God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (38 page)

Every captured priest and layman was now ‘asked for Henry’.
²⁷
In 1600 they removed to White Webbs, a large house in Enfield Chase about ten miles north of London. John Grissold
alias
James Johnson from Rowington, Warwickshire, acted as caretaker. He arrived in February and had the house ready for ‘Mrs Perkins’ (Anne) by Whitsuntide. One of the first guests was her ‘kinsman’, Mr Measy, ‘an ancient well set gentleman, but plain in apparel’.
²⁸
This was Henry Garnet. Around the same time, Eleanor’s son, William Brooksby, and his bride, Dorothy Wiseman, moved in. Soon the patter of two little girls’ feet could be heard.

There were other joys: Henricus Garnettus professed his final vows as a Jesuit on 8 May 1598, the anniversary of the day that he had set out from Rome with Robert Southwell twelve years earlier. To General Aquaviva he wrote a heartfelt letter of thanks.
²⁹
To the Vaux sisters, who had protected and defended him all those years, he would surely also have expressed his gratitude. And still there was music and holy days and those supremely risky Jesuit meetings – ‘I cannot keep them away, but they will flock to such feasts,’ Garnet wrote on 25 November 1600. And still there were the sacraments, with their life-breathing properties for the ailing faith. Notwithstanding the dawn raids and the midnight runs, notwithstanding the spies and fallen friends, ‘notwithstanding all our troubles,’ Garnet wrote on 30 June 1601, ‘we sing Mass.’
³⁰

^fn1
Watson and the appellants did not represent the views of all the secular priests in England, of whom, in the 1580s and 1590s, there were between 120 and 150 in any given year. The Jesuits, by contrast, only ever comprised a handful, but they made a lot of noise and put a great deal on record. This can lead to a magnification of their role in the wider mission. For the Vauxes, however, their influence was immense. (McGrath and Rowe, ‘Harbourers and Helpers’, p. 209)

^fn2
In October 1602 a papal brief ratified Blackwell’s appointment and removed the clause regarding consultation with the Jesuit superior. The appellants were exonerated from charges of schism.

^fn3
course
: literally, to pursue with hounds. It is not clear whether Eleanor meant that her uncle should chase Tresham in the courts or give him a beating.

^fn4
Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel (the ‘Lady
A
.’ disparaged by William Watson in 1602) was a great patroness of the Society of Jesus in England. Southwell wrote his
Short Rule of Good Life
for her and she harboured him, and the Jesuit printing press, at one of her houses in London for several years. According to her biographer (and chaplain for the last fourteen years of her life), she had only meant for Southwell to be an occasional visitor, but he had assumed a more permanent arrangement and she had been too polite to put him straight. Her husband, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, who died a few months after Southwell in 1595, had prayed in prison for the success of the Spanish Armada. The Countess’s biographer wrote admiringly of her charitable works, relating one instance when she walked three miles from Acton to assist a poor woman giving birth ‘in the common open cage of Hammersmith’. (Fitzalan-Howard,
Lives
, pp. 308–9)

PART THREE

ELIZA

Great Harrowden is a village in a million. Why? Because – so I am assured – there is no gossip, no scandal, no backbiting.

Tony Ireson,
Wellingborough News
, Friday, 21 March 1958

Thus this Harrodian hatred hath in Hydra-wise me in restless chase, ended with one, assailed by another, and multiplied in one stem of brothers and sisters: that as it seemeth neither determined with death, nor ought pacified in long process of years, yet all these religious and virtuous Catholics.

Sir Thomas Tresham on the Vaux family, summer 1599

15

Brazen-faced Bravados

Harrowden Hall is now Wellingborough Golf Club. Rolling fairways and smooth greens have replaced the pastures and meadows once trodden by forbidden priests. The drama of the final putt is the talk of the clubhouse, not the events of four hundred years earlier when Eliza Vaux’s house was stripped bare, her plants and trees were uprooted and ‘the charming shaded enclaves and summer houses’ that she had raised in the grounds were flattened in a frenzied dawn raid.
¹
The mansion was largely rebuilt in the early eighteenth century, but one Tudor wing might have survived and, with it, a priest-hole.

When the twenty-year-old Eliza
^fn1
Roper came to the house in the summer of 1585, it was in some disrepair. Lord Vaux, confined to Hackney and overwhelmed by debt, was in no position to keep it up. Just over a decade later, some wings were ‘quite dilapidated, almost in fact a ruin’.
²
Eliza was the controversial bride of Lord Vaux’s newly instated heir, George. Thomas Tresham wrote of her ‘creditless carriage when she went for a maiden’, though he was hardly a disinterested observer.
³
As George’s uncle and Lord Vaux’s adviser, he had gone to great lengths to ensure the transfer of the inheritance to George from his half-brother Henry. ‘Many, and many years, I much more busied my brains on your behoof than did I on my eldest son’s,’ he would later remind his nephew. Although George’s ‘adopting’ was supposed to redound to his benefit, the ‘original intention’, Tresham explained, was ‘to repair the ruins of Harrowden baned barony and to relieve your father’s pitiful distress plight’.
⁴
It was agreed that Lord Vaux, who had a habit of making ‘thriftless bargains’ (as well as a wife who was ‘a much better hand at spending money than saving it’), would only – and only with his heir’s
permission – be able to sell certain lands for the maintenance of his children. He would not be allowed to sell any for the payment of his, or George’s, debts. George was to marry a suitable girl with a suitable marriage portion; that is to say, he was to be ‘ruled in his marriage by the advice of his honourable parents and eldest brother’.
⁵

But George would only be ruled by his heart. Three months later, on 25 July 1585, without the necessary consents, indeed plain against Tresham’s ‘oft reiterated’ warnings, he ‘heedlessly and headlessly’ married his sweetheart and forfeited his inheritance. It was a double blow to the family, since on that very day Edward Vaux, the next son in line, died at Hackney.
⁶
The new heir was Lord Vaux’s youngest son, Ambrose, who was under twenty-one and thus could not authorise any sale of land.

Tresham seems to have taken it all much harder than Lord Vaux. ‘You well know,’ he huffed to George, ‘that I should have been one of them whose consents you must have had.’ (If true, this was only an informal arrangement.) He threw a spectacular tantrum and refused to see George for two years. The match was ‘brainless’, he steamed, ‘far-fetched’; George was ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘over distaffly awed’. The ‘track of time,’ he warned, would completely unveil ‘the guileful mask of blinded fleshly affection’.
⁷
Except that it did not. George and Eliza had six children in quick succession and seemed perfectly happy with each other. This only enraged Tresham further.

On paper, Eliza did not seem such a bad match. Granted, she was no great heiress, but her father, John Roper of Lynsted, Kent, paid £1,500 and an additional £400 in jewels and apparel, which does not seem ungenerous considering the state of the Vaux barony.
⁸
Moreover, the Ropers had an excellent Catholic pedigree: Eliza’s great-uncle had married Sir Thomas More’s favourite daughter, Margaret, in 1521. The memorial of Eliza’s mother at Lynsted parish church bears the words: ‘She led her life most virtuously and ended the same most catholicly.’ Those of Eliza’s brother and sister likewise celebrated their
constantissimo
Catholicism. John Roper’s ‘my hope is in God’ was more circumspect, as befitted an ambitious patriarch, but his epitaph proudly celebrated his family’s union with the baronial Vauxes. Indeed Roper, who was knighted in 1588, would eventually realise his dream of a peerage. Courtesy of £10,000 in King James’s coffers, he would end his days as Lord Teynham, first Baron of Teynham.
⁹

Eliza’s younger sister Jane, Lady Lovell, was another strong character. She would found an English Carmelite convent in Antwerp and provoke the lines: ‘she is as forward in her monastery as she was four or five years since, being a person humorous and inconstant, not only as she is a woman but as she is
that
woman the Lady Lovell.’ Witness too her affronted letters to the Earl of Salisbury after being ‘disquieted’ by pursuivants: ‘If your Lordship did rightly understand their abuses, you would not permit that gentlewomen of my sort should be subject to the authority of so base persons.’
¹⁰

Eliza shared Jane’s forcefulness, but seems to have had more charm. She may have been beautiful – her daughter Katherine inherited looks which, it was suggested, would have found favour with Henry VIII.
¹¹
Eliza was probably the dedicatee of the composer John Dowland’s
Mrs Vaux’s Jig
and
Mrs Vaux Galliard
.
¹²
She was certainly beguiling. Tresham made constant swipes at her ‘irresistible feminish passions’. George was utterly enchanted and soon so was Ambrose – ‘scandalously’, thought Tresham. Even Lord Vaux seems to have been charmed. Uncharacteristically, he warned Tresham that if he continued in his ‘self-willed and obdured refusing’ to see George, ‘no mean part’ of the blame for his predicament would be placed at Tresham’s door. For a while, Rushton Hall was deprived of the baron’s visits. ‘Commend me to the captive Lord,’ Tresham despaired to Vaux’s solicitor on 6 January 1593, ‘that dare not while the sign is in the predominating Virago to look upon poor Rushton.’
¹³

Tresham had good reason to suspect Eliza of trying to dominate Lord Vaux. Around Shrovetide 1592 she allegedly read him a letter, ‘as written from her father’, that promised an end to all his debts and an easy life with his musicians, hounds and hawks on the condition that he ‘renounce amity’ with Tresham ‘and be ruled by her father’. Clearly knowing the way to Vaux’s heart, Eliza sweetened the offer with ‘a cast of choice sore falcons, which purposedly was kept for him’. Vaux ‘greedily swallowed’ the ‘baits and hooks’, but when he signalled his willingness to discuss terms, Roper ‘utterly disavowed’ the letter, ‘protesting that he never wrote any such and that it was lewdly devised’ by George and Eliza.
¹⁴
Be that as it may, Roper clearly shared his daughter’s view that Tresham was a pernicious influence on Vaux and should be ‘severed’ from future negotiations. As he explained to Lord Burghley on 4 July 1590, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham hath intruded himself
as the disposer of all my Lord Vaux his estate & the commander of him & all his, who dare no more offend him than a child his master having a rod in his hand.’
¹⁵

Eliza claimed that ‘the world thinketh what my Lord doeth is by his Lady’s setting on, and what she doeth is by [Tresham’s] setting on’. Tresham said this was a ‘feminine feeble induction’, but it is clear from his papers that his influence was powerful and pervasive. Vaux did sometimes act independently of his brother-in-law, making the ‘thriftless bargains’ that so jeopardised the patrimony, and letting land ‘at Robin Hood’s pennyworths’, but more often than not Tresham’s shadow can be glimpsed.
¹⁶
Whether it was friendly or not is debatable. Eliza accused him of ‘cozening’ Vaux. Lord Burghley, who was briefed by Roper, publicly denounced him as ‘covetous, covinous and godlessly treacherous’. Lord Keeper Egerton, who had grown to dislike Tresham’s religion as much as his character, declared in Chancery that he was ‘a bad man every way’.
¹⁷
Tresham’s response to the critics was glorious in its pomposity: ‘My innocency and justifiable dealings is to me a brass wall of defence against these brazen-faced bravados.’
¹⁸

Sir Thomas Tresham was undoubtedly an aggressive estate manager. He ruthlessly exploited his tenants and his practices would spark agrarian riots.
¹⁹
Regarding the Vaux estate, though, he seems, mostly, to have acted in the family’s (or at least his sister’s) best interests. His ‘kinsmanly care’ advanced him neither socially nor financially. He complained of being ‘lugged and worried’ like a baited bear and exposed to ‘splenish censure’. In 1593 his brother-in-law’s exorbitant borrowing on his credit cost him £2,400.
^fn2
20
One wonders why he bothered.

He claimed to be defending the patrimony from Roper, ‘his darling daughter and her damnable drifts’. They claimed to be protecting it from fragmentation. Tresham sometimes behaved as though he had power of attorney over Lord Vaux. Eliza allegedly had him posthumously registered as an ‘idiot’.
²¹
In the savage battle over the body
and mind of the increasingly senile baron were these two determined personalities for whom being Catholic was just one – and sometimes seemingly the very least – of their attributes.