used in the houses here’. Gilbert Pickering was knighted on 10 November and wasted no time briefing the new Lady Pickering on the ‘many hundreds’ in London who had saluted him, and on the King’s delight at his service in this ‘religious and state cause of great consequence’.

Eliza, then about forty-six years old, was sent to the Fleet. She became quite ill and secured a transfer to a more salubrious house in Fleet Street. She had to pay prison fees for both places. The oath of allegiance was put to her, but she refused it, saying ‘it was not something she understood’. Her perceived gender inferiority could not save her this time, nor her friends, not even a letter from Archduke Albert, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, who was moved by Eliza’s sister to beg King James ‘to moderate the rigour of the laws’ and have ‘regard to her sex’. Eliza remained a prisoner. Edward, Lord Vaux, whose licence to travel had already expired, rushed back from Europe to see what he could do. He went straight to the Earl of Salisbury, who blamed Eliza for having chosen ‘blood-soaked Jesuits’ over a nice old Marian priest.

‘Sir,’ Edward replied, resisting the temptation to make the obvious point that Marian priests were practically extinct, ‘my mother has been so great a Catholic for so long, and notoriously so throughout the whole kingdom, that I do not believe that you or anyone else in the land ever doubted that she would truly love and embrace all that is to be loved and esteemed in her religion.’

‘You are very young,’ Salisbury told the 23-year-old, ‘look out for yourself.’

Soon afterwards Edward was presented with an ultimatum: take the oath or lose everything. In the five weeks that he was given to decide, he tied up his lands in a trust.
¹⁴
He refused the oath – or his offer to take a modified version was rejected – and he joined his mother in prison. Both were arraigned – Eliza on 19 February at the
Old Bailey,
^fn1
Edward on 14 May at the King’s Bench
^fn2
– and sentenced to forfeiture of property and life imprisonment.

The case attracted a lot of interest at home and abroad. From the Low Countries, the latest Jesuit translation of Thomas a Kempis’s
Imitation of Christ
was dedicated to Eliza in recognition of ‘the public demonstration, which you have lately given of your true desire to follow the footsteps of our Lord’.
¹⁵
Edward received lectures and tracts. The King was reportedly ‘in much anxiety on account of the Baron Vaux’ and some peers felt that the social implications of his imprisonment (‘a common insult to their grade’) outweighed any potential political threat that he might have posed. Edward seemed rather to revel in his fate, writing that ‘the consolation that I feel in my present state far exceeds anything that I have ever before experienced during the whole course of my life’. As Michael Questier has written, he even rivalled Viscount Montague in ‘the suffering peer stakes’, giving the Jesuits – Montague was the seculars’ man – a ‘quasi-martyr’ of their own.
¹⁶

The oath of allegiance divided the Catholic community rather as the issue of church conformity had done in Edward’s grandfather’s day.
¹⁷
Rome pronounced it unlawful, so for some, that was that. For others, including the imprisoned Archpriest Blackwell, the oath was acceptable, since it made no mention of royal supremacy. Blackwell was sacked, but some other priests and many of the laity took the oath and wondered why the hard-liners, and their tender consciences,
had to make life quite so difficult for themselves. When, in June 1612, Eliza’s keeper walked in on a Mass, he asked rather wearily: ‘Has not your ladyship suffered enough already for this sort of thing?’
¹⁸

The sentences were not perpetual. The Vauxes were allowed to keep their property, even the church plate that the Pickerings deigned to return. The enquiry into the family estate revealed an annual income of about £1,200, outgoings of £650 and more than £8,000 of debt.
¹⁹
The priests were exiled; both would return. Lord Vaux was transferred to the custody of the Dean of Westminster in October 1612 and slowly the controls on his movement (for example, he was only to meet with county gentry ‘well affected in religion’) were lightened. By the end of 1614 he was back at Harrowden on good-behaviour bonds. Eliza was released on 3 July 1613 ‘for eight months for recovery of her health’ and thereafter sureties were entered for her too.