God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (6 page)

In the event, both countries would have their own domestic trials. France would be destabilised by four decades of religious civil war and Philip II, upon returning to Spain in the autumn of 1559, initially poured his energies into the Inquisition and his battle against growing Protestant activism in the Low Countries. Yet he was always very interested in English affairs, not just because he was the self-styled champion of Catholic Europe and because Dutch Protestant exiles found a safe haven across the North Sea, but also because he had been married to Mary I for four years and enjoyed the ‘crown matrimonial’ of England. ‘God has already granted that by my intervention and my hand that kingdom has previously been restored to the Catholic Church once,’ Philip later declared in an ominous statement of chutzpah and intent. He did not mourn Mary much or his departure from the country that had received him with such ill grace, but he had relished his role as joint Defender of the Faith and even contemplated reclaiming the title long after Mary’s death.
⁴¹
Elizabeth I was wise indeed to avoid making waves at the start of her reign.

She was, nevertheless, determined to kill off Catholicism in her kingdom. She was happy to procure a slow death by gradually starving the community of its sacraments. Once the old generation of Marian ‘mass-mongers’ had died out, and once the schoolmasters, who after 1563 were required to take the oath of supremacy, had worked on the next generation, the demand for the Catholic sacraments would dwindle. That was the theory. It did not take into account the resilience and resourcefulness of the Catholic community. Nor the efforts of an Oxford academic in exile called William Allen, who circumvented the ban on domestic ordination by setting up a seminary in Douai, Flanders. Within six years of its foundation in 1568, Allen was sending newly trained priests across the Channel for the sustenance of hungry Catholic souls.

Another event in 1568 caused even graver consternation. Mary Queen of Scots, the young Catholic widow of Francis II of France, and the great-niece of Henry VIII, sailed into England seeking refuge from the Scottish Protestants who had forced her abdication. Elizabeth I was in a bind. Until she married and had children, her cousin Mary was the
heir presumptive to the English throne. By quartering her arms with those of England, Mary had signalled her desire to be enthroned at Westminster. Whether she hoped to achieve this by deposition or succession was unclear, but many of her supporters, including militant leaders in Spain, Rome and France, seemed to favour the former.

Elizabeth’s Secretary, William Cecil (Lord Burghley from February 1571), was convinced that Mary posed a mortal threat to his Queen. Five years earlier, he had even tried to introduce a bill that would have given the Privy Council, in the event of Elizabeth’s death, temporary control of government, allowing time for Parliament to elect a suitable (Protestant) successor. It was a radical proposal and ahead of its time. The Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 would later justify Cecil’s vision, but in 1563 Queen Elizabeth was far too wedded to the concept of inviolable hereditary monarchy to legislate for such a provision.
⁴²
The bill was dropped, but Cecil never gave up and nor did Mary or her supporters. ‘There is less danger in fearing too much than too little,’ Francis Walsingham wrote to Cecil towards the end of 1568.
⁴³

Despite noble privilege and official reluctance to intrude upon private worship at Harrowden, Lord Vaux was doubtless observed with a weather eye. He was known on the Continent as a friend of Rome: a document in the Vatican archives from December 1567 lists him as one of thirty-one English Catholic peers.
⁴⁴
Two years earlier he had granted the advowson of a church living to a ‘clarke’ who subsequently ‘changed his habit’ and ministered as a priest to the Catholic community. From 1571, the priest was receiving ten pounds a year from Lord Vaux. The following year, he was imprisoned by the Bishop of London. One of Burghley’s spies, who suspected the priest of associating with confederates of the Scottish Queen, reported from London that he had been living ‘very gentlemanlike in this town, resorting familiarly to the French ambassador & is favoured of a great number of papists’.
⁴⁵
Lord Vaux may have been adopting a conformist pose, but it must be wondered how many other priests were receiving his aid behind the scenes.

