God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (10 page)

It is expedient for your souls’ salvation rather to forsake your country, or with stout and invincible courage to abide the strokes of howsoever miserable and afflicted fortune, than any way to obey most wicked laws, to the shame and reproach of your faith and religion.
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There would be no hat wearing or ear blocking in church for the Vauxes.

Recusants argued that their cause was religious and their motivations spiritual. They were loyal citizens who simply sought freedom of worship. Their refusal to attend prayer-book services was purely a matter of conscience. It was a defence for which some local officials had a measure of sympathy. It was not uncommon for churchwardens to use their discretion or for communities to treat their recusants as local eccentrics. There seems to have been more mischief than malice behind John Wood’s decision on Ascension Day, 1612, to lead a recusant’s horse into the church porch of North Petherton, Somerset, with the words: ‘If thou wilt not go to the church, thy horse shall!’
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On the other hand, there was an inescapable logic to the Protestant argument that any unwillingness to accept the Queen’s religious settlement was a challenge to her sovereignty. Resistance to the Act of Uniformity, as to any statute, was political, even if not politically motivated. And since the papacy had not only excommunicated Elizabeth, but also deprived her of ‘the right which she pretends’ to rule England,
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the maintenance of any form of Roman Catholic devotion was arguably damaging to the unity of the commonwealth. As Francis Hastings put it, papists were ‘unprofitable’ to the body politic, ‘for they have dismembered themselves from us’.
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A similar terminology infused Catholic writing. Those who oscillated between Protestant and Catholic forms of worship were branded ‘schismatic’. A great deal of contemporary ink was spilled on a circular argument that could never be squared. Service to God and Caesar could not fruitfully be separated, not for those Protestants who upheld the absolute jurisdiction of the monarch in matters of faith, nor for the Roman
Catholics whose God, through his papal deputy, had denied the authority of the Queen.

Sometime around the turn of the decade – perhaps in 1579 when he celebrated his twentieth birthday and began to receive a fifty-pound annuity
¹⁴
– Henry Vaux ventured to London. If he felt at all ‘dismembered’ from society or any sense of frustrated ambition, then he soon found a sense of purpose in the sprawling metropolis. The gambling dens and brothels that Campion had feared were so popular with young men of Henry’s rank offered no temptation. Instead, he fell in with a group of like-minded individuals who wanted to channel their passions and their cash more productively.

Henry already knew several from home. Those whose families were intertwined on the trellis of Midlands Catholicism included Edward and Francis Throckmorton – distant cousins, whose grandmother had been a Vaux – and William Tresham, whose brother was married to a Throckmorton and whose sister was Henry’s stepmother. Edward Brooksby was married to Henry’s sister Eleanor, but most were unencumbered by wife or office. They were, chiefly, twenty-something, second-generation Catholic gentlemen, who shared an ardent desire to defend their embattled faith.

Some had raised the standard at a young age. Edward Throckmorton had belonged to a Warwickshire gang of boys who had pledged to endure all manner of worldly pain for refusing to go to church. Others spent time overseas visiting foreign courts and English Catholics in exile. At Spa in the Low Countries, Francis Throckmorton conferred with the Queen’s enemies ‘touching the altering of the state of the realm’ in England ‘and how the same might be attempted by foreign invasion’.
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Stephen Brinkley was engaged in a more sedate, but no less hazardous, endeavour. In 1579 his translation of a devotional handbook, composed in Italian by the Spanish Jesuit Gaspar Loarte, was issued from a secret printing press. Not only was its publication a flagrant defiance of the law, but Brinkley, under the pseudonym ‘James Sancer’, had added insult to injury by dedicating
The Exercise of a Christian Life
to the Society of Jesus. In the eyes of the English government, the Society, founded in 1540 by a Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola, was the most militant and threatening religious order to come
out of Counter-Reformation Europe. In his dedicatory epistle, Brinkley acknowledged his debt to the Jesuits for ‘the means you gave me to attempt and finish this work’ and offered it up ‘as a testimony of a reverent zeal I bear to your whole Society’. Signing off as ‘your most bounden beadsman and dutiful friend forever’, Brinkley prayed that God would ‘preserve, increase and strengthen you forever; and grant me and all others grace to follow your good instructions’.
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The ‘good instructions’ in the book – an aid to prayer, meditation and ‘the exercises, which every good Christian ought to occupy himself in’ – shed some light on the way Brinkley, Henry Vaux and their fellows tried to shape their lives. Although ‘principally intended for the simple and more ignorant sort’,
The Exercise
would, its author hoped, ‘profit each one that with good and godly intent will vouchsafe to read it’. It prescribed methods based on the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ taught by Jesuit retreat masters and was recommended by the Society as a foundation text for practical Christian worship.
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Although it may not reveal the actual lifestyle of the London Catholics, it presents the ideal to which they would have strived.

The book directed readers to ‘fly such places where God is customably offended, as be dicing houses, taverns, dancing schools and such like’. They had to avoid idleness and ‘all excess in eating, drinking, sleeping and clothing’. Abstinence, fasting and ‘other afflictions and corporal chastisements’ were recommended, but only if ‘moderately applied’; any ‘indiscreet mortifying of the flesh’ was considered counterproductive as it could lead to infirmity. After night-time prayers and a complete examination of his conscience, the good Christian, ‘making the sign of the holy cross’, could lie down on his bed, but he should beware, the book warned, ‘in any wise of loving too dainty and soft a bed, calling to mind that narrow and hard couch of the cross, which for thy sake our Saviour lay upon’.

Prayers and meditations were an integral part of the daily routine, designed to help the layman get to know God intimately. There were chapters on ‘how to pray mentally’ – the mind was to be lifted up to God in silent, concentrated prayer for ‘one hour in the morning, and another in the evening (little more or less)’ – on appropriate behaviour during holy days, and on the mysteries of the rosary – ‘the whole rosary to be said at least once every week’. A large number of prayers were provided at the end of the book for specific moments: ‘in the
morning before all other business’, ‘before Sacramental Confession’, ‘before Mass’, ‘in time of sickness’. Chapter nine prescribed meditations for every day of the week: Monday was for the reflection of past sins, Tuesday for present sins. On Wednesday the reader should concentrate his mind on death and on Thursday the last day of judgement. The pains of Hell were to be dwelt upon on Friday (‘for the meditating whereof it shall be convenient thou frame in thine imagination some horrible and hideous place, as might be an infernal pit, or dungeon without any bottom, dark and full of fire; whereinto the damned souls shall be thrown headlong down’). Saturday was to be awakened with the joys of Heaven and Sunday with thoughts and thanksgiving for ‘that Sacrament of Sacraments’, the Mass. There was a separate chapter on ‘the utility and profit that is reaped by often receiving the holy sacrament’, a requirement not easy to fulfil in a country where the Mass was prohibited.

At the end of his translation Brinkley appended the report of a discovery in July 1578 of ‘a most strange and excellent monument’, chanced upon by men digging for black sand in a vineyard about two miles from Rome. Further excavation had exposed a Roman catacomb, one of the underground cemeteries built between the second and fifth centuries
AD
, but forgotten since the Middle Ages. This one, the catacomb of St Priscilla, was the first to be rediscovered and had reportedly brought tears to the eyes of its beholders. In the vivid account printed by Brinkley, ‘it seemeth an under-earth city of dead men … even like a labyrinth, the circuit whereof is supposed to be a mile’. At the end of one of the subterranean passages was ‘an inner room, a chapel, with a little altar found, where the picture of the crucifix is to be seen’, flanked by images of the saints.

Contrary to popular legend, the catacombs were not the product of persecution; they were, chiefly, a practical solution to a lack of space for Christians who wanted to bury their dead together, but did not have the money to buy land for open-air cemeteries. In the early days of the persecution however, Christians had occasionally resorted to the catacombs to hear Mass and had used the underground space to display the symbols of their faith. For Brinkley and his fellows, who identified with the early Christians and used their suffering as a reference for their own experience, there was nothing accidental about the discovery. It was, ‘as God would have it’, a thrilling and timely revelation:

By this most worthy monument we may easily gather how great the persecutions and miseries, as also the piety of those godly persons were in the primitive Church.

Here may every man see, to the singular confirmation of our undoubted and Catholic Religion and of the Catholic rites and observances, the religion, care and diligence which those good friends of God used in the burying of the dead. Here may we witness apparently with our own eyes how, when those holy and devout friends of God could not in the Ethnikes’ and Idolators’ days paint and reverence pictures in open place and public show, yet did they paint and reverence them in caves and secret corners.

By binding the tale of the catacomb’s discovery with the pages of the devotional manual, Brinkley was seeking to authenticate the message of his text. The finding seemed to prove ‘the reverend antiquity of our Catholic Religion’ and its resilience in times of hardship. ‘Catholic rites and observances’ had provided strength and comfort then, just as they would help true Christians overcome the ‘intolerable blindness of our days’. This sense of community in suffering bound the ‘good friends of God’ to the Church Universal. In revealing the catacombs at this time, God, through the agency of Stephen Brinkley and an illicit printing press, was apparently reminding the English Catholics of their common union with Christ.

Brinkley and his fellows may have been coming up with imaginative ways of reigniting the faith, but all the brotherly love in the world could not make priests out of laymen – not in Elizabethan England, where the ordination of the Catholic clergy was banned. But it was priests that were so desperately needed. One of the first directives of
The Exercise of a Christian Life
was for the confession of sins to ‘the best learned and most virtuous confessor thou mayest possibly find’. And while it was comforting to be reminded of one’s common union with Christ, it was no substitute for actual communion with Christ in the Mass, which, the
Exercise
again made clear, was to happen on a regular basis.

But if they could not minister the sacraments, they resolved to do the next best thing: they would help those priests who had attended the continental seminaries return home and find their wandering
flocks. William Allen’s foundation (transferred from Douai to Rheims in 1578) was the model for subsequent English colleges in Rome and elsewhere in Europe. Applying the decrees of the Council of Trent, which had themselves been inspired by the proposals of Archbishop Pole in the reign of Mary I, the seminary provided a thorough schooling in Counter-Reformation discipline, dogma and spirituality. As much a training ground for the mission as a school of theology, it produced a corps of professional priests, equipped for disputation in religious controversy and the practical skills necessary to minister in a hostile environment.

What it could not provide, in an age when communication was not instantaneous, was a sound knowledge of the situation on the ground. Since 1574, when the first four graduates had launched the English mission, the numbers of seminarians smuggled into England had swollen. There had been seven new arrivals in 1575, eighteen the following year and fifteen the next. By 1580, there were about a hundred new priests in England seeking the conversion of its inhabitants.
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The government, alarmed by the means as well as the motives of these seminary men who received subsidies from Spain and Rome, had reacted with its laws and proclamations. Border patrols were stepped up and the circle of intelligence widened. In 1577 Cuthbert Mayne became the ‘protomartyr’ of Allen’s seminary for bringing a papal bull into the country and having an Agnus Dei around his neck. He was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason in Launceston marketplace.

In order to avoid his fate, incoming priests needed current information on the ports, roads, inns and people. This is where Henry Vaux and his friends came in. They offered lodging, clothes, funding and an escort through the country. Not only did they provide cover for the priests, but also, and just as crucially, they safeguarded the Catholic hosts who were risking their livelihoods. Priests did not carry papers of identification any more than householders advertised their Catholic credentials. Both had to rely on the lay companions to ensure there were no renegades in their midst.

The apparent leader of this group was a convert, George Gilbert. He had been raised a Protestant and had been attracted to the intensity of Puritanism before travels in Europe and an encounter with the Jesuit Robert Persons convinced him that his true calling lay in
‘advancing the Catholic cause’ at home. He returned to London in 1579 and, according to Persons, ‘put in execution so much as had been counselled him, drawing diverse principal young gentlemen to the same purpose’. Each man offered ‘his person, his ability, his friends and whatsoever God had lent him besides’. They were eager to make sacrifices and pledged ‘to content themselves with food and clothing and the bare necessaries of their state, and to bestow all the rest for the good of the Catholic cause’.