The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (11 page)

Unfortunately, even the most secure household could be penetrated by treachery. Harrowden, like other suspect Papist strongholds, was subjected to constant searches. On one occasion the ten-year-old Frances Burrows, Eliza’s niece by marriage, showed that female spirit could start early, by defying the poursuivants (as the searchers were known). The priest was actually at Mass in an upper chamber when a great noise was heard in the house. Through the negligence, real or assumed, of the housekeeper, the poursuivants and constables had already entered with drawn swords. Frances ran down.

‘Oh, put up your swords,’ cried Frances, ‘or else my mother will die, for she cannot endure to see a naked sword.’ Frances pretended to fetch wine to revive her fainting mother, but actually gave the warning. On another occasion the intrepid Frances had a dagger put to her breast to make her reveal the secret hiding-places. When she declined, the poursuivant was sufficiently amused by the resolution of this small person – Frances was undersized for her age, and delicate – to offer a hundred pounds to buy her and present her to the Bishop of London: ‘a maid of her courage should not be spoiled with Papistry’. The offer was declined. Frances was finally smuggled abroad to find, one hopes, greater tranquillity as a nun in Louvain.
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Father John Gerard, the dashing Jesuit priest who was Eliza Vaux’s confessor, was one of those who had a narrow escape at Harrowden. Gerard’s easy manner, his zest at hunting and hawking, his skill as a swordsman – the traditional pursuits of a gentleman – were all assets in covering up his true profession of priest. They also made him an attractive and persuasive proselytiser. Even his taste for ‘very gallant… apparel’ was an advantage, since dress officially betokened the rank of the man. Criminals for example were wont to disguise themselves as gentlemen in order to have the same freedom of progress as the upper class – and of course priests were criminals according to the government. None of this had saved Gerard in 1594
when he was captured and held in the Tower of London, then severely tortured. But a dramatic escape from the Tower itself brought Gerard back into the clandestine Catholic community in time to exercise an important presence there at the accession of James I.

George Vaux’s unmarried sister Anne
*
was the other member of the family who played a crucial part in the circumstances surrounding the Powder Treason. Mistress Anne Vaux was a ‘maid’ in the parlance of the time, but what we would call a spinster. She was born in 1562 and was therefore over forty at the time of James’ accession: this spinsterhood was almost certainly a deliberate choice in that Anne Vaux held herself to be dedicated to the service of God. From the 1590s onward she saw this service as best performed by protecting and managing the affairs of Father Henry Garnet, the Superior of the Jesuits. Garnet’s own sisters had gone abroad and became nuns at Louvain: this left Anne Vaux able to pose as his sister ‘Mistress Perkins’ in order to avoid awkward questioning about the priest’s precise status. In private Garnet called Anne his ‘sister in Christ’.

Father Henry Garnet had been born in 1555, some seven years before Anne, at Heanor in east Derbyshire. His family antecedents were not quite so glamorous as those of Father Gerard, but he did have a notable taste for scholarship. He was a brilliant linguist, expert in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Having been educated at Winchester, he acted as a corrector in a legal press, and then went abroad, becoming for a while Professor of Hebrew at Rome. As a priest, his scholarly bent made him a natural devotee of theology and theological debate. He also had a great love of music: he had a ‘rare and delightful’ voice, already mentioned in connection with Byrd, he had an ability
to set songs extemporarily, and was skilled with instruments, especially the lute.
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Certainly Garnet was the opposite of a man of violence, believing with ‘his usual modest cheerfulness’, in the words of one who knew him well, that things were best settled by submission to the will of God. This applied to the reconversion of England to the Catholic Faith: political manoeuvres, let alone armed risings, were much less likely to be efficacious than prayers, the maintenance of Catholic rituals and the celebrations of Masses. Contemporaries also bore witness to Garnet’s kindheartedness and compassion. He thought it his duty to attend (in disguise) the hideous public executions of his priests in order to administer the last rites to them if he could. Such ordeals filled this sensitive and scrupulous man with apprehension: would he be able to act so bravely if and when his own turn came?

Anne’s father Lord Vaux once reflected wistfully: ‘St Paul admonisheth that women should learn in silence and subjection: in their houses they themselves should learn by demanding of their husbands; who doth not permit them to teach in their presence, but to be silent.’ But Anne Vaux (like her widowed sister-in-law Eliza) did not have a husband from whom to learn. Buoyed up by her Faith, in the words of Father Henry Garnet, ‘this brave Virgo became a veritable Virago’.
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Father Garnet, unlike Sir Thomas Tresham, meant the word ‘virago’ as a compliment. Nevertheless, for all her piety, Anne did, like Eliza, take on Sir Thomas himself, suing him in the Court of Wards as a trustee for her marriage portion. Since she had not married and had no intention of doing so, it was a bold gesture undoubtedly provoked by her desperate need of funds to help the priests. Sir Thomas was once again furious and this time managed to fight back by forcing Anne Vaux to come to Rushton, to beg for the money personally. If she showed herself ‘stomachful’ (uppish), she still would not receive it. Anne was in her turn extremely angry. Hauling along her widowed sister Eleanor Brooksby (equally pious but much
more timid), Anne Vaux indulged in ‘verbal combat’ with Sir Thomas in his own house from noon until four in the afternoon, stopping him from eating his dinner. She got her money.
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As a single woman with a handsome fortune at her disposal and a convenient widowed sister to provide domestic respectability, Anne was able to play a crucial part in renting houses in which Jesuits might gather in safety. The Jesuit rule required priests to meet at least once a year – hopefully twice – in order to give an account of their conscience to their Superior and renew their vows. Such a congruence of Jesuits inevitably presented dangers which single priests, operating alone, did not face. For this purpose Anne Vaux rented Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire from the antiquarian Henry Ferrers.

