God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (27 page)

So, some recusant women enjoyed a degree of latitude in the law and there seems to have been a vague but quite deeply ingrained feeling in society that private women and their private consciences should not be exposed to public prosecution. However, the exigencies of time and place, the peculiarities of character, tensions from within and pressures from without could all combine to blow a vapid generalisation out of the water. On 25 March 1586 a butcher’s wife from York was pressed to death by the hand of the law. For her general defence of the recusant cause and, specifically, her refusal to plead to the charge of priest-harbouring, Margaret Clitherow was sentenced to the gruesome medieval penalty
peine forte et dure
. In the tollbooth on the Ouse Bridge in York, she was stripped and ordered to lie down. A large sharp stone was placed under her back and ‘seven or eight hundred weight’ was piled on top of her. Her ribs shattered and ‘burst forth of the skin’.

Clitherow’s gender could not save her. On the contrary, her overt defiance of male authority almost certainly contributed to her fall. Contemporaries and historians have discussed the Clitherow case and the ‘remarkable confluence of circumstances’ that produced it.
³⁹
Some hailed her as a selfless martyr, others denounced her as a showboating suicide. Quite a few thought she was just plain mad. She was the first of three women put to death in Elizabeth’s reign for allegedly giving aid to outlawed priests. The others were Margaret
Ward, executed in 1588 for helping a priest escape from prison, and Anne Line, hanged for harbouring on 27 February 1601. None was the daughter of a peer. None could boast in her corner a Burghley or a Beaumont or any of the connections that seem to have afforded the Vauxes a measure of protection. The nobility, regardless of faith, tended to view the molestation of their own as ‘a common insult to their grade’. Anne and Eleanor would never have ‘kissed the gallows tree’ like Anne Line, or had their ribcages crushed on the Ouse Bridge.
⁴⁰
Their commitment was unswerving and they made hard sacrifices, but they were undeniably more secure in their activities than the unfortunate butcher’s wife from York.

In the early hours of 29 July 1588, Anne and Eleanor’s grandmother Elizabeth Beaumont died at home in Leicestershire. It was apposite that she expired on the feast day of St Martha because, Garnet noted, she had been a great hostess herself, tending to the needs of the priests in her house and even cooking and cleaning for them ‘so that their presence might be kept more secret’. The sisters had spent their formative years with their grandmother and they continued to live nearby, often visiting with Garnet, to whom she had showed ‘great devotion’. Indeed her deathbed request was to see him. Garnet said Mass every day for ten days until ‘her death agony began’. He read the commendation of her soul to God and ‘in the space of four or five
Misereres
’
^fn5
she died ‘with the name of Jesus on her lips’. In the evening, the obsequies were performed and the following night, in accordance with her wishes, she was buried in the parish church ‘without the ministers saying their prayers over her body’. In death, if not in life, consecrated ground was consecrated ground, irrespective of the Reformation.
^fn6

There was one notable absentee: Elizabeth’s elder son, Francis, who had conformed to the ‘new religion’ for the sake of his career. That was, in any case, the family’s view. Francis was only informed of his mother’s death after Garnet had sung the Requiem Mass and made good his exit. A few months later he organised a memorial service at which his mother’s virtues were praised, but her ‘popery’ was decried. Thus, wrote Garnet, the minister ‘ruined the soup with one ill-chosen herb’. The following year, Francis Beaumont accepted promotion to the degree of serjeant-at-law and on 25 January 1593 he was appointed a Justice of the Common Pleas.
⁴¹
He seems to have been on good terms with his Vaux nieces, despite their different paths. Perhaps he recognised that ignorance of his mother’s dying days had spared him any career-compromising questions about fugitive priests. Anne and Eleanor, for their part, would have occasion to be grateful for the legal muscle of Justice Beaumont.

Lord Vaux had not been able to attend his mother-in-law’s obsequies either. In December 1587, after more than six years of confinement, he was transferred to the custody of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The reason was soon clear. ‘Her Majesty,’ the Privy Council informed the county lieutenants, ‘being advertised sundry ways of the great preparations that are made abroad of shipping and men’ was willing to do ‘all things necessary’ for the defence of the realm. Among other things:

considering how of late years divers of her subjects, by the means of bad instruments, have been withdrawn from the due obedience they owe to her Majesty and her laws, insomuch as divers of them most obstinately have refused to come to the church to prayer and divine service

it was thought appropriate that ‘those bad members that already are known to be recusants’ should be ‘so looked unto and restrained as they shall neither be able to give assistance to the enemy, nor that the enemy may have any hope of relief and succour by them’.
⁴²

After years of having his coastlines harried, his ships plundered, his rebellious subjects aided and, to paraphrase Francis Drake, his beard singed by Elizabeth’s privateers, Philip II of Spain had decided to call time on his erstwhile sister-in-law and launch the ‘Gran Armada’ that
he had long threatened. Pope Sixtus V promised indulgences and a million gold ducats (about £250,000) for a successful invasion. On 25 April 1588, the expedition standard was blessed at a special service in Lisbon Cathedral. By the end of the following month, it was billowing atop the flagship
San Martín
off the west coast of Portugal. It bore the words: ‘Arise, O Lord, and vindicate thy cause.’
⁴³

^fn1
Modern calculations suggest that just under 1 per cent of mothers died in childbed in Elizabethan England. (Cressy,
Birth, Marriage, and Death
, p. 30)

^fn2
Virtue (
virtus
in Latin, deriving from
vir
: man) was originally a male preserve. It is not known how many contemporaries believed the (quite wrong) assertion in the 1486 witch-hunter’s handbook, the
Malleus Maleficarum
, that
femina
(woman) was a derivation of
fe
+
minus
(less faith).

^fn3
Ward and her society of English Ladies (later known as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary) settled their first house in St Omer (then in the Spanish Netherlands) in 1609 and expanded throughout Europe. The superior of the house in Perugia was Lord Vaux’s granddaughter Joyce. The English Ladies sought an active apostolate in imitation of the Society of Jesus, but in defiance of the Council of Trent, which insisted upon female claustration. They were branded ‘Jesuitesses’, ‘chattering hussies’, ‘galloping girls’ and ‘wandering nuns’. According to the papal bull that suppressed them in 1631, they were guilty of ‘arrogant contumacy’ and ‘great temerity’, and their work was ‘by no means suiting the weakness of their sex, intellect, womanly modesty and above all virginal purity’ (Lux-Sterritt, p. 50). The Institute finally gained papal approbation in 1877 and on 19 December 2009 Pope Benedict XVI declared Mary Ward ‘Venerable’, thus progressing the cause for her canonisation.

^fn4
Ignatians
: Jesuits, after their founder, Ignatius Loyola.

^fn5
The recitation of Psalm 51 beginning
Miserere mei Deus
(‘Have mercy upon me, O God’).

^fn6
In principle recusants were not entitled to parish burial because they died excommunicate, but in practice a sympathetic (or bribable) minister might permit a quiet bending of the rules, especially between dusk and dawn. This is probably what happened with Henry Vaux, whose burial was recorded in the register of Great Ashby on 19 November 1587. It was advisable to bury the dead with the connivance of the vicar or one of his wardens: one widow from Edmonton was indicted in the next reign ‘for her misdemeanour about the interment of her dead husband, who was a recusant, whom she caused to be carried to the cemetery of Hornsey and there to be buried not one foot deep in the soil whereby his head and feet remained uncovered and exposed.’ (Jeaffreson, II, p. 236)

10

Fright and Rumour

A thousand years after the virgin birth

and after five hundred more allowed the globe,

the wonderful eighty-eighth year begins and

brings with it woe enough. If, this year,

total catastrophe does not befall, if land

and sea do not collapse in total ruin, yet

will the whole world suffer upheavals, empires

will dwindle and from everywhere will

be great lamentation.

The fifteenth-century prophecy of

‘Regiomontanus’
¹

La Felicissima Armada
: the most fortunate fleet – 130 ships, 19,000 troops, 60,000 tons of shipping. When the captain of a Hamburg-bound cargo ship came across this great behemoth in the Atlantic, he thought he heard the ocean ‘groaning’ under its weight. That was before the planned embarkation of the Duke of Parma’s 27,000 veterans and a further 300 small ships waiting in Flanders.
²
On 19 July 1588 the first sails were sighted off the Scilly Isles. The following morning, in its awesome crescent formation, the Armada beat slowly up the Channel.

Lord Burghley was confident that if the Spanish could be kept at a distance, the English would better them at sea: ‘Her Majesty is of her own proper ships so strong as the enemy shall not be able to land any power where Her Majesty’s navy shall be near to the enemy’s navy.’
³
The problem lay in intelligence: everyone knew the Armada was on its way, but no one could agree on its precise destination. The Queen did not have a standing army and her veteran troops were stuck in the Netherlands or on the Scottish border. Recent research
suggests that the ‘trained bands’ upon whom she was forced to rely were better prepared than previously thought, but whether these raw recruits could match up to Parma’s professionals was another matter.
⁴

The great dread was that if the Spaniards could gain a foothold and wave their banner, all the Catholics in England – the quiescent as well as the notorious – might see it as their one chance of salvation and start to mobilise. The spectre of a fifth column of unquantifiable Catholics lined up alongside their Spanish co-religionists haunted many Englishmen, or at least it haunted the Puritans, to whom, at times like this, Englishmen lent an ear. A bloodbath was feared, a repeat of St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, when French Catholics had massacred thousands of their Protestant compatriots and the Seine had run red with blood. The Spanish were held to be the most savage race of all. According to the Protestant polemicist John Ponet, there was ‘no nation under the cope of Christ like them in pride, cruelty, unmercifulness, nor so far from all humanity’.
⁵
Flemish and Dutch refugees told lurid tales of Spanish cruelty, while those old enough to remember the last time that Philip II was king in England found it convenient to blame him for the burning time. Should he succeed now, they feared their womenfolk would be ravished, their children slaughtered and the faggots at Smithfield would glow again. Protestants who usually muddled along fairly amicably with their Catholic neighbours now imagined the horns of Antichrist under their hats. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, born in the spring of Armada year, believed that his mother ‘fell in labour with him upon the fright of the invasion’.
⁶

The Privy Council was taking no risks. ‘It is hardly ventured to repose that trust in them which is to be looked for in her [Majesty’s] other good subjects,’ it had reasoned. So the orders had gone out to the lieutenants of each county to commit their ‘most obstinate and noted’ recusants to prison. Lord Vaux – categorised as a substantial recusant, but ‘not so obstinate’ – was placed in the custody of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
⁷
In mid-July, ‘the chief recusants’ were transferred to Ely, ‘until it be known what will become of these Spanish forces’. Vaux, however, was left in Lambeth, ‘in respect only’, it was thought, of ‘bad health’.
⁸
He was lucky. His brother-in-law Tresham and cousin Sir William Catesby were two of the fifteen gentleman prisoners ‘bloodily threatened’ at Ely by locals who had deduced from
their detainment that they were enemies of the state. The Catholic prisoners begged to be allowed to give ‘undoubted spectacle’ of their loyalty by presenting themselves ‘unarmed’ in the vanguard, but then came the news that ‘the powerful enemy’s navy had passed the ocean’ and was entering the narrow seas.
⁹