God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (43 page)

According to one informant, Gerard usually dressed ‘costly and defencibly, in buff leather garnished with gold or silver lace, satin doublets and velvet hose of all colours, with cloaks correspondent, and rapiers and daggers gilt or silvered’. In 1603 he was ‘very gallant in apparel’. His snipers observed that he did not dress like a man of the cloth and Gerard himself admitted that, as a gentleman born, he was ‘at ease’ in smart clothes, but they were also part of his disguise, along with apparent materialism and a fondness for worldly pursuits. Ladies were astonished when Gerard was unmasked: ‘Why the man lives like a courtier,’ they exclaimed, but by then they were hooked.
¹⁵

Even on paper ‘Long John with the little beard’ is extraordinarily compelling. In many ways his flaws make him a more sympathetic character than cautious, self-effacing Garnet. It is an unfair comparison, for anyone would look square and stiff next to Gerard, but theirs was an interesting dynamic: the compassionate, scrupulous leader with the logical mind, and the dashing maverick who was not afraid to take risks and ruffle feathers. The men in Rome knew what they were doing when they sent both men to England; the mission required circumspection and chutzpah.

There was some tension between the two. Gerard irritated his superior by not following protocol when he landed in 1588. Nine years later, Garnet frustrated Gerard by insisting upon a thicker rope for the prison break, which actually ‘increased the hazards’. When they wrote about each other it was with courtesy and admiration, but not the warmth that they bestowed upon a Southwell or an Oldcorne. Nevertheless, they earned each other’s respect. Garnet valued Gerard as his ‘most active and most useful’ priest and Gerard seemed to appreciate that in ‘this most modest of men’ the English Jesuits had the right man at the helm.
¹⁶

Garnet and Gerard may have had contrasting styles, but they had the same goal and were single-minded in its pursuit. It is tempting to think of Gerard as an Elizabethan gallant, but he saw himself as God’s ‘instrument’. There was certainly nothing romantic in his conversion of Francis Page, a handsome young man who was ‘deeply loved by a lady’ whom he hoped to marry. She was a ‘good and devout’ Catholic and introduced her sweetheart to the faith, and to Gerard, which was a mistake, since he spotted priestly potential in young Page and ground
him down, ‘pointing out’, for example, ‘that perhaps the girl’s parents would not give their consent as she would be marrying below her station’. Soon all thoughts of marriage were abandoned. Francis Page, S.J., was executed at Tyburn on 20 April 1602; Anne and Eleanor kept some of his relics.
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John Gerard could be ruthless and, like many charming people, ruthlessly effective. According to one hostile source, he was the type of person ‘in whose mouth a man would think butter could not melt’.
¹⁸
It was just the kind of comment that Sir Thomas Tresham might have made about Eliza Vaux. Henry Garnet had found the perfect hosts in Anne and Eleanor. His flamboyant junior with the good looks and brazen ways would find an equally suitable match with their sister-in-law Eliza.

^fn1
Anne Line
alias
Mrs Martha ran a boarding house for priests. The widow would be arrested on 2 February 1601. Charged with harbouring, she ‘kissed the gallows tree’ at Tyburn on the 27th of the month. Garnet’s agent in London managed to procure some of her clothes as relics.

18

St Peter’s Net

‘And so I happened, by God’s good providence, to visit a noble household. I had often been invited there before and had been expected for a long time, but other business had always kept me elsewhere.’
¹

Following his escape from the Tower, Gerard laid low with Garnet and the sisters for a few days. When he attempted to resume work in London, word soon spread and his old city haunts were raided. It became so hot for him that Garnet considered sending him back to Europe. Gerard was ‘much dismayed’ by the prospect and managed to convince his superior to keep him on. ‘I hope he will walk warily,’ Garnet wrote on 31 March 1598.
²

Meanwhile, Eliza and her six small children had moved into the Vaux house in Irthlingborough. It was ‘old and tumble-down’, but more suited to their needs than grand, derelict Harrowden. ‘When I came to the house,’ Gerard recalled,

I found her completely overwrought by her husband’s untimely death. So much had it affected her that she hardly moved out of her room for a whole year; and for three years after that (when I was visiting her) she had been unable to bring herself to enter the wing of the house in which her husband had died.

He added that she was ‘worried by anxiety for the future of her son’. The barony was impoverished and Eliza was finding it hard to make ends meet. ‘But,’ Gerard concluded, with a nod to Proverbs 14:1, and also to Eliza’s steel, ‘a wise woman builds up her house and proves herself in it.’
³

As the voluminous Tresham Papers reveal, Eliza had not just been sobbing into her pillow since George’s death in 1594. She had been
busy shoring up the Vaux patrimony and defending herself against threats of indictment and forfeiture. ‘To her great costs and charges’, she had also secured the wardship of her son Edward, fourth Lord Vaux. This had been achieved through the mediation of Sir Thomas Cecil, who had purchased the guardianship of the underage peer from the Queen and then sold it on to Eliza, who continued to look after Edward and the estate.
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A ‘marked Catholic’, Eliza was not afforded a completely free hand. As Gerard explained, ‘the Lords of the Council wanted to keep in touch with her son the baron and watch where and how he was being brought up.’ Although a bill for the seizure of the children of recusant parents had been dropped in the Parliament of 1593, the treatment of the Worthington boys – four brothers forcibly taken from a house near Warrington in 1584 – lived long in Catholic memory.
^fn1
Recusant schoolmasters were illegal, so Eliza employed Thomas Smith, an Oxford graduate who was prepared to take the oath of supremacy and go to church. This made him a ‘schismatic’ in Jesuit parlance. ‘He was the type of person,’ wrote Gerard, ‘who can say truthfully with the prophet “My belly cleaveth to the ground”, and they are much more difficult people to move than heretics.’

The family chaplain did not fare much better. Although a Jesuit, ‘a learned man and a good preacher’, Richard Cowling of York was unpopular with the servants and had spent an ineffectual year in Eliza’s house with his nose in his books. She claimed to like and reverence him, but she really wanted someone who ‘mixed with men’, someone who could advise on practical matters, someone, perhaps, like Gerard himself, who had previously strengthened the faith of her sister, Lady Lovell. During Gerard’s visits Eliza’s ‘grief seemed to change to joy’. She let it be known that, if he came to live with her, she would ‘put aside her long mourning – she would be a different person and all would be well’.
⁵

On the basis of Tresham’s testimony, John Gerard did not turn
‘covetous, conscionless’ Eliza into a saint.
⁶
In Gerard’s prose, however, she is ‘the gentle widow’ and her life, hitherto ‘good and holy’, becomes exemplary. She learned ‘to set cares of the next world before those of this’. She began to meditate, ‘for she was capable of it – in fact she had intelligence and talents of a high order’. She embraced her widowhood, offering her chastity to God and promising to act as a ‘handmaid’ to His servants. Indeed:

she was resolved to fulfil as nearly as she could the role of Martha and of other holy women who followed Christ and ministered to Him and His Apostles. She was ready to set up house wherever and in whatever way I judged best for our needs – whether, she protested time and again, it was in London or in the remotest part of England.
⁷

This was a
vie édifiante
, an idealised version of the truth, but clearly changes were made in Eliza’s household that were not to everyone’s liking. One thinks of Valentine Kellison, for example, ‘a well-willer, but no Catholic’,
^fn2
who was more used to raising hell with Ambrose Vaux than examining the state of his soul.
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‘This lady had many servants in her house when I came to live with her,’ Gerard recalled:

A number were non-Catholics; others were Catholics of a sort, but all enjoyed too much liberty. Gradually I got rid of the abuses. By talking privately with them and by my sermons in public, I brought them slowly, with the help of God’s grace, to better ways. Some I instructed and received into the Church, but there were a few I had to get dismissed, since there seemed no hope of their reform.
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Kellison, whose brother Matthew would become president of the seminary in Douai, was retained by Eliza and remained staunchly loyal to the family. But another, unnamed servant had to be let go when, on a visit to London in the train of his mistress, he carped at Gerard’s reforms to ‘a treacherous friend’ and gave away their location. In the ensuing raid, Gerard hid in the gable, but his great
stalwart John Lillie gave himself up and was reportedly tortured. Also seized were Gerard’s meditation notes, his breviary, some devotional books ‘and what I valued most: my manuscript sermons and notes for sermons, which I had collected together over the last ten years’.
¹⁰
Any notion of moving to London was abandoned. It was too dangerous for Gerard and too public for Eliza, who faced scrutiny as the fourth Lord Vaux’s mother and estate manager: ‘Officials and bailiffs would be constantly coming to see her’, making it ‘impossible for her to live near London under an assumed name as she would have to do if she was going to continue her good work for any length of time’.
¹¹

Having decided that Irthlingborough and Harrowden were shabby, inhospitable and ill-defended, Gerard and Eliza went house hunting. They combed Northamptonshire and finally came across Kirby Hall, a large remote Elizabethan manor with sprawling grounds. All it lacked were priest-holes. In the spring of 1599, they took the lease – or rather, the owner, Lady Elizabeth Hatton (whose late husband had inherited the property from his uncle, Sir Christopher Hatton), let it to John Wiseman, who let it to Henry Montagu, who let it to Francis Crisp and Thomas Mulsho, the last named being a trustee for Lord Vaux.
¹²

There were already rumours of Eliza’s plan in Puritan-run Northamptonshire when she and Gerard travelled to Kirby that summer with ‘Little John’ Owen and his carpentry kit. Pursuivants were posted at Kettering in a bid to intercept them on their return to Irthlingborough, but a servant fortuitously suggested an alternative route that was ‘easier for the lady’s carriage’. Back at Irthlingborough, Gerard and Eliza were not aware of the raid at Kirby the following morning, nor of the pursuivants galloping furiously towards them. They ‘burst in on us at the dinner hour’, but as the mistress and young master of the house were both ill and resting in their chambers, they stormed an empty room. Gerard was in his own chamber, about to dine with the gentleman convert, Roger Lee, who had come to take the Spiritual Exercises, and John Percy, a second Jesuit priest newly posted at Irthlingborough. ‘Hastily I snatched up everything I wanted to conceal and made a dash for the hiding-place.’ It was beyond the room where the searchers were gathered:

I heard them shouting out that they wanted to get on with their search without delay. One pursuivant actually pushed his head round the door to see who was passing and some of the Catholics in the room told me afterwards that he must have seen me as I went past. But God intervened, for how else can you explain it? There they were, straining and shouting to get through and search the house, yet they halted behind in an unlocked room just long enough to allow us time to reach the hiding-place and shut ourselves safely in. Then they broke out as though they had been let loose. They burst into the lady’s apartment while others raged round the remaining rooms.

They searched the whole day, but found nothing and no one:

Undoubtedly it was the finger of God who did not want to cut at the roots of the lady’s good works. Rather, by this manifestation of His providence, He wished to confirm her in her resolve and keep her for a future full of service and fine achievement.
¹³

So Gerard wrote a decade later and so he must have told Eliza at the time, for she remained determined to risk all for the mission. She took ‘very special precautions’ and gave out that the Jesuit was going to ‘quit the house altogether’. But he never left. Eliza shifted her household to Harrowden Hall and had an extension built for Gerard and Percy ‘close to the old chapel where the former barons used to hear Mass when the weather was too wet for them to go to the village church’. Nicholas Owen probably constructed the new wing from which priests could ‘pass out unnoticed into the private garden and through the broad walks into the fields’.
^fn3

There were other advantages to Harrowden, including an impressive library that had been enlarged by Henry Vaux and two sets of ‘very fine’ vestments – ‘one for ordinary use, the other for greater feasts.’ Several were embroidered with pearls and gold thread and
displayed ‘exquisite workmanship’. Gerard was also delighted by the chapel plate: