God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (9 page)

^fn3
The seventeenth-century term
hocus-pocus
may be a corruption or parody of the words of consecration: ‘
hoc est (enim) corpus (meum)
’.

^fn4
In terms of aesthetics, it is easy to lament what was lost, but modern sensibilities should be resisted. Edward VI’s iconoclasts were not artistically motivated. Their God was a jealous God who had forbidden graven images. Similarly, it was to destroy the idols of false gods that the Catholic conquistadors demolished the monuments of native religion in the New World.

Keith Thomas makes an interesting point: ‘Nowadays, when we gaze happily and indiscriminately at altarpieces of the virgin Mary and Greek statues of Apollo and Hindu sculpture and Japanese Buddhas and masks from Benin, are we showing the catholicity of our taste or simply our indifference to religious values? For it would still be almost impossible for us to appreciate an artefact, however exquisite, if we found its symbolic overtones too repugnant. What would we do if we were given, say, a beautifully carved and bejewelled swastika? … Perhaps the gulf separating us from the Tudor and Stuart iconoclasts is narrower than we think.’ (Thomas, ‘Art and Iconoclasm’, p. 40)

^fn5
As with much of
1066 and All That
(1930), Sellar and Yeatman’s gentle parody of posterity’s verdict is astute: ‘Broody Mary’s reign was … a Bad Thing, since England is bound to be C of E, so all the executions were wasted.’

^fn6
Sir John Beaumont, a bencher of the Inner Temple, had attained the office of Master of the Rolls in the reign of Edward VI, but lost it, along with his estate, under charges of corruption and fraud.

^fn7
The famous, but often misquoted, assertion that Queen Elizabeth did not like ‘to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts’ was made by Francis Bacon towards the end of the reign. As Diarmaid MacCulloch points out, ‘the heart is not the seat of salvation as is the soul. It would not be inconsistent with protestantism for the Queen to care less about feelings or opinions than about salvation.’ (J. Spedding,
The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon
, I, 1861, p. 178; MacCulloch, ‘Latitude’, p. 49)

^fn8
Memories of the mistimed Bull took a long time fading: ‘Pius’s action was so generally recognized as a political blunder that it was even remembered in the 1930s when the papacy considered how to react to Adolf Hitler’s regime: discreet voices in the Vatican privately recalled the bad precedent, and behind the scenes it was a factor in preventing a public papal condemnation of Nazism.’ (MacCulloch,
Reformation
, p. 334)

^fn9
This is an arresting image. The cockle was a purple-flowering weed that blighted the cornfields. In the Parable of the Weeds (Matthew 13:24–30), Jesus advised against uprooting the weed too soon, ‘lest perhaps, gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it. Suffer both to grow until the harvest, and in the time of the harvest, I will say to the reapers: Gather up first the cockle and bind it into bundles to burn, but the wheat gather ye into my barn.’

^fn10
A century later, the massacre, along with the Marian burnings, was still used to stir up a visceral fear of Catholicism. In order to fathom ‘the last time Popery reigned amongst us,’ wrote Charles Blount in 1679, the reader must imagine a town in flames, ‘at the same instant, fancy amongst the distracted crowd you behold troops of papists ravishing your wives and daughters, dashing your little children’s brains out against the walls, plundering your houses and cutting your own throats … Then represent to yourselves the Tower of London playing off its cannon and battering down your houses about your ears. Also, casting your eye towards Smithfield, imagine you see your father or your mother or some of your nearest and dearest relations tied to a stake in the midst of flames, when with hands and eyes lifted up to heaven, they cry out to God for whose cause they die.’ (Justin Champion, ‘Popes and Guys and Anti-Catholicism’, in Buchanan et al.,
Gunpowder Plots
, pp. 93–6)

PART ONE

WILLIAM AND HENRY

1

The Enterprise is Begun

And touching our Society, be it known unto you that we have made a league – all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England – cheerfully to carry the cross that you shall lay upon us and never to despair your recovery while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or to be consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted, so it must be restored.

Campion’s ‘Brag’, 1580
¹

Lord Vaux’s first son, Henry, had been eleven when he had left home with his sisters to live with his maternal grandmother in Leicestershire. There was nothing particularly unusual in the arrangement; children often completed their education in the households of their relatives and Lord Vaux could rely on his mother-in-law to bring up his children the right way, which is to say, the Catholic way.

Elizabeth Beaumont was born a Hastings. She was distantly related to the Puritan Earl of Huntingdon and his brother, Francis Hastings, a fervid Protestant, who was convinced that no Catholic could be a good Englishman. He persistently railed against the ‘viperous brood’ of priests and their ‘popish poison’. Their harbourers, he wrote, were ‘dangerous people (for subjects I cannot call them till they obey better)’, who threatened to ‘infect the heart and mind of many a simple subject’.
²
Despite her relation’s best efforts to rid the county of ‘this pernicious sect of papists’, Elizabeth Beaumont, a widow and therefore possessed of a certain amount of independence, continued to worship the old faith in her home.

Henry Garnet, the Jesuit leader who was active in England from 1586, would praise Elizabeth’s service to the mission. ‘It was her pleasure,’ he wrote, ‘to look after the priests’ rooms and to cook their food so that their presence might be kept more secret. And she showed great devotion to me without my meriting it in any way.’ Priests had been resorting to her house long before the first missionaries came to England in 1574. Garnet mentions that her son Francis Beaumont had grown up hearing Mass secretly at home before disappointing them all in adulthood by attending the services of the ‘new religion’.
³

In addition to Elizabeth Vaux, Beaumont had another daughter, Jane, who was the second wife of Robert Brooksby of Shoby, one of those dangerous non-subjects whose ‘obstinacy’ in his faith Francis Hastings deemed so malignant.
⁴
Around 1577, Brooksby’s son by his first marriage, Edward, married the eldest Vaux girl, Eleanor. Little is known about the middle Vaux girl, Elizabeth, who sailed away to France in 1582 to become a nun, but Eleanor and the youngest, Anne – of whom much more later – would both dedicate their lives to the English mission. The little evidence that survives suggests that the girls, whose mother had died within a month of Anne’s birth, were devoted to their only living grandparent. When she lay dying in 1588, it was a priest under their care who would administer the last rites. Many years later, Anne was still in possession of some of her grandmother’s greatest treasures: ‘a tawny rouge mantle’ and ‘a gold cross full of relics’.
⁵

Henry Vaux’s erstwhile tutor, Edmund Campion, also approved of Elizabeth Beaumont. ‘I congratulate you on your intellectual outlook,’ he wrote in his letter to Henry of July 1570, ‘your distinguished father, your grandmother, your relations and kinsfolk: all of them are and were your teachers.’

I congratulate you on the result of their teaching, namely, that you truly count it a thing admirable and splendid, excellent and glorious, to consider the ornaments of virtue and not fleeting imaginings to be the real fame; not to waste your talents in idleness, not to gamble away your life, not to be puffed up, not to live licentiously and for pleasure; but to serve God, to avoid vicious practices, to seek the best in culture and in art.
⁶

Henry, who may have inherited his literary skills from his father’s father, the second Lord Vaux, was a precocious student. Campion noted that he was composing verse at the age of nine. Three surviving poems, including a Latin meditation on the Passion of Christ, were written when he was thirteen.
⁷
The priest John Gerard described Henry as ‘a very scholarly man, well known for his piety’,
⁸
but this was not just the pensive piety of his grandfather, who had deemed it ‘the sweetest time in all his life in thinking to be spent’. Henry’s was the active, determined piety of a young man. There was no question of him sitting out Elizabeth’s reign in the safe house of his grandmother. Latin meditations, even on the Passion, could only exercise him so far. But Henry and other young Catholics who resolutely adhered to the Church of Rome had to accept a life of diminished scope. If they refused to take the oath renouncing papal sovereignty, they could not graduate from university or hold office under the Crown. They could not be magistrates or members of Parliament or command the Queen’s forces. Prominent public roles, in any case, made absenteeism from church more visible and harder for the authorities to disregard. Nor was overseas travel an easy option as a licence was required and tricky questions were asked.

A great many Catholics opted for occasional conformity and suffered the label ‘church papist’ for their sins. They participated in public worship and were discreet about their private devotions. Some heard Mass at home secretly after church. Others, like the composer William Byrd, conformed at court, but refused to attend the services of his local parish. A common ruse was the division of the responsibilities of the household: the men, who were more vulnerable to the penal laws, would go to church and avoid the fine, while the women would say their prayers and foster the young – and sometimes the priest – behind closed doors. Sir Arthur Throckmorton complained of this practice in Northamptonshire in 1599: ‘Such here have a common saying that the unbelieving husband shall be saved by the believing wife.’

Ralph Sheldon of Beoley in Worcestershire came up with a novel solution. On the north side of his parish church he built himself a chapel that housed an elaborate stone altar, which still survives. He entered it through the churchyard, thus bypassing the main body of the church. Few Catholics had the resources to construct such solid
defences, but they still managed to qualify their conformity with mini-protests designed to prove the impenetrability of their souls. Simon Mallory of Northamptonshire, ‘a very inward man with Sir Thomas Tresham and the Lord Vaux’, went to church and heard the sermon, but afterwards ‘scoffeth at the preacher’. Another Northamptonshire family tight with Tresham and Vaux were the Flamsteads. William, who was in his eighties, read a book during the sermon ‘in contempt of the word preached’, while Roger kept his hat on during the prayers for Queen and country. They were reported by the Puritan minister of Preston, a stickler for transgressions at which his more moderate colleagues might have winked. In 1585 he informed on one of his own churchwardens for ‘prating and talking’ during a baptism.

Excuses for abstention from the Lord’s Supper proliferated. Being out of charity with a neighbour was a frequent plea as it rendered the parishioner unfit for communion. Others, in common with William Shakespeare’s father, John, were thought to forbear the church ‘for fear of process for debt’. Mrs Kath Lacy of Sherburn in North Yorkshire took communion in 1569, but, instead of consuming the sacrament, trod ‘the same bread under her foot’. There is the suspicion that some parishioners, like Sir Richard Shireburn, who blocked his ears with wool when he attended church throughout the 1560s and 1570s, might have rather enjoyed their little rebellions. The reports of irreverent behaviour can sometimes read like the actions of overgrown schoolchildren testing the patience of sober ministers. But their motives were serious. There was nothing light-hearted about the attempted suicide of John Finche of Manchester, who tried to drown himself after attending public worship.
⁹

The Elizabethan Catholic experience was a wide and wavering spectrum, as sensitive to the dictates of conscience and the vagaries of local law enforcement as to shifts in domestic policy and pressures from abroad. It ranged from those who were, to all intents and purposes, Protestant, and were only reconciled on their deathbed, through all the subtle variegations of church papistry (or moderated recusancy), towards those professed papists who actively resisted what they regarded as a heretical regime. The Vauxes were situated at the less obedient, or from Rome’s viewpoint the more obedient, end of the spectrum. The Council of Trent, a general synod responsible in the mid-sixteenth century for devising ways of countering the
Protestant advance and revivifying the Catholic Church, had ruled in August 1562 that conformity to the Elizabethan Settlement, even if only outward and occasional, was against the law of God. According to the Declaration of the Fathers of the Council of Trent: