God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (61 page)

^fn1
Eliza argued that ‘forasmuch as there was contained matter of learning, not yet discussed among the learned, about the Pope’s power to depose princes, she being unlearned durst not with safe conscience take it. Yet if they pleased to take her oath of allegiance whereby she might free her integrity from disloyalty & secure, as she thought, the King from fear of her, she offered to swear fidelity to him notwithstanding any excommunication of the Pope granted against him. But when this would not suffice, she said if she had had money wherewith to have purchased her freedom, she should not have needed further to have been urged.’ (AAW A XI, no. 34)

^fn2
‘The Lord Vaux made answer to the court that if any part of this oath did touch the conscience of his subjects, if it be the pleasure of the King to make a safe exposition of the oath, he would then take it accordingly.’ Otherwise, ‘he thought it better to swear from his heart his true allegiance to the King than to swear to a matter of the which he in his conscience hath some doubt, and that such an oath by him taken shall be for the greater safety of the King.’ (Bulstrode,
Reports
, pp. 198–9)

^fn3
During the negotiations for a Spanish match for his son, James I permitted volunteer regiments to fight on both sides in the war between Catholic Spain and the Protestant United Provinces. On 8 April 1622, the Privy Council authorised Lord Vaux ‘to pass the seas as Colonel to the voluntary soldiers licensed by His Majesty to go over to serve the King of Spain’ (
APC
, 1621–3, p. 213). It did not end well. Vaux resigned his commission in July 1624 after his grant for reinforcements was revoked. By then, England and Spain were at war again.

^fn4
‘Auicen sayeth: There be certain medicines … which will not suffer poison to approach near the heart, as treacle and metridate’ (
Regimen Sanitatis Salerni
, 1541). ‘Take a great onion, make a hole in the middle of him, then fill the place with mitridat or treacle, and some leaves of rue.’ (
Defensative against Plague
, 1593 –
OED
Online)

1. Thomas Vaux, second Baron Vaux of Harrowden (1509–1556)

2. Thomas Vaux’s wife Elizabeth, Lady Vaux (d.1556).

3. Harrowden Hall, now Wellingborough Golf Club. It was sold by the family in 1694 and almost entirely rebuilt.

4. William Vaux, third Baron Vaux of Harrowden. Vaux’s adherence to his faith cost him his freedom, his fortune and perhaps also his sanity.

5. William Vaux’s second wife Mary née Tresham.

6. Catholic atrocities like the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in France, 1572 shaped the popular Protestant impression of Catholic bloodlust.

7. In this woodcut the Pope is depicted as Antichrist riding the seven-headed beast of the apocalypse. Demons are fired from his mouth as he orders a monk, a priest and a layman to ‘go kill your prince’.

8. ‘Certaine of the Popes Merchandize latly sent over into Englande’, issued in 1579 to help officials identify devotional objects banned by Elizabeth I. They include rosaries, crucifixes, Agnus Deis and (object 1) a superaltar. ‘These stones are portable,’ explains the accompanying text, ‘and serve to say Mass on in any secret place where there is no altar, and to that purpose are they sent over into England.’

9. Young missionaries pray with Pope Gregory XIII before being sent to England ‘to the defence of the faith against the treachery of the enemy’. Seminary priests started arriving in England in 1574 and the Jesuits six years later. After March 1585 they were deemed traitors for being on English soil and their harbourers also risked the death penalty.

10. Edmund Campion, Jesuit missionary priest, hanged, drawn and quartered on 1 December 1581.