The letter that Edmund Campion wrote to Lord Vaux’s first son, Henry, is suggestive: ‘During the period of several months when I was a guest at your father’s house,’ he wrote, in reference to his sojourn at Harrowden Hall around 1568, ‘his daily speech and intimate
conversation brought home to me the great work he was doing for all men of learning.’ Campion concluded by sending his infinite good wishes to Henry ‘and your family, by whom I am so sumptuously maintained and so honourably encouraged’.

Within a month of writing this letter, which he addressed from Oxford on 28 July 1570, Campion had left England for Ireland, where he wrote
Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland
, dedicated to the Chancellor of Oxford University, and Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester. The following summer, he travelled to Allen’s seminary in Douai, where he studied scholastic theology for nearly two years before moving to Rome and joining a religious order, the Society of Jesus. He was ordained in Prague in 1578 and celebrated his first Mass on 8 September. Two years later he returned to England ‘to cry alarm spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance wherewith many my dear countrymen are abused’.
⁴⁶

It would be putting the cart before the horse to anticipate all this in the summer of 1570 when Campion gratefully acknowledged Lord Vaux’s continued support. However, he did write his letter at a crossroads. In the late 1560s, the Oxford scholar had composed a long Latin poem on the tribulations of the early Church that juxtaposed the permanence of the Roman Church with the transitoriness of the Empire. ‘The strong pillar of faith stood firm,’ Campion wrote, ‘and the sure barque of Peter, never to sink, sailed bravely forward despite the tyrant.’ He wrote in the classical hexameters of Virgil and dedicated his work to ‘one of the most heroic men alive’: Viscount Montague, a prominent Catholic nobleman, who had spoken against the oath of supremacy in Parliament, but retained the favour of the Queen.
⁴⁷

Towards the end of 1568, Campion had sacrificed his exhibition with the Grocers’ Company because he had not fulfilled their request to ‘utter his mind in favouring the religion now authorised’ in a public sermon. On 19 March 1569, after five years studying theology at Oxford, he had supplicated for the degree of Bachelor of Theology, something that he was unlikely to have done had he been unable to defend the established Church (the degree required public disputation). It seems that around this time Campion also ‘suffered himself to be ordained’ into the Anglican Church. Yet he did not take his degree in the summer, possibly, as his fellow missioner Robert Persons maintained, because
of ‘a remorse of conscience and detestation of mind’ against his ordination, which prompted him to forsake the established Church and, for a time, his country. According to one scholar, Campion was ‘an avowed Catholic’ when he arrived in Ireland on 25 August 1570.
⁴⁸

The chronology is important because it helps to assess Campion’s frame of mind when he wrote his letter to Henry Vaux from Oxford on 28 July 1570. We cannot know what ‘intimate conversation’ Campion and Henry’s father had shared in 1568, nor the exact nature of ‘the great work’ Lord Vaux had been doing for ‘all men of learning’. But if, as now seems likely, Campion was a recent convert to Catholicism when he wrote his letter, then his gratitude to Lord Vaux for his sumptuous maintenance and honourable encouragement well over a year after he had left his employ is intriguing. The two men had not seen each other for a while – ‘I have been separated from him longer than I anticipated (not my by own wish, but by reason of my way of life),’ Campion wrote, possibly in reference to his acceptance of the Anglican diaconate, which may have temporarily alienated Lord Vaux.
⁴⁹
But they had recently been in touch as Campion had written the letter at Vaux’s request – ‘your Father (by whom I am dearly loved, and whom I particularly revere) has easily persuaded me that my voice and advice should come to you.’

Whatever Campion’s subsequent vocation and whenever he resolved upon it, his job at Harrowden Hall had been to tutor Henry Vaux. He was hugely impressed with the boy, who at nine had already mastered Latin and was composing poetry. This was astonishing to Campion because:

among men of your rank we very seldom come across any who have even a slight acquaintance with literature. Many are overburdened with leisure; they concern themselves with trifles, waste the possessions of others and squander their own; they ruin the prime of life with women and pleasure. All the more rightly, then, do I congratulate you on your intellectual outlook.

Campion also had high praise for Henry’s sister, ‘your rival in study and work’. This was probably the eldest Vaux girl, Eleanor, who was about eight in 1568. If Henry continued to fly ‘the flag of promise’ and encourage his sibling, then Campion predicted great things:

You and your sister will be a matchless pair; you will reach the delights you so eagerly seek for, you will shine with marvellous lustre, you will be filled with the desire to do your duty and act generously, and you will be surrounded by fame and affection in the sight of all men.

It might seem a curious letter to write to a young boy, but such compositions, offering students praise and advice in elegant Latin, were fairly commonplace in sixteenth-century England. We cannot now know if the lessons at Harrowden Hall strayed towards issues of faith. Campion’s language is suggestive, but circumspect. Any direct references to religion are neutral: ‘Love God and serve Him.’ Henry and Eleanor would both commit their lives to the Catholic cause and, if not exactly regarded with affection ‘in the sight of all men’, to many Catholics at least, Campion’s words were prophetic.

The turn of the decade was not a good time to be a Catholic peer. National security was under threat. A series of diplomatic skirmishes damaged the uneasy relationship between England and the Catholic monarchy in France, while the English seizure of a treasure fleet destined for the Spanish Netherlands in November 1568 brought latent hostility between Elizabeth I and Philip II of Spain into the open. Early in 1569 Secretary Cecil wrote a memorandum outlining his fears of an international Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth. Everywhere he looked – Rome, France, Spain, the Low Countries, Ireland, Scotland, even at home, where Mary Stuart now resided – he saw ‘perils … many, great and imminent’.
⁵⁰

In November 1569, there was a rising in the north of England. The causes were as much political as religious, but the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland had rallied their tenants under a Catholic banner and heard Mass in Durham Cathedral. The plan, in as much as there was one, was to free Mary Stuart from house arrest in Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, and ‘thereby to have some reformation in religion’.
⁵¹
The Duke of Norfolk, already in prison for conspiring to marry Mary, was implicated. Spanish aid was sought, but not forthcoming, and the rising was crushed with ruthless efficiency. Retribution was swift and terrible. Hundreds of rebels were executed under martial law; 450 dead is the conservative estimate, though a convincing argument has been made for the figure to be doubled.
⁵²

The rising had occurred miles from Northamptonshire and Lord Vaux, serving on the county commission for musters, had had nothing to do with it. He felt the heat nonetheless. On 18 November 1569, he subscribed to a statement of loyalty tendered to past and present justices of the peace. He promised to worship ‘devoutly’ according to the official prayer book, at church ‘or upon reasonable impediment’ in his chapel, and to oppose anything said or done in contempt of the established religion. A couple of months later, the baptism of his youngest daughter, Merill, was registered at Irthlingborough parish church.
⁵³

Such tokens of conformity were no longer deemed sufficient proof of loyalty. The northern rising had exposed the Catholic Church militant in England and undermined the claims of all its worshippers to be good Elizabethans. Far from winning allegiance, the Queen’s ‘natural clemency’ had apparently emboldened rebellious spirits. The shooting in Scotland of Regent Moray on 23 January 1570 confirmed Protestant fears that assassins were active in the British Isles. If there was any doubt that Elizabeth I was also a target, it was removed the following month when she was excommunicated by the Pope.

The papal bull
Regnans in Excelsis
condemned Elizabeth as a heretic, whose ‘monster-like’ usurpation of the English throne had brought ‘miserable ruin’ upon the kingdom. It deprived her of ‘the right which she pretends’ and absolved all Catholics from any previous oaths of allegiance. The time had come for absolute obedience to the papacy: ‘there is no place left for any excuse, defence, or tergiversation.’ Thenceforth, any Catholic peer or subject (the bull made the distinction) ‘shall not once dare to obey her or any her directions, laws, or commandments, binding under the same curse those who do anything to the contrary’.
⁵⁴
The ‘curse’ was the sentence of anathema. Catholics could either obey their Queen and consign their souls to damnation or they could obey the Pope and surrender their bodies to temporal punishment. They could not, in good conscience, do both. It was the choice of two betrayals and theoretically it put Lord Vaux and his co-religionists in an impossible position.