Baddesley Clinton was a secluded early Tudor mansion, with a moat, set amid woods about a hundred miles from London. The situation was perfect for the purposes of retreat and Anne immediately set about having a talented lay brother called Nicholas Owen (who will play an important part in this story) devise enough hiding-places to conceal twelve or more priests.
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By using the moat and the levels of a sewer, together with secret turret trapdoors and stairways, Owen was able to ensure that Father Garnet and others survived a notorious search in 1591. They stood for four hours, half immersed in water. But they were not captured.

Not all the houses Anne Vaux and Eleanor Brooksby occupied were in the midlands. White Webbs, rented in 1600 on behalf of Father Garnet, was deep in Enfield Chase, on the borders of Hertfordshire and Essex. This was another ‘spacious house’ – but nearer to London – which could be honeycombed with escape routes and refuges. And of course not every visitor to White Webbs would actually be a priest. There would also be members of the vast Catholic cousinage to which Anne Vaux belonged by birth.

In this small world, which for security’s sake perpetuated itself by intermarriage, it is perhaps simplest to state that almost everyone was related to almost everyone else. This was certainly true of Anne Vaux, with a Throckmorton grandmother as well as a Tresham step-mother. Thus visitors to White Webbs who were her relatives included the two first cousins, children of Throckmorton sisters, Robert Catesby and Francis Tresham. They were respectively ten and six years younger than Anne and they regarded her with that affection which kindly maiden-aunt figures are inclined to inspire in their juniors.

It would be some years before the interweaving in time and place of these rash Elizabethan gallants with the forbidden English Jesuits would prove to have terrible consequences for the latter. In the meantime, it was understandable that with such women as Eliza and Anne Vaux at work, Father Robert Persons should conclude that the continuance of the Faith in England was due to the courage of its women.

So the sombre picture of ruthless persecution painted by Father Weston was not in fact unrelieved by light. First, there was the way in which Catholics managed to survive, their Faith more or less intact, by leading a kind of schizophrenic existence. Secondly, while there were ‘honest’ Papists in King James’ phrase, there were also brave priests and their courageous helpers, often female.

There was hope for the future, not only practical hope but also spiritual hope which Robert Southwell, the Jesuit put to death (after torture) in 1595, described in his poem
The Burning Babe:
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As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in
    the snow
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my
    heart to glow.

In the last year of Queen Elizabeth’s life, it began to be whispered among English Catholics that King James had already made them promises of genuine toleration to be redeemed when and if he came to the throne.

*
Canonised by the Catholic Church in 1970, along with other English martyrs including Anne Line, who was executed in London in 1601 for harbouring priests.

*
The Ropers were connected to Sir Thomas More: they descended from William Roper, whose brother married More’s daughter Margaret.

*
Harrowden Hall was rebuilt once more in the early eighteenth century. A Grade I scheduled building, it is now the site of the Wellingborough Golf Club; nevertheless within its walls lies at least one of the numerous late-sixteenth-century hiding-places. This is in the former stable block, now the caterers’ flat, somewhere behind a thick wall at the top of a short staircase. If there are still hiding-places in the main house, which was largely refurbished in the 1970s, their location is unrecorded.

†
Eliza Vaux was known as the ‘Dowager of Harrowden’ or the ‘Dowager Lady Vaux’ since she was the mother of the Lord Vaux of the day, although she never bore the actual title of Lady Vaux of Harrowden, given that her husband died before his father.

*
Anne Vaux was in fact the step-sister of George Vaux, her own mother having died as a result of her birth, after which Lord Vaux married Sir Thomas Tresham’s sister Mary; but the term ‘step’ was never used during this period, nor the distinction made, at a time when so many women died young in childbirth leaving their babies to be brought up by their husband’s next wife as their ‘mother’.

*
Baddesley Clinton, now a National Trust property, still retains its air of romantic mystery; and the hiding-places so skilfully constructed by Nicholas Owen can still be inspected.

CHAPTER THREE

Diversity of Opinions

I will never allow in my conscience that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion…

KING JAMES VI
to Robert Cecil

W
hat, if anything, did King James, while in Scotland, promise to the Catholics in England? The question is of crucial importance in understanding the Powder Treason. And there is a supplementary question: if such promises were made, were they verbal or written? Unfortunately, the various personalities involved complicate rather than simplify the issue: none of them is particularly satisfactory from the point of view of honest record.

There was King James’ own way with hints, protestations and the like – the superb diplomatic skill by which he raised but did not satisfy religious hopes. His dealings with the Papacy were certainly not sincere since, whatever his feelings about Rome as the historic Mother Church, King James never had any plans to become a Catholic. The granting of toleration for other Catholics was rather different, and makes estimating the King’s sincerity a much subtler problem.

In the course of his secret correspondence with Robert Cecil, which began in the spring of 1601, King James gave vent to a number of opinions on the subject, although we should bear in mind that these letters, written and received without the old Queen’s knowledge, were emphatically not destined for
publication, and nor were they dated. For example, on one occasion he saw fit to warn ‘my dearest and trusty 10’ as Cecil was known in their private code, of ‘the daily increase that I hear of popery in England’. King James, who enjoyed giving a good lecture, ended his warning on a kindly if condescending note. He admitted that it might be argued that Cecil (actually in England) knew all this much better than James (in Scotland) did: ‘yet it is a true old saying, that another man will better see a man’s game than the player himself can do’.
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