God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (44 page)

Six massive silver candlesticks stood on the altar and two smaller ones at the side for the elevation. The cruets, the lavabo bowl, the bell and thurible were all of silverwork.
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The lamps hung from silver chains, and a silver crucifix stood on the altar. For the great feasts we had a golden crucifix a foot high. It had a pelican carved at the top and on the right arm an eagle with outstretched wings carrying on its back its little ones who were learning to fly; and on the left arm a phoenix expiring in flames so that it might leave behind an offspring; and at the foot was a hen gathering her chickens under her wings. The whole was worked in gold by a skilled artist.
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It was as if the past half-century had never happened. It helped, of course, that Harrowden was a baronial seat and that the Vauxes were tied, as the Jesuit, Oswald Tesimond, observed, ‘by consanguinity or affinity … to practically every leading and noble family in the county’.
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The old Lord Vaux had been well liked and there was good will towards his grandson. The Cecil connection continued into the next generations.
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Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton, though a Protestant official, was not entrusted with a general search of Harrowden in February 1601 because it was suspected that he would not ‘use the matter so strictly and circumspectly as is fit and convenient’. (It was further noted that Eliza had ‘such places for the concealing’ of a priest that unless ‘a man pull down the house, he shall never find him’.)
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Thus, although Eliza was observed by the powers on high, she was also to some extent protected by them. As long as the altar furniture and ancestral vestments were kept out of sight, and on site, they might remain out of mind. Approaching danger usually came with a warning. Some local Puritans were outraged. Richard Knightley of Fawsley
would complain in 1625 about the family’s apparent immunity from prosecution and their ‘too daring and insolent’ behaviour. Contacts and favours only went so far, however.
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With the coming of Gerard and his colleagues, the noise and traffic from Harrowden began to increase. Eliza only had herself to blame for any withdrawal of privilege, the Earl of Salisbury (Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil) would inform Lord Vaux in 1612, if, ‘rather than content herself with one of the priests from Mary’s reign, she chose to have two of those blood-soaked Jesuits’.
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During their first Christmas together in 1598, Eliza gave Gerard a ‘precious ornament’ depicting ‘the Holy Name’ in gold pins. Gerard estimated – or did he count? – 240 pins in total, each attached to a large pearl. There was another, smaller monogram at the bottom enclosing ‘a heart with a cross of diamonds radiating from it’. Gerard was thrilled with his gift – technically a donation to the Society – if disappointed that the pearls weren’t quite perfect. ‘Had they been,’ he wrote wistfully, ‘the value of the ornament would have been fabulous, but as it was the whole thing was worth about a thousand florins.’
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The following Christmas, the children’s ‘schismatic’ tutor, Thomas Smith, had an evangelical awakening courtesy of the edifying example of his young charges staying up for midnight Mass. Gerard observed that the pupils had taught the master ‘by conduct and not by words a lesson which he should have been teaching them’. Smith departed for the English College in Rome and was replaced at Harrowden by another Oxford scholar, one Tutfield, who was not at all trusted by the Council and was later ‘suspected to be a priest’.
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The schoolroom was filled with Vaux children, the offspring of neighbours and servants and at least one child from further afield: Henry Killinghall, born of a recusant mother in York gaol, was educated at Harrowden and later became a priest.
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By his own account Gerard sent ‘many young men to the seminaries’ as well as several ladies to the convents. His conversion rate was extremely – perhaps suspiciously – high. Leaving Percy at Harrowden to receive visitors and administer the sacraments, he would go foraging
for souls in the south Midlands. With introductions from the Vauxes and subsequent influential converts like Roger Lee and Everard Digby, he was welcomed into smart circles and offered generous hospitality. His disguise was crucial for it was often during card games
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or out in the saddle that he would win the trust of his subjects. Only later, and with great delicacy, would he attempt to catch them in ‘St Peter’s net’, a conversion that entailed not only a change of institutional allegiance, but also a complete reorientation of the self. Gerard taught his penitents how to examine their consciences thoroughly before confession and how to purify their souls through frequent prayer, spiritual reading and meditation. He utilised the principles and methods of the Spiritual Exercises and led some of his converts through the month-long meditative retreat. His goal was to reveal, ‘by means of the Exercises, the straight road that leads to life with Him for guide, who is Himself the Way and the Life’.
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Gayhurst in Buckinghamshire, where the Digbys lived, soon resembled Harrowden Hall with its well-appointed chapel and priest-holes. There was even a pair of wafer irons for making altar breads. According to Gerard:

what this family did, others did too. Many Catholic gentlemen, when they visited this house and saw the arrangements there, took it as a model. They founded congregations centred round their own homes, furnished their chapels and, designing accommodation suited to a priest’s needs, maintained one there with reverence and respect.
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By 1609 the chief Jesuit ‘churches’ were known by code names. A surviving cipher list reveals that Lord Vaux and his mother belonged to A.P., the ‘church’ of their resident chaplain, John Percy, who was also responsible for Lady Digby in Buckinghamshire, Lady Wenman of Thame Park near Oxford, members of the Simeon family of Baldwin Brightwell, Oxfordshire, and the Fermors of Easton Neston.
All were related or affiliated to the Vauxes and it is evident that kin networks were as important as geography in determining the make-up of these ‘churches’.
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The Jesuits were often accused of elitism, but it was strategic elitism, designed for hierarchical England in order to open up as many mission fields and win as many souls as safely and as quickly as possible. The coverage could be wide, extending through tenants and other dependants to all levels of society.

Eliza turned her home, to use Alexandra Walsham’s phrase, into one of the ‘humid hothouses in which Tridentine spirituality seems to have flourished exuberantly’.
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Indeed her contribution to the mission extended beyond her facilities. In his
Autobiography
Gerard told the story of the conversion of one of her kinswomen.
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Eliza apparently loved this relative ‘like a sister’ and wept tears of frustration when she could not ‘induce her to become a Catholic’. She refused to give up on the lady. Inviting her to stay, she introduced Gerard as a guest from London ‘as we had previously arranged’. They kept the conversation light for a few days until Gerard chose a propitious moment for Eliza ‘to open a serious conversation on religion’. He then took over and Eliza left the room. A few hours later, Eliza was accosted by her red-faced relative:

‘Cousin,’ she cried, ‘what have you done?’

‘What have I done?’ asked my lady.

‘Who’s this man you brought to me? Is he what you said he was?’

And she asked questions about me and spoke much too favourably about my eloquence and learning, saying she could not hold her own or answer back.

The next day God confirmed what He had begun in her. She surrendered at discretion and I gave her a book to help her prepare for confession.

After her confession, the lady rushed to thank Eliza, ‘who was the means of bringing her this happiness’. She stayed at Harrowden for about two years ‘and during all that time she grew in devotion and read many ascetical books’. Although careful not to overstep the bounds of Pauline decency, Gerard gave his hostess due credit for her kinswoman’s conversion, depicting it as a joint plan, jointly realised. Gerard was the exegete, but the initiative was Eliza’s.

A later, extremely hostile source also portrayed Eliza in the proselytising process. A young clergyman called John Gee wrote a book,
New Shreds of the Old Snare
, in 1624 in a bid to improve his Protestant credentials after his attendance at a Catholic evensong was revealed to his superiors. (The service in question was the ‘fatal vespers’ of 26 October 1623 when the floorboards of the gatehouse adjoining the French embassy in Blackfriars collapsed, killing almost a hundred worshippers. Gee saw God’s hand in his deliverance from death and the ‘snare’ of popery.) Written in the same intemperate vein as Samuel Harsnett’s exorcism-bashing
Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures
, Gee’s tract sought to expose the ‘legerdemaine tricks’ of the Jesuits and unmask them as a pack of actors so skilled ‘that they should set up a company for themselves, which surely will put down The Fortune, Red-Bull, Cockpit, & Globe’.
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Gee seemed to be particularly incensed by the Catholic Church’s belief in miracles and its cultivation of the supernatural as a proselytising tool. Exorcisms, relics, signs, ‘personated apparitions’ and the like were all, to Gee’s mind, terrible cons designed to bolster conversion rates and extort cash from impressionable youths. He cited the case of Mary Boucher, a London Protestant in the service of ‘Lady A., a Papist’.
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The girl’s mother had received assurances from Lady A – presumably the Countess of Arundel – that no attempt would be made to convert her. But three Jesuits, including ‘Mr Fisher’ (an alias of John Percy), could not help themselves. ‘We are God’s prophets,’ Fisher reputedly told Mary, ‘we can do miracles and we are inspired with divine illuminations. It is revealed unto me that you must go beyond the seas and become a nun.’ When Mary protested that her mother would never allow it, she was told that she should no longer see her. Sick with confusion, Mary took to her bed,

where, after she had rested herself a while, there comes into the chamber one Mris Vaux, a great recusant, and asked her how she did and then came to her and did somewhat stroke or rub her forehead. After which time Mary Boucher felt herself very ill at ease and distempered in her head. And about an half-hour after Mris Vaux was departed from her, she heard her chamber door open and with that a great light flashed into the room two or three times, which she thought somebody did by way of jest or merriment to make her afraid.

Mary’s dead godmother seemed to enter the room. She was dressed all in white, her hair was long and loose and her hand was ‘cold as earth or iron’. She claimed to have come from purgatory and she admonished Mary of the perils of damnation. After the vision had disappeared, Eliza returned to help the girl make sense of it.

‘Oh then,’ quoth Mris Vaux, ‘it is time for thee to become a good Catholic, for assure thyself it was a special favour and mercy of God that thou shouldest have such a warning.’ And so, giving her more instructions to this purpose, went away.

The ghost reappeared and reiterated the message (Gee noting in the margin that ‘nimble actors know their Q’). Mary was visited over a dozen times and seemed keen to be ‘nunnified’, but in the end her mother’s protestations were so loud that ‘the voyage was stayed and her daughter restored’. Three years later, Mary was married and living near Baynards Castle in London and it was there that Gee claimed to have interviewed her ‘to inform myself the better of the truth of these particulars’.

It is a classic tale of Jesuit duplicity. Gee was a plagiarist and a polemicist, determined to undermine the teaching of the Catholic Church. In an earlier work of the same year, he ridiculed Mary Boucher’s ‘ghastly ghost walking in a sheet knit upon the head’.
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His modern editor was unable to trace Mary or her mother, but the story, though partisan, is not necessarily apocryphal.
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It may have stemmed from a real event involving real people. Whatever the truth of the tale, Gee’s inclusion of the ‘great recusant’ Eliza Vaux lent it an air of authenticity, for she was well known by then as ‘one of the best friends the Jesuits have had in England’. So wrote her middle son, William, in a plea for special treatment from the Jesuits of Lisbon in 1612. This pallid redhead thought he deserved more respect from the brethren considering his mother ‘hath harboured them and hid them in stone walls and furnished them with money’.
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Actually, it is easy to see why no one thought much of Eliza’s foul-mouthed, volatile son. She did her sharp-elbowed best with him, sending him to the Jesuit colleges at St Omer and Valladolid, and imposing on friends for favours, but he consistently let her down. In October 1612 Eliza would petition Pedro de Zúñiga, Marquis of Flores
Dávila, who was in England on diplomatic business, to return to Madrid with William in his train. When Zúñiga refused, Eliza begged the intercession of Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish noblewoman in London. Knowing that a refusal ‘would have hurt her too much’ and ‘she would certainly have complained a great deal about it to me’, Luisa reluctantly agreed. Zúñiga relented, but insisted that Eliza ‘consider hard first’ whether her son had ‘the character and virtue for Madrid, because if he was not prepared to heed the advice of others and was not virtuous, he would be completely ruined there’. Eliza assured him that William was a good boy who ‘neither gambled nor blasphemed’. Zúñiga took her at her word and William to Madrid, a decision that he would soon regret.