God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (63 page)

24. Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire, probable home of the Vaux sisters between 1588 and 1591. The sewer hide ran along this side wall.

25. The swinging-beam hide at Harvington Hall, Worcestershire, discovered by a boy exploring a derelict wing in 1894.

26. The ‘pedlar’s chest’ containing a portable church for the itinerant priest.

27. Recusant women at home, taken from
The Painted Life
of Mary Ward.

28. A chasuble embroidered by Helena Wintour, daughter of the gunpowder plotter Robert Wintour. Priests had to wear their vestments during Mass despite the high risk of detection.

29. ‘Fresh green new relics’: the thumb of Robert Sutton (ex.1588) was preserved by the Vaux sisters.

30. Engraving of the main gunpowder plotters.

31. Sir Everard Digby: one of John Gerard’s glamorous young converts and Eliza Vaux’s ‘great and tried friend’. He was one of the last recruits to the Gunpowder Plot: ‘Oh how full of joy should I die if I could do anything for the cause which I love more than my life.’

32. St Winifred’s Well, North Wales. It was on a pilgrimage to this holy shrine in September 1605 that Anne Vaux noticed fine horses in her friends’ stables and ‘feared these wild heads had something in hand’. She implored Garnet ‘for God’s sake’ to talk to Catesby ‘and to hinder anything that possibly he might’.

33. Coughton Court, Warwickshire: home to the recusant Throckmorton family and rented by Digby upon the advice of Catesby. It was here that Garnet and the Vaux sisters first heard the news of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot.

34. Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuit Mission in England. The Vaux sisters kept him safe for almost twenty years. (Inset: a representation of ‘Garnet’s Straw’.)

35. Anne Vaux’s orange-juice letter to Henry Garnet in the Tower. The writing was invisible until exposed by heat.

36. Henry Garnet’s last letter to Anne Vaux, written from his cell in the Tower of London on Easter Monday 1606.

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