God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (8 page)

In blackening Mary’s reputation, Burghley arguably benefited a great deal from the exposure of the Ridolfi Plot, but he failed in his ultimate aim to have the Scottish Queen destroyed. When Parliament met in May 1572, Mary was denounced as a Jezebel, a murderess and a ‘most wicked and filthy woman’, but Elizabeth refused to heed the clamour for her execution. Nor would she formally exclude Mary from the succession. Instead, after much temporising, she surrendered the head of another conspiratorial cousin, Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk. He was executed for his part in the Ridolfi Plot on 2 June on Tower Hill, where, some twenty-five years earlier, his father, the poet Earl of Surrey, had also placed his neck on the block.

The failure of the Ridolfi Plot did little to blur Philip II’s ‘messianic vision’. Victory for his half-brother, Don John of Austria, over the Turks at Lepanto in October 1571 and news from France the following August of the ‘St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’ were welcomed in Madrid as God’s handiwork. The Spanish ambassador in France could hardly contain his delight at the slaughter of so many Protestants:

As I write, they are killing them all, they are stripping them naked, dragging them through the streets, plundering the houses and sparing not even children. Blessed be God who has converted the French princes to His cause. May he inspire their hearts to continue as they have begun.
⁷²

For the Protestants of Europe, there was nothing sanctified about the slaughter of their brethren at the hands of the French Catholics. It was an atrocity that few witnesses – including Francis Walsingham, on secondment at the English embassy in Paris – would forget. Many French Protestants sought refuge in England, each arriving with his own harrowing tale of Catholic bloodlust.
^fn10
According to the French
ambassador in England, many believed ‘that it was the Pope and the King of Spain who kindled the fire in France … and that there is something evil afoot from all three of them against England’.
⁷³

Philip II reportedly laughed at the news of the massacre. It was, he said, ‘one of the greatest moments of satisfaction that I have had in all my life’. Not only would it reduce French interference in the Netherlands, but it also provided reassurance that in those apocalyptic times he was indeed a messiah who could discern God’s purpose. When, a decade later, a medal was struck to commemorate the Spanish annexation of Portugal of 1580, it bore the legend:
Non sufficit orbis
– The world is not enough.

Despite the setback of the Ridolfi business, Philip was sure that one day God would help him dethrone England’s heretic Queen. He had to be careful; in April 1572 Elizabeth I signed a treaty of mutual defence with France. As long as the French had the power to intervene across the Channel, peace – no matter how strained – was the defining characteristic of Anglo-Spanish relations. But Philip remained determined to honour his ‘special obligation to God’.
⁷⁴
The Enterprise of England was not abandoned.

Lord Vaux’s reaction to the atrocities in France is nowhere recorded, nor is his response to the Ridolfi Plot, though he was hardly a disinterested observer. His attendance at the 1572 Parliament that was called to deal with Norfolk, Mary and the ‘safety’ of Elizabeth and her realm suggests that he was still engaged by the issues of the day. He may also have wanted to demonstrate his loyalty to the Queen, for the Italian letter of March 1571 (set under Norfolk’s name, but more probably drawn up by Ridolfi himself) allegedly represented the views of ‘the more part of the nobles of this realm’. Indeed, it had gone further, suggesting that Norfolk could muster ‘twenty thousand
foot and three thousand horse’ by forty English Catholics, who were ‘well disposed and ready to act’. Lord Vaux’s name was on the list.
⁷⁵

It is highly unlikely that Vaux was aware of what was, in all probability, the arrogation of his name. Ridolfi undermined his claim by further asserting that ‘many’ Protestants would afford aid, ‘being concerned rather with the question of succession than with that of religion’. He even named the Earl of Leicester as a fence-sitting ‘neutral’. A thorough investigation into the Ridolfi Plot implicated the Catholic peers Arundel and Lumley, but Vaux was not mentioned in the associated intelligence. The following year, however, a priest on his pension, who had been ‘resorting familiarly to the French ambassador’, was named by one of Burghley’s spies as a person of interest in the ongoing investigation into Mary Stuart. Committed to prison by the Bishop of London, the priest, ‘one Dowglas’, was briefly suspected of ‘familiarity’ with some of the Scottish Queen’s supporters and ‘hath confessed somewhat of them’.
⁷⁶
The spy does not elaborate and ‘Dowglas’ does not appear in his later reports. Burghley, it seems, did not pursue the matter, but any perceived association with Mary Stuart, even by several degrees of separation, did not augur well for Lord Vaux.

Whatever secret sympathies he may or may not have harboured, Lord Vaux was, on the face of it, a loyal and trusted citizen. Not only did he attend Parliament in 1572, but he also sat on the county commission for musters in 1569 and 1570, on a committee dealing with vagabonds in 1572, and on the commission for gaol delivery in 1579. Indeed, for much of the decade, it was county business that dominated his agenda. When Parliament met again in 1576, he nominated Lord Burghley as his proxy – an unlikely choice in terms of religion, but Burghley was a close neighbour who could be relied upon to defend local interests.
⁷⁷

Vaux could not avoid religious controversy by withdrawing from Westminster, however. Another near neighbour was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, an outspoken Protestant who liked to lambast ‘the usurped tyranny of Rome’ at any given opportunity.
⁷⁸
There was a strong Puritan element in the county. Indeed, it was a Northamptonshire Puritan, Percival Wiburn, who would coin the phrase ‘the hotter sort of Protestants’ to describe those godly
activists who sought further reform in Church and society and campaigned for a preaching ministry throughout the realm.
⁷⁹

There were some very substantial Catholics in the shire too. In addition to the Treshams, Lord Vaux could find allies among the Mordaunts of Drayton, the Griffins of Dingley and the Brudenells of Deene, but their influence was counterbalanced by men like Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton and Sir Richard Knightley of Fawsley – Puritan sympathisers who came to dominate the county bench. The religious polarisation of the region did not correspond with any clear-cut geographical division. Puritans and recusants lived side by side and although there were moments of friction, harmony was the norm.

Lord Vaux and Sir Edward Montagu, for example, shared many local interests and seem to have spoken with one voice when they bailed poachers and punished vagabonds in the 1570s. Indeed, the two were good friends and Montagu entertained Vaux ‘many times’ at Boughton House.
⁸⁰
The Vauxes were also welcome at Fawsley, Sir Richard Knightley’s home, where, on one occasion, Henry Vaux composed a Latin poem
ex tempore
at the encouragement of a fellow guest. The proposed theme was the Ciceronian maxim
Honos alit artes
(Honour nourishes the arts).
⁸¹
Fawsley would become a Puritan stronghold under Knightley’s patronage, but at least in this instance, the religious differences of the neighbours did not prevent them from enjoying some traditional pastime with good company.

Occasionally, however, simmering religious tensions boiled over. On Friday, 13 April 1576, for instance, Henry Norwich, a Protestant, was badly beaten up by a group of Catholics that included two of his nephews and Lord Vaux’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Tresham. According to Norwich, his assailants, ‘arrayed with swords, bucklers, daggers, long-picked staves, cudgels, bastinadoes and sundry other weapons, as well invasive as defensive’, had set upon him in Kettering market and would have killed him had he not escaped to a nearby house. He alleged that other attempts had been made on his life before and since. He sought redress at the Northampton quarter sessions, but was not happy with the verdict delivered by Lord Vaux and his fellow officials there. He claimed that the defendants were ‘supported by some in authority’ and in 1578 he appealed to the Star Chamber. The case evidence exposes the murderous divisions within the Norwich family. Henry Norwich testified that his assailants were utterly contemptuous of the law:

And such is their liberty and especially the said Simon [his nephew] that he dare openly profess popery or any superstition and to manifest the same he hath not been at any divine service nor received any sacrament sithence your Majesty’s reign, unless it have been at any armitage [Hermitage] in the woods near his house where sometimes, with divers vagrant persons known to be massing priests, he heareth Mass.
⁸²

Henry Norwich was an informer against Catholics, all Catholics it seems, even those who happened to be his nephews. He also accused Simon of smuggling papal bulls into the country, defaming the English Bible and supporting Catholic priests both at home and abroad. Evidently his nephews felt that Uncle Henry had meddled one time too many in their affairs and at Kettering market they had meted out their own brand of rough justice. The case is a reminder not only of local resentment to the implementation of the recusancy laws, but also to the inherent violence of the age.

Henry Norwich won his case in the Star Chamber and continued to hound local Catholics. Sixteen years after the affray at Kettering, ‘her Majesty’s servant’ would be ‘assaulted and wounded’ again, this time ‘by the procurement’ of George and Ambrose Vaux, two of Lord Vaux’s sons by his second marriage. The cause was the same: ‘for splena [
sic
] and displeasure borne by them unto him for prosecuting some of their friends for recusancy’. As before, Norwich was dissatisfied with the reaction – or rather inaction – of the local authorities and complained to the Privy Council that his assailants were persisting in ‘their riotous and disorderly proceedings’.
⁸³
Despite the law of the land and the ferocity and ubiquity of anti-Catholic rhetoric in Elizabethan England, it seems that, in Northamptonshire at least, informing on one’s neighbours with what was deemed unnecessary fervour was an unpopular and risky endeavour.

In 1580 Lord Vaux turned forty-five. This was around the time, according to contemporary experts, of the onset of old age. It was believed that the body would begin to dry up, strength would decline and the mind would become ‘more sedate and quiet in its motions’.
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Wisdom and discretion would replace the passion and folly of youth. This probably suited Vaux just fine.

He had lived through three changes of monarch (four if one includes the abortive reign of Lady Jane Grey). He had seen the Mass abolished, restored and abolished again. He had subscribed to a religious settlement, in which he did not believe, and promised to defend a Church whose authority he did not recognise. He had witnessed the publication of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and the excoriation of his faith. He had been forced to serve God in secret and conceal aspects of worship of which he was proud. Priests, whom he revered, had been exiled, imprisoned and even put to death. He had buried his parents and his first wife. He had sired nine children and was the grandfather of two. Towards the end of the decade, his daughter Eleanor, who had married Edward Brooskby, had a boy and a girl, William and Mary. Raised from birth as Catholics, they joined an embattled minority. It has been estimated that by 1580 more than half of the population had been baptised in the Elizabethan Church.
⁸⁵

‘Learn thou hereby not to faint,’ Lord Vaux may have read in
The Exercise of a Christian Life
issued from a secret Catholic press in England in 1579,

or to be discouraged when thou art persecuted, tempted and afflicted, but with faith to expect our good Lord his hour, who after a tempest sendeth fair weather, after troubles quietness.
⁸⁶

Lord Vaux knew all too well that the better part of valour was discretion. Even the hardest heart might have forgiven him for wanting to live out the rest of his days in quiet expectation of future fair weather: to enjoy his hounds and hawks, to muddle along with Puritan neighbours and to let the next generation champion the cause with the vigour of youth. Then a familiar friend turned up at his gates and Lord Vaux, ever the hospitable nobleman, welcomed him inside. In so doing, he condemned the rest of his life to imprisonment, pecuniary pain and ‘inspeakable misery’.
⁸⁷

The tempest was only just beginning to stir.

^fn1
Lady Guildford was attendant on the young Catherine of Aragon on the night of her wedding to Prince Arthur (Henry VIII’s older brother). According to her later testimony, made during Henry VIII’s annulment proceedings, Lady Guildford had seen the young couple ‘lying in bed together alone and sole, and in mind and intent, as she believeth, to have carnal cognition together as man and wife’. (PRO SP 1/65, f. 19r)

^fn2
Hamlet
, Act 5, Scene 1. Two centuries later Goethe would use two stanzas of Vaux’s poem in
Faust
(Part II, v. 